[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 149 (Tuesday, December 9, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Page S6405]


                          CIA OVERSIGHT REPORT

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, today for the first time the American people 
are going to learn the full truth about torture that took place under 
the CIA during the Bush administration. I have served for 22 years with 
the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein. She is 
dignified. She is very thorough in whatever she does. She is 
intelligent and she cares a great deal. She has proven herself to be 
the one of the most thoughtful and hard-working Members of this body. 
The people of California are, as well they should be, very proud of 
this good woman.
  I am appreciative of the work the Senate Intelligence Committee has 
done under her direction. We are here today because of her efforts. She 
has persevered, overcome obstacles that have been significant, to make 
this study available to the American people.
  I am gratified for the work done by Democrats on the Intelligence 
Committee. We are here today, again I repeat, because of their efforts. 
We do not often mention, as certainly we should, the work of our 
staffs. I want to throw a big bouquet to the intelligence staff. They 
have worked so hard. Under the direction of Senator Feinstein, they 
have worked for 7 years--7 years--working on this vitally important 
matter. It is a report that was not easy, but they did it.
  Here is what they did: Committee members and staff combed through 
more than 6 million pages--6 million pages--of documents to formulate 
the report. The full committee report is 6,700 pages long--7 years, I 
repeat, in the making.
  The unclassified executive summary, which is going to be released 
today, is more than 500 pages. I want everyone to understand, the 
Select Committee on Intelligence, along with the House Committee on 
Intelligence, is the only group of people who provide oversight over 
our intelligence community. They actually have the ability to 
investigate what happened. No one else. Not the press, not Senators, 
nor the public, or outside organizations have the ability to 
investigate the CIA. But we did it. The implications of this report are 
profound. Not only is torture wrong, but it does not work. For people 
today, we hear them coming from different places saying, It was great. 
It was terrific what we did. It has got us so much.
  It has got us nothing, except a bad name. Without this report, the 
American people would not know what actually took place under the CIA's 
torture program. This critical report highlights the importance of 
Senate oversight and the role Congress must play in overseeing the 
executive branch of government. The only way our country can put this 
episode in the past is to come to terms with what happened and commit 
to ensuring it will never happen again. This is how we as Americans 
make our Nation stronger. When we realize there is a problem, we seek 
the evidence; we study it; we learn from it. Then we set about to enact 
change. Americans must learn from our mistakes. We learned about the 
Pentagon papers. They were helpful to us as a country. The Iran contra 
affair. I was here when it went on. It was hard on us, but it was 
important that we did this. More recently, what happened in that prison 
in Iraq, Abu-Ghraib.
  We have three separate branches of government, the judicial, the 
executive, and the legislative branches of government. To me, this work 
done by the Intelligence Committee, of which the Presiding Officer is a 
member, cries out for our Constitution, three separate, equal branches 
of government.
  We are here today to talk about the work done by the legislative 
branch of government. We can protect our national security as a country 
without resorting to methods like torture. They are contrary to the 
fundamental values of America. So I call upon the administration, the 
Intelligence Committee, and my colleagues in Congress to join me in 
that commitment, that what took place, the torture program, is not in 
keeping with our country.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.

                          ____________________

[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 149 (Tuesday, December 9, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6405-S6414]



 SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE STUDY OF THE CIA'S DETENTION 
                       AND INTERROGATION PROGRAM

  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I want to thank the leader for his 
words and for his support. They are extraordinarily welcome and 
appreciated.
  Today, a 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence 
Committee's 5\1/2\ year review of the CIA's detention and interrogation 
program, which was conducted between 2002 and 2009, is being released 
publicly. The executive summary, which is going out today, is backed by 
a 6,700-page classified and unredacted report with 38,000 footnotes 
which can be released, if necessary, at a later time.
  The report released today 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.
  Over the past couple of weeks, I have gone through a great deal of 
introspection about whether to delay the release of this report to a 
later time. This clearly is a period of turmoil and instability in many 
parts of the world. Unfortunately, that is going to continue for the 
foreseeable future whether or not this report is released.
  There are those who will seize upon the report and say ``See what the 
Americans did,'' and they will try to use it to justify evil actions or 
incite more violence. We can't prevent that, but history will judge us 
by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness 
to face an ugly truth and say ``never again.''
  There may never be the right time to release this report. The 
instability we see today will not be resolved in months or years. But 
this report is too important to shelve indefinitely.
  My determination to release it has also increased due to a campaign 
of mistaken statements and press articles launched against the report 
before anyone has had the chance to read it. As a matter of fact, the 
report is just now, as I speak, being released. This is what it looks 
like.
  Senator Chambliss asked me if we could have the minority report bound 
with the majority report. For this draft that is not possible. In the 
filed draft it will be bound together. But this is what the summary of 
the 6,000 pages looks like.
  My words give me no pleasure. I am releasing this report because I 
know there are thousands of employees at the CIA who do not condone 
what I will speak about this morning and who work day and night, long 
hours, within the law, for America's security in what is certainly a 
difficult world. My colleagues on the Intelligence Committee and I are 
proud of them, just as everyone in this Chamber is, and we will always 
support them.
  In reviewing the study in the past few days, with the decision 
looming over the public release, I was struck by a quote found on page 
126 of the executive summary. It cites a former CIA inspector general, 
John Helgerson, who in 2005 wrote the following to the then-Director of 
the CIA, which clearly states the situation with respect to this report 
years later as well:

       We have found that the Agency over the decades has 
     continued to get itself in messes related to interrogation 
     programs for one overriding reason: we do not document and 
     learn from our experience--each generation of officers is 
     left to improvise anew, with problematic results for our 
     officers as individuals and for our Agency.


