On the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, It’s Time for Someone to Leak the Whole of the US Senate Torture Report

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Today is an important day — 30 years since the entry into force of the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and 20 years since the establishment, on that anniversary, of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, and to mark the occasion it would be wonderful if someone in the huge, sprawling organization that is the United States government would release — leak, if you prefer — the full Senate Intelligence Committee Study on CIA Detention and Interrogation Program.

The report took five years to compile, contains 6,700 pages, and cost $40m, and it was approved for publication by the committee members on December 13, 2012, by nine votes to six, although it was not until December 9, 2014 that a partly-redacted 525-page document — the executive summary and certain key findings — was released. See Senator Dianne Feinstein’s page on the report for all the publicly available documents.

The executive summary was a profoundly shocking document, despite the redactions, and despite consisting of less than one-tenth of the total, as I explained at the time, when I wrote that:

the interrogations “were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others”, …. that torture was “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees”, that the CIA made “inaccurate claims” about the “effectiveness” of the programme in an attempt to justify it and that it led to friction with other agencies that endangered national security, as well as providing false statements that led to costly and worthless wild goose chases.

There were also other shocks — the first public revelations, for example, that some prisoners were subjected to “rectal feeding” — or, in other words, were anally raped, a revelation that still shocks me, as well as incredibly useful information about how many men had been subjected to the program. When I researched the program in 2009 and wrote about it for a UN report on secret detention, I estimated that 94 men had been held; the Senate report, however, found 119.

However, although the publication of the executive summary of the report led to a widespread recognition within the US that something terrible had happened, and that it couldn’t be swept under the carpet, no one was held accountable for what took place, and repeated calls from NGOs for the full report to be released were ignored.

Adding insult to injury, just before President Obama left office, he preserved the full report under the Presidential Records Act. This prevented critics of the report, like  Richard Burr, the Republican who became the Senate intelligence Committee’s chair after Sen. Feinstein, from destroying existing classified copies, but also placed it “out of public view for at least 12 years and probably longer,” as the Guardian described it in December.

Daniel Jones, who led the torture inquiry, criticized Obama’s actions as inadequate, saying, “The bar for positive White House action on this is incredibly low. Preserving the full 6,700-page report under the Presidential Records Act only ensures the report will not be destroyed. It does little else.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “The American people deserve the opportunity to read this history rather than see it locked away in a safe for twelve years. When the president-elect [Donald Trump] has promised to bring back torture, it is also more critical than ever that the study be made available to cleared personnel throughout the federal government who are responsible for authorizing and implementing our country’s detention and interrogation policies.”

As the Guardian explained, he “urged Obama to designate the torture report an agency record, which makes it releasable under the Freedom of Information Act.” As Wyden himself added, “Burying the study achieves nothing but to create an information vacuum that gets filled with uninformed and highly dangerous propaganda.”

This month, more bad news emerged from the Trump administration. On June 2, the New York Times reported that congressional officials had said that the administration “had begun returning to Congress” copies of the Senate report, which “raises the possibility that most of the copies could be locked in Senate vaults indefinitely or even destroyed.”

In response, to repeat what I mentioned above, I believe it is time for someone in the US government with access to the full report to release it to the public. make a donation.