By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Dec. 4, 2014
In March 2009, U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Kit Bond (R-Mo.), respectively the chairwoman and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced that their group had agreed on a bipartisan basis to review
• How the [Central Intelligence Agency] created, operated, and maintained its detention and interrogation program;
• How CIA’s assessments that detainees possessed relevant information were made;
• Whether the CIA accurately described the detention and interrogation program to other parts of the U.S. government, including the Office of Legal Counsel and the Senate Intelligence Committee;
• Whether the CIA implemented the program in compliance with official guidance, including covert action findings, Office of Legal Counsel opinions, and CIA policy;
The 2009 announcement also said that the committee would evaluate intelligence “gained through the use of enhanced and standard interrogation techniques.”
“Enhanced interrogation” is, of course, a euphemism for actions that most people would call “torture.”
Work on this Senate investigation spanned about five years, culminating in a report of about 6,000 pages. In early 2014, the committee submitted a 480-page executive summary to the White House. The Obama administration, including CIA officials, redacted the summary in ways that rendered it unintelligible and unsupported, according to complaints from Senate committee members.
The administration redactions came to light in August. The executive summary has remained in limbo since then.
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