U.S. Senate report on CIA torture
The Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program is a report compiled by the bipartisan United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the Central Intelligence Agency 's Detention and Interrogation Program and its use of torture during interrogation on detainees in CIA custody. The report covers CIA activities before, during, and after the "war on terror". The initial report was approved on December 13, 2012, by a vote of 9–6, with seven Democrats, one independent, and one Republican voting in favor of the report and six Republicans voting in opposition.
The more than 6,700-page report details the history of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program and the Committee's 20 findings and conclusions. On December 9, 2014, the SSCI released a 525-page portion that consisted of key findings and an executive summary of the full report. It took more than five years to complete. The full unredacted report remains classified.
The report details actions by CIA officials including torturing prisoners, providing misleading or false information about classified CIA programs to the president, Department of Justice, Congress, and the media, impeding government oversight and internal criticism, and mismanaging the program. It also revealed the existence of previously unknown detainees, that more detainees were subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques" than was previously disclosed, and that more techniques were used without Department of Justice approval. It concluded that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques did not yield unique intelligence that saved lives, nor was it useful in gaining cooperation from detainees, and that the program damaged the United States' international standing.
Some people, including some CIA officials and U.S. Republicans, disputed the report's conclusions and said it provided an incomplete picture of the program. Others criticized the publishing of the report, citing its potential for damage to the U.S. and the contentious history of its development. Former Republican presidential nominee John McCain praised the release of the report. Upon the report's release, then-president Barack Obama stated, "One of the strengths that makes America exceptional is our willingness to openly confront our past, face our imperfections, make changes and do better."
In the wake of the release of the report's executive summary, a large number of individuals and organizations called for the prosecution of the CIA and government officials who perpetrated, approved, or provided legal cover for the torture of detainees; however, prosecutions are considered unlikely. The U.S. has also passed legislation, sponsored by Senators McCain and Dianne Feinstein, to prevent U.S. agencies from using many of the torture techniques described in the report.
The 2019 film The Report covers the decade-long time period that led to the final creation and publication of the report.
History
Impetus for the report
California Senator Dianne Feinstein said that the initial investigation began after press reports emerged stating that in 2005, CIA Director of the National Clandestine Service Jose Rodriguez destroyed almost 100 video recordings of interrogations over objections from CIA and White House legal staff. The tapes showed CIA officers and contractors using torture techniques such as waterboarding on detainees Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The CIA did not inform the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that Rodriguez had destroyed the tapes, and the committee had not known they had existed. SSCI believed that Rodriguez was covering up illegal activities by the CIA, although the committee had initially been told by CIA officials that Rodriguez was not engaging in "destruction of evidence". Rodriguez preemptively criticized the report in an op-ed for The Washington Post on December 5, 2014. In addition to destroying the torture tapes, the Committee's report shows that Rodriguez was heavily involved in the CIA's use of torture, including overseeing black sites where torture took place, preventing CIA Counterterrorism Center legal staff from implementing vetting processes for interrogators, provided misleading information to the Department of Defense about a detainee's identity, and participated in the payment of millions of dollars to a country hosting a black site.CIA Director Michael Hayden told the Committee on December 11, 2007, that if the Committee had asked for the videos, the CIA would have provided them, and offered the Committee written summaries of the interrogation sessions depicted on the destroyed tapes. CIA records show that the decision to destroy the tapes came shortly after CIA attorneys raised concerns about Congress discovering the tapes' existence.
Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side stated that the CIA also neglected to inform the 9/11 Commission that these tapes existed: "In a meeting on December 23, 2003, Zelikow demanded that the CIA at the very least provide any and all documents responsive to its requests, even if the Commission had not specifically asked for them. Tenet replied by alluding to several documents he thought would be helpful. But in an omission that would later become part of a criminal investigation, neither Tenet nor anyone else from the CIA in the meeting mentioned that, in fact, the Agency had in its possession at that point hundreds of hours of videotapes of the interrogations of Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, both of whom were waterboarded."
In December 2007, the committee opened an investigation into the tape destruction and designated four staffers to conduct the investigation, which they completed around early 2009.
Development of the report
On February 11, 2009, the committee began considering a broader review of the CIA's detention and interrogation practices after committee staff presented a summary of the operational cables detailing the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. On March 5, 2009, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted 14–1 to open an investigation into the CIA detention and interrogation program. In August 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder announced a parallel preliminary criminal investigation into the use of unauthorized interrogation techniques by CIA officials. As a result of the attorney general's investigation, the Republican minority on the SSCI concluded that many witnesses were unlikely to participate in the investigation for fear of criminal liability. Citing the attorney general investigation as their reason, the Republican minority of the SSCI withdrew their participation from the investigation in September 2009.The Senate investigation was led by Committee staffer and former FBI investigator Daniel J. Jones, and was prepared following a review of more than 6.3 million pages of documents, cables, emails, and other materials principally provided by the CIA. The document production phase lasted more than three years and was completed in July 2012. As described in the Senate report, an additional 9,400 classified documents repeatedly requested by the SSCI were withheld by the White House under a claim of executive privilege.
Despite the initial expectation that interviews would be used, no formal interviews or hearings were conducted in the preparation of the report. The lack of interviews and hearings was one of the chief complaints of the Republican minority on SSCI. However, the report included CIA officials' on-the-record statements in classified committee hearings, written statements, and interviews conducted through the CIA Inspector General's office and the Agency's oral history program, as well as through the formal response to the committee in June 2013 after reading the report. These statements and interviews included those from CIA director George Tenet, CTC director Jose Rodriguez, CIA general counsel Scott Muller, CIA deputy director of operations James Pavitt, CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo, CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, and a variety of interrogators, lawyers, medical personnel, senior counterterrorism analysts and managers of the detention and interrogation program.
The CIA estimated that approximately $40 million in personnel time and resources was spent assisting the investigation, but this was largely because of the CIA's insistence on hiring Centra Technology contractors to review documents prior to presenting them to the Committee and establishing a separate secure facility and computer network for CIA and Committee staff to use during the review. This deviated from the standard document-sharing process, in which the CIA provides documents for Committee staff to review in Committee offices.
The final report was approved on December 13, 2012, by a vote of 9–6, with eight Democrats and one Republican voting in favor of publication and six Republicans voting in opposition, and the published minority views of Senator Chambliss were joined by Senators Burr, Risch, Coats, Rubio, and Coburn. Republican Senator John McCain, a member of the Committee ex officio, did not have a vote, but he supported approval alongside Snowe. On April 3, 2014, the SSCI voted 11–3 to submit a revised version of the executive summary, findings, and recommendations of the report for declassification analysis in preparation for future public release. Independent Senator Angus King and Republican Senator Susan Collins supported the release of the report. After eight months, involving contentious negotiations about what details should remain classified, the revised executive summary, findings, and recommendations were made public with many redactions on December 9, 2014.
The CIA had demanded that the Committee redact the names of all detainees, all CIA officer's pseudonyms, and the names of all countries that hosted black sites. Daniel J. Jones told The Guardian that the Agency wanted to redact other material, such as references to Allah. The CIA wanted pseudonyms to be used for contractors and interrogators James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, despite the fact that they had both been identified publicly prior to the report's release. The report ended up including detainee names, and used pseudonyms for several Agency officers, but redacted the names of almost all others, as well as black site host countries.
Information about the cooperation of foreign agencies with the CIA has been redacted from the report. The British chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee stated they would request access to anything taken out of the report at the request of British agencies.