The struggle between the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) and the CIA headed by John Brennan has broken wide open.

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein

It is a titanic struggle because it erupted as Capitol Hill wants to investigate the CIA's detention and interrogation program which involves waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques (read "torture"), and the CIA wants to cover it up, trying to block the publication (the technical term is "declassification") of the panel's 6,300 page report. The agency even searched the investigative panel's computers without authorization. That has led to requests to the Justice Department for criminal investigations of CIA personnel and Senate aides.

This is an extremely serious matter. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said, "This is kind of death of the Republic kind of stuff… The allegation that a nation's own spy service has been turned against its own government is serious, particularly where that government is supposed to be overseeing the spy services."

Writing in "Mother Jones," David Corn called it a constitutional crisis and claimed that "the foundation of the national security state exploded."

What is more, the White House has been involved in stonewalling the investigation, withholding for five years more than 9,000 top-secret documents sought by the panel. Obama has not prosecuted anyone involved in the design and execution of Bush's program of detainee torture, and he said he continues to have confidence in Brennan as CIA Director.