The CIA’s inspector general is claiming it inadvertently destroyed its only copy of a classified, three-volume Senate report on torture, prompting a leading senator to ask for reassurance that it was in fact “an accident.”
“As you may be aware, the office of the CIA inspector general has misplaced and/or conditionally destroyed its electronic copy and disk of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s full 6,700-page classified study of the CIA detention and interrogation program,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., wrote in a Friday letter to CIA Director John Brennan.
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Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked that Brennan “immediately” provide the IG with a new copy of the report. “Your prompt response will allay my concern that this was more than ‘accident,'” Feinstein added. “The CIA IG should have a copy of the full study because the report includes extensive information directly related to the IG’s ongoing oversight of the CIA.”
The letter followed reports in the media that quoted unnamed sources in the IG who indicated that the agency had accidentally deleted its digital copy of the file, in addition to inadvertently destroying a physical disk the file was stored on. The destruction was never reported either to senators or to a federal judge overseeing a Freedom of Information Act case pertaining to the information.
It is not the first time that Feinstein has sparred with Brennan over the report, which contains Senate Intelligence Committee findings on the CIA’s use of torture in the war on terrorism. Brennan in 2014 admitted his agency had hacked Feinstein’s committee staffers in an attempt to destroy classified information that, he argued, the committee had wrongfully obtained.
During production of the report, it was also revealed that the agency had destroyed video footage from 2005 that featured agents using enhanced interrogation methods on Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two high-level detainees.
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The American Civil Liberties Union has attempted to obtain the text of the report through a FOIA lawsuit but was denied on the basis that it constitutes a report by Congress, which is not subject to FOIA laws. Feinstein and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., have petitioned David Ferriero, the head of the National Archives, to declare the report a “federal record … in the public interest,” which would eliminate that roadblock.
In the meantime, Feinstein said she is seeking reassurance that the IG is going to receive another copy of the report. “Providing the CIA IG with a copy of the full report immediately will also ensure that [Department of Justice] lawyers can inform federal judges that the status quo was adhered to and has been restored,” she wrote on Friday.
