Senate report says CIA repeatedly misled policymakers about interrogation program
Six months after the Central Intelligence Agency first captured a suspected high-level al-Qaida figure in early 2002, it opened a potential can of worms by briefing several Senators about new policies for detaining and aggressively interrogating such captives. The Senate Intelligence committee chairman, Bob Graham (D-Fla.), responded by sending the agency multiple requests for additional information.
No problem, CIA officials decided, according to a report about the program finally published by the committee’s Democrats on Tuesday after years of back-and-forth argument over its release. Knowing that Graham was retiring in January 2003, the agency simply deferred additional congressional briefings until after he had left. That decision stemmed from what the CIA’s liaison to Congress depicted in an internal email at the time as a desire to “get off the hook on the cheap.”
Thus began what the Intelligence Committee report portrays as a sustained CIA effort to block potential scrutiny of an exceptionally secretive and unquestionably brutal program using what became known as EIT, or enhanced interrogation techniques, that even some internal CIA documents said encompassed torture.
Related: "All pain is subjective"
According to the controversial report, the agency’s effort to shield the initiative from accountability persisted through 2005, when the CIA made a series of claims to the Justice Department about interrogations that were “incongruent” with its actual program, and 2007, when then-CIA director Michael Hayden allegedly made roughly three dozen “inaccurate” statements to the committee. The false claims by the agency produced a series of key legal opinions by the Justice Department that supported the program’s continuation, the report states.
In between, according to the report, the agency repeatedly lied to the media, to the National Security Council, to lawmakers and to the State Department about the program’s scope, its methods and its effectiveness. At the helm of this effort: A group of roughly three to four dozen CIA officials privy to all its workings, who had either wrongfully convinced themselves it was succeeding or willfully decided to exaggerate its accomplishments.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the committee’s current chairwoman, said in a lengthy Senate floor speech unveiling the 2012 report that the CIA’s actions were “a stain on our values and our history.”
Related: The president quote
There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.
This story is part of National Security. Click here to read more stories in this topic.
Related stories
Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
