Sen. Dianne Feinstein brushed aside an urgent 11th-hour plea from Secretary of State John Kerry and opposition from the Obama administration to release a report Tuesday detailing the CIA’s extreme interrogation of suspected terrorists in the months and years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Kerry and other U.S. officials have warned of unrest and potential violence at U.S. facilities around the world if Feinstein moved forward and released the report, the culmination of five and a half years of research and investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Feinstein said she decided to move forward with disclosing a 500-page summary of the 6,200-page report because the country needed to provide a complete accounting of exactly what the government did after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killed nearly 3,000 people.
“There will be those who seize on the report to justify evil actions to incite violence,” she said during remarks Tuesday on the Senate floor. “But history will judge us on our commitment [as Americans] and our willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again.'”
She said the document examines the CIA’s secret overseas detention of at least 119 individuals and the use of “coercive interrogation techniques — in some cases amounting to torture.”
Feinstein also argued that the techniques were “far more brutal than people were led to believe” and “not an effective means of gaining effective intelligence.”
The report details the CIA’s use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques known as “enhanced interrogations” on al Qaeda prisoners during the George W. Bush administration and identifies secret rendition prisons in the Middle East and Asia, along with several Eastern European countries, such as Romania and Poland.
The report’s release has fueled an intense debate in Congress with some lawmakers arguing that it will prevent the future use of extreme methods of interrogation while others argue that it will only give extremists around the globe more reasons to threaten the lives of Americans overseas.
Kerry on Friday called Feinstein personally to ask her to delay the report’s release, arguing that its release could damage relationships abroad at a particularly sensitive time. Kerry supports Feinstein’s efforts to disclose the report but argued that this week is a particularly bad time.
Feinstein countered that there will always be sensitive foreign policy issues at stake. She also is acutely aware that if she doesn’t release the report this week, it may never be released.
“This report is too important to shelve indefinitely,” she said Tuesday.
In January, Feinstein will no longer chair the Intelligence Committee, and her successor, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., could prevent the report’s release when he takes over the panel. Burr initially voted against disclosing the report, and the decision to publicly release it would be his in the new year, according to Senate rules.
In addition, Bloomberg reported that Feinstein is scheduled to give a major speech about the report at a Dec. 10 gala hosted by Human Rights First. The group is giving Feinstein and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., an award for their leadership in advocating against the use of extreme interrogations of prisoners.
The Senate panel adopted the report and submitted it for declassification on bipartisan votes, and numerous military leaders, civil rights advocates and Republicans, including McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, strongly support its release.
“Our enemies act without conscience. We must not,” McCain said in a speech on the Senate floor. “This executive summary of the Committee’s report makes clear that acting without conscience isn’t necessary, it isn’t even helpful, in winning this strange and long war we’re fighting. We should be grateful to have that truth affirmed.”
Others, such as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, oppose its disclosure, arguing that in some cases the “enhanced interrogation” techniques were necessary to gain crucial intelligence and that releasing the report would only fuel more anti-American sentiment among terrorists groups.
Many of the incidents of alleged torture outlined in the report are not new, but it contains new details about the practices, the exact names and locations of the rendition sites and how extensively the CIA used them. It also argues that the CIA and others who knew about the activity tried to hide many of the details about it from Congress, the White House and the Justice Department.
The report also alleges that the extreme interrogation practices failed in their ultimate goal — to produce good intelligence to help save American lives.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Monday said releasing the report could lead to greater risks for U.S. facilities and individuals around the world.
“So the administration has taken the prudent steps to ensure that the proper security precautions are in place at U.S. facilities around the globe.”
But he also stressed that President Obama supports the report’s release on principle.
“It’s important to release the report so that people around the world and people here at home understand exactly what transpired,” he said Monday, adding that “something like this should never happen again.”
Jose Rodriguez Jr., a former CIA official who ran the program detailed in the report, argues in an op-ed published in the Washington Post on Friday that the CIA was doing its job and responding to what Congress asked it to do to protect Americans after the Sept. 11 attacks.
He also rejected the conclusion that the enhanced interrogation techniques weren’t useful in helping save American lives.
“The report’s leaked conclusion, which has been reported on widely, that the interrogation program brought no intelligence is an egregious falsehood; it’s a dishonest attempt to rewrite history,” he argued.
“I’m bemused that the Senate could devote so many resources to studying the interrogation program and yet never once speak to any of the key people involved in it, including the guy who ran it (that would be me).”
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, former President George W. Bush defended the CIA agents who conducted the interrogations.
They are “really good people, and we’re lucky as a nation to have them,” he said.
“These are patriots, and whatever the reports says, if it diminishes their contributions to our country, it is way off-base,” he continued.
President Obama has long opposed the extreme interrogation techniques, and shortly after he took office in 2009 issued an executive order banning the practice.
He also shuttered the secret rendition facilities abroad and ordered that the CIA comply with the letter of the international law banning the extreme practices established during the Geneva Conventions.
The Obama administration, however, has spent most of the year in negotiations with the Senate Intelligence Committee over redactions to the report.
The clashes between the CIA and the Senate panel were on vivid public display over the summer when CIA officials were forced to admit that they spied on the computers of committee staff working on the report.
CIA Director John Brennan was forced to apologize to Feinstein and Chambliss for the breaches.
This story was first published at 11:30 a.m. and has been updated.
