The International Spy Museum will make significant changes to its controversial torture exhibit after widespread criticism that it downplayed the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program.
The exhibit’s updates, which are expected to be made by March, were detailed in a letter sent to lawmakers obtained by BuzzFeed News.
“The new exhibit will focus more broadly on the history of interrogation, to include both coercive methods (physical and psychological) and non-coercive methods (such as rapport building),” reads the Dec. 20 letter to Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Martin Heinrich, and Ron Wyden. “We also intend to add content on scientific and technical innovations to detect deceit (to include a polygraph artifact), as well as legal definitions of torture.”
Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee had accused the museum of “sanitizing” the interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, used by the CIA after the 9/11 attacks. The exhibit asks whether torture works and includes videos of people who ran the program defending it. It also asks visitors if they would support torturing suspected terrorists.
It makes no mention of the findings of a six-year investigation into the Bush-era program by the Senate Intelligence Committee that concluded the techniques failed to provide “valuable” intelligence.
The Geneva Conventions prohibited torture, and President Barack Obama signed a law backed by Sen. Feinstein and the late Sen. John McCain that prohibited the methods used but the CIA after the 9/11 attacks.
Feinstein and Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, asked the museum in May to include the panel’s study on the interrogations and that the techniques had been banned.
The new exhibit will include both “an expanded timeline of the history of the [CIA] program” as well as the committee’s report, museum president Tamara Christian said in the Dec. 20 letter.
“As you know, the Museum is an independent, educational organization, and as such is ultimately responsible for the integrity, accuracy and balance of its own exhibits,” Christian wrote. “We welcome input from all quarters. Input from those responsible for the Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program has been of particular value.”
Heinrich, Feinstein, and Wyden said they were “pleased that the museum has confirmed it is moving forward with changes to its interrogation exhibit.”
Daniel Jones, who was the lead investigator and the author of the committee’s 6,700-page report, had doubts about the changes.
“The museum’s promotion of the CIA’s torture program, blind allegiance to the CIA’s talking points, and willful avoidance of the documented facts is appalling,” he told BuzzFeed News.
“Based on what I’ve seen so far — how far they’re off the mark — I’m more than a little skeptical that they can make the necessary corrections to this exhibit. But we will see in March if they’re serious,” he said.
