Given the recent acrimony between the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and given the obvious conflict of interest the CIA has in being responsible for the declassification of the the SSCI report on torture, I strongly suspected that someone would leak the full findings of the report in order to subvert any effort to whitewash it. That is exactly what has happened (pdf). Here are the findings:
The Committee’s complete list of findings follows.
The CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques did not effectively assist the agency in acquiring intelligence or in gaining cooperation from detainees.
The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
The CIA subjected detainees to interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorized by CIA Headquarters.
The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention.
The CIA’s claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.
The CIA inaccurately characterized the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation techniques to justify their use.
The CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques was brutal and far worse than the agency communicated to policymakers.
The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the agency communicated to policymakers.
The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.
The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.
The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General.
Numerous internal critiques and objections concerning the CIA’s management and use of the Detention and Interrogation were ignored.
The CIA manipulated the media by coordinating the release of classified information, which inaccurately portrayed the effectiveness of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques.
The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.
The way in which the CIA operated and managed the program complicated, and in some cases hindered the national security missions of other Executive Branch agencies.
Management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout its duration, particularly so in 2002 and 2003.
Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and were central figures in the program’s operation.
By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program. The effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation techniques was not sufficiently evaluated by the CIA.
CIA personnel who were responsible for serious violations, inappropriate behavior, or management failures in the program’s operation were seldom reprimanded or held accountable by the agency.
The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program ended by 2006 due to legal and oversight concerns, unauthorized press disclosures and reduced cooperation from other nations.
The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program damaged the United States’ global reputation, and came with heavy costs, both monetary and nonmonetary.
Once again, what are we supposed to do with this information?
Maybe it’s my browser, but this post appears twice for me.
Not you. I fixed some html in it and accidentally double-posted it.
Comment by James Corbett at McClatchy
Allegedly eight years after the fact, what US government employees and contractors did in our name remains a secret — and all the “evil doers” have nothing to fear from the withered arm of the law and justice. Very difficult to accept this outcome for those of us that don’t believe a hell awaits them after they die.
Yes but if you don’t pay a $25 dollar fine and have a warrant for it, then you have the misfortune of being shot in NYC, the police will run your warrants and then handcuff you to the hospital bed for the length of your treatment.
So glad this information was leaked. I presume it was just this short list, not the whole executive summary?
Now I would like to see the whole thing formally released.
The CIA/Executive branch answer so far?
Bet on it.
And that answer…nicely shaded of course, to hide the inevitable duplicity…will remain as long as a mainstream, centrist DemocRat or RatPublican holds the PermaGov White House.
Bet on that as well.
The whole rotten edifice of this system will have to be razed before anything substantive is changed as far as the Security State/War State/Corporate-owned-and-controlled state is concerned. Everything else will just be ass-covering.
Obama is slick at the ass-covering thing. It took over 6 years for the majority of Americans to distrust his pronouncements, but we are there now…just in time to anoint a new front-person.
Who’s slicker?
Right now it looks to me like the Jebster by a wrinkle.
We shall see.
Won’t we.
AG
Yet, the “evil” Feinstein-chaired, Democratic Party-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee completed this report which damns the CIA’s actions, and the President has said he wants the report to be released to the public.
So, your both-sides-do-it, annihilative cynicism fails to deal with reality again, AG. Our interrogative techniques are no longer the same as the Bush Administration’s, and Congress supports that change. I look forward to your response to these facts: a variant of the same subject-changing talking points you always trot out. Many of those talking points are valid, but your unwillingness to acknowledge progress makes you an extremely unreliable narrator.
Frankly, I see nothing in that list of 20 findings that compromises national security.
There is nothing there that should be withheld or redacted in any form whatsoever.
Preventing embarrassment is not a national security interest. Protecting our democracy is.
It jeopardizes our national security when the rest of the world realizes what amoral monsters create policy within the US government. That’s probably the thinking (more favorably worded, of course).
The problem with that argument is that the rest of the world has already known that. For a long time. The only people shielded from that ugly truth are Americans.
Or, reminiscent of the rejoinder to the old “if you don’t like this country, leave it!” line: I don’t want to move anywhere else because then I’d become a victim of US foreign policy. I miss George Carlin.
Very likely the White House and Justice Department will seek out the whistleblowers and journalists involved in leaked CIA documents. A continuing story by the Obama administration invoking the Espionafe Act of 1917, have traitors been executed already?
○ Zero Dark Thirty leak investigators now target of leak probe
○ Senate Intelligence Committee investigating leak to McClatchy, Feinstein says