The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a 528-page executive summary of a study that investigated the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program on Tuesday.
According to its website, the SSCI was established in 1976 in order to provide oversight and investigative reports about intelligence agencies such as the CIA, National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The full study was about 6,700 pages in length, but only a portion of the study was declassified and released to the public.
The released portion included a foreword by committee chairperson Dianne Feinstein, a brief summary of the findings, conclusions of the committee and an extensive executive summary of the study and ?findings.
Feinstein is a Democratic senator from California and has served on the committee since 2001.
"(The study) documents the abuses and countless mistakes made by CIA personnel between late 2001 and early 2009,” Feinstein said in the report’s foreword. “(It) describes the history of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program from its inception to its termination, including a review of each of the 119 known individuals who were held in CIA custody.”
Justin Schon, a doctoral candidate for political science at IU, was underwhelmed by the report.
“I found it to be a very boring report that lacked anything that I didn’t already know,” he said.
He referenced a portion of the report that cited the various methods of interrogation as disturbing, but wasn’t optimistic that the report would change any federal policies or ?procedures.
The study was initially approved for release Dec. 13, 2012 and sent to the White House and other relevant executive branch agencies on Feb. 15, 2013.
The CIA issued a response to the study as a whole in June 2013, which was declassified and released to the public Dec. 8, 2014. The response rejected the claims made by the committee and suggested they were ?inaccurate.
Feinstein continued to describe the process of the investigation, which lasted from early 2009 until late 2012 , during which small groups of committee members’ staffs reviewed more than 6 million pages of CIA materials, including operational cables, intelligence reports, briefing reports and interview transcripts.
The findings and conclusions section of the released report gave 20 different discoveries that condemned the CIA and its actions through its Detention and Interrogation Program.
According to the report, “the CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.”
The report continued with another claim: “The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.”
A short list of some of the interrogative techniques that were used against CIA detainees included “slaps and wallings,” when a prisoner is slammed against a wall, sleep deprivation, nudity, waterboarding, rectal rehydration and constant threats of death and violence. Waterboarding is a controversial form of torture in which water is poured over a cloth covering a captive’s face.
The report went on to say that “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 has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.”
Chisda Magid, also a doctoral candidate in political science, made his opinion clear.
“It’s limited only to the CIA, which is only one element of the practice of torture in the U.S.,” Magid said. “It’s nothing new, nothing we didn’t already know about. Any claim that it’s going to have any impact isn’t true.”
