Washington, DC. Since WWII the CIA has operated in the shadows, but by real rules and laws-to some extent. But after 911, America and the CIA got lost in a world where America became no different than the enemy it hunted. Now those methods of torturing those it caught and their stories are the subject of the Trump Administrations desires to hide them from the public at all costs. One can only wonder the horrors that must lay inside.
Trump’s administration has begun returning to Congress copies of a voluminous 2014 report describing the CIA’s harsh detention and interrogation programs.The administration’s move means it could be more difficult for the full, 6,700-page report to ever be made public, because documents held by Congress are exempt from laws requiring government records to eventually be made public.
The move was made in response to requests by Sen. Richard Burr, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s current Republican chairman. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat who chaired the committee when the report was produced, had asked that it be distributed to multiple executive branch agencies, a move designed to make it eventually releasable to the public under the Freedom of Information Act law.
There was a declassified summary of the report made public in December 2014. It concluded that the CIA’s interrogation programs, using techniques such as waterboarding that most observers consider torture, were more brutal and less effective than the CIA had told policymakers.
Congressional sources who have read the report said that not a single terrorist attack was foiled as a result of the use of harsh interrogation techniques. The American Civil Liberties Union had filed litigation to have the full report released. But US courts ruled that because the document was created by Congress, it was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
There is still hope if your a historian though, at least one copy of the report will not be returned to the committee. That’s because a copy has been preserved in former President Barack Obama’s presidential archive, according to a Dec. 9, 2016 letter written to Feinstein by Obama’s top White House lawyer at the time, W. Neil Eggleston.
Senator Feinstein said she was “concerned and disappointed” that Burr requested the document be returned, calling it a departure from the committee’s normal bipartisan nature.”No senator, chairman or not, has the authority to erase history. I believe that is the intent of the chairman in this case,” Feinstein said. Senator Burr’s office had no immediate comment, and the CIA declined comment to News Front.