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The Senate has finally released its report on CIA torture
by Adi Robertson
The Verge - All PostsToday, 5:15 PM

The Senate Intelligence Committee's long-delayed report on "enhanced interrogation" was published today, after months of delays. The report's key findings were leaked months ago and discussed long before that: parts of the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, which involved techniques like waterboarding, stress positions, and sleep deprivation, qualified as torture; the CIA misrepresented the nature of its programs to the public; and the program failed to yield effective intelligence that would have justified its existence. A declassified 500-page executive summary of the 6,700-page report, whose development was led by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), is available on the Senate's site.

The Senate has been working on the report since 2009, initially planning to spend one year researching and compiling it. In the years since, it's been in a tug of war with the CIA, which Feinstein alleged had tried to block access to potentially damaging records and even hacked into the Intelligence Committee's computer network to see what it had found. This summer, CIA director John Brennan issued an apology for inappropriate behavior by CIA staff, saying he was looking into disciplinary action. Getting approval to declassify it has also been an arduous process. The Intelligence Committee voted to release a summary in April of 2014, but it then spent months fighting attempts to redact what Senator Feinstein called "key facts that support the report's findings and conclusions." Most recently, Secretary of State John Kerry reportedly asked to delay the report for fear it could spark violence overseas, though a State Department spokesperson later denied that he had done so.

President Obama banned enhanced interrogation after taking office in 2009, but he was leery of prosecuting anyone involved in it during the Bush administration, saying that "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards." Years earlier, a CIA officer had also decided to destroy interrogation tapes that allegedly showed waterboarding; in 2010, the Justice Department completed an investigation of that incident and decided not to file charges. The Senate's reporting, however, grew out of a 2007 probe on the tapes' destruction. Obama has continued to stand by intelligence agencies, but he admitted in August that the US "crossed a line" by using interrogation techniques that "any fair-minded person would believe were torture."

Senate Torture Report



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