A Senate report on CIA torture and interrogation techniques that has been at the center of a spying scandal and heated congressional debate for the last year will finally be released early next week.
Journalist Jason Leopold, who has pursued the report via a Freedom of Information Act request, tweeted Wednesday that the report’s release, which has been held up for months in arguments between the agency and lawmakers over redactions, will come Monday. (RELATED: CIA Spied On US Senate Computers Over Torture Program Report)
BREAKING: Senate report on CIA interrogation program will be released MONDAY, govt atty just told my atty in my #FOIA case for the rpt
— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) December 3, 2014
Quote from DOJ atty to my atty on Sen/CIA rpt: “The plan is to release it on Monday. But it’s not within our control.”
— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) December 3, 2014
On Monday California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee charged with drafting the report, said the report was only “days” away from release, according to The Daily Beast.
An aide for Feinstein told reporters that the list of 400 disagreements between the committee and the Obama administration about details revealed in the report has been whittled down to just two, which the aide expected to be resolved by Monday night.
The executive summary of the full 6,000-page report is expected to elaborate on techniques used by the CIA during the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq, including water boarding, sleep deprivation, imprisonment in overseas “black site” prisons outside of U.S. legal protections and other interrogation tactics. (RELATED: Report: CIA Impersonated Senate Staffers To Spy On Senate Computers)
“We tortured some folks,” President Obama said in support of the report earlier this year. “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line. And that needs to be understood and accepted.”
This past fall the CIA wrapped up an internal investigation into misconduct by several personnel, all of whom participated in infiltrating and spying on computers used by Senate Intelligence Committee staffers to compile the report. (RELATED: Report: CIA Deleted Computer Records About Senate Spying)
The findings of the investigation, which uncovered numerous deliberate agency cover-up attempts including deleting agency emails, purposefully misleading Department of Justice investigators and denying the allegations of senators, led multiple lawmakers to call for the resignation of CIA Director John Brennan. (RELATED: CIA’s John Brennan Refuses To Tell Congress Who Authorized Senate Spying)