[[Page S6406]]


  I believe that to be true. I agree with Mr. Helgerson. His comments 
are true today. But this must change.
  On March 11, 2009, the committee voted 14 to 1 to begin a review of 
the CIA's detention and interrogation program. Over the past 5 years a 
small team of committee investigators pored over the more than 6.3 
million pages of CIA records the leader spoke about to complete this 
report or what we call the study. It shows that the CIA's actions a 
decade ago are a stain on our values and on our history. The release of 
this 500-page summary cannot remove that stain, but it can and does say 
to our people and the world that America is big enough to admit when it 
is wrong and confident enough to learn from its mistakes. Releasing 
this report is an important step to restore our values and show the 
world that we are, in fact, a just and lawful society.
  Over the next hour I wish to lay out for Senators and the American 
public the report's key findings and conclusions. I ask that when I 
complete this, Senator McCain be recognized. Before I get to the 
substance of the report, I wish to make a few comments about why it is 
so important that we make this study public.
  All of us have vivid memories of that Tuesday morning when terrorists 
struck New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania. Make no mistake--on 
September 11, 2001, war was declared on the United States. Terrorists 
struck our financial center, they struck our military center, and they 
tried to strike our political center and would have had brave and 
courageous passengers not brought down the plane. We still vividly 
remember the mix of outrage, deep despair, and sadness as we watched 
from Washington--smoke rising from the Pentagon, the passenger plane 
lying in a Pennsylvania field, and the sound of bodies striking 
canopies at ground level as innocents jumped to the ground below from 
the World Trade Center. Mass terror that we often see abroad had struck 
us directly in our front yard, killing 3,000 innocent men, women, and 
children.
  What happened? We came together as a nation with one singular 
mission: Bring those who committed these acts to justice. But it is at 
this point where the values of America come into play, where the rule 
of law and the fundamental principles of right and wrong become 
important.
  In 1990 the Senate ratified the Convention against Torture. The 
convention makes clear that this ban against torture is absolute. It 
states:

       No exceptional circumstances whatsoever--
  Including what I just read--

     whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political 
     instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as 
     a justification of torture.

  Nonetheless, it was argued that the need for information on possible 
additional terrorist plots after 9/11 made extraordinary interrogation 
techniques necessary.
  Even if one were to set aside all of the moral arguments, our review 
was a meticulous and detailed examination of records. It finds that 
coercive interrogation techniques did not produce the vital, otherwise 
unavailable intelligence the CIA has claimed.
  I will go into further detail on this issue in a moment, but let me 
make clear that these comments are not a condemnation of the CIA as a 
whole. The CIA plays an incredibly important part in our Nation's 
security and has thousands of dedicated and talented employees.
  What we have found is that a surprisingly few people were responsible 
for designing, carrying out, and managing this program. Two contractors 
developed and led the interrogations. There was little effective 
oversight. Analysts, on occasion, gave operational orders about 
interrogations, and CIA management of the program was weak and 
diffused.
  Our final report was approved by a bipartisan vote of 9 to 6 in 
December of 2012 and exposes brutality in stark contrast to our values 
as a nation.
  This effort was focused on the actions of the CIA from late 2001 to 
January of 2009. The report does include considerable detail on the 
CIA's interactions with the White House, the Departments of Justice, 
State, and Defense, and the Senate Intelligence Committee.
  The review is based on contemporaneous records and documents during 
the time the program was in place and active. These documents are 
important because they aren't based on recollection, they aren't based 
on revision, and they aren't a rationalization a decade later. It is 
these documents, referenced repeatedly in thousands of footnotes, that 
provide the factual basis for the study's conclusions. The committee's 
majority staff reviewed more than 6.3 million pages of these documents 
provided by the CIA, as well as records from other departments and 
agencies. These records include finished intelligence assessments, CIA 
operational and intelligence cables, memoranda, emails, real-time chat 
sessions, inspector general reports, testimony before Congress, 
pictures, and other internal records.
  It is true that we didn't conduct our own interviews, and I wish to 
state why that was the case. In 2009 there was an ongoing review by the 
Department of Justice Special Prosecutor, John Durham. On August 24, 
Attorney General Holder expanded that review. This occurred 6 months 
after our study had begun. Durham's original investigation of the CIA's 
destruction of interrogation videotapes was broadened to include 
possible criminal actions of CIA employees in the course of CIA 
detention and interrogation activities.
  At the time, the committee's vice chairman, Kit Bond, withdrew the 
minority's participation in the study, citing the Attorney General's 
expanded investigation as the reason.
  The Department of Justice refused to coordinate its investigation 
with the Intelligence Committee's review. As a result, possible 
interviewees could be subject to additional liability if they were 
interviewed, and the CIA, citing the Attorney General's investigation, 
would not instruct its employees to participate in interviews.
  Notwithstanding, I am very confident of the factual accuracy and 
comprehensive nature of this report for three reasons:
  No. 1, it is 6.3 million pages of documents reviewed, and they reveal 
records of actions as those actions took place, not through 
recollections more than a decade later.
  No. 2, the CIA and CIA senior officers have taken the opportunity to 
explain their views on CIA detention and interrogation operations. They 
have done this in on-the-record statements in classified committee 
hearings, written testimony and answers to questions, and through the 
formal response to the committee in June 2013 after reading this study.
  No. 3, the committee had access to and utilized an extensive set of 
reports of interviews conducted by the CIA inspector general and the 
CIA's oral history program.
  So while we could not conduct new interviews of individuals, we did 
utilize transcripts or summaries of interviews of those directly 
engaged in detention and interrogation operations. These interviews 
occurred at the time the program was operational and covered the exact 
topics we would have asked about had we conducted interviews ourselves.
  These interview reports and transcripts included but were not limited 
to the following: George Tenet, Director of the CIA when the Agency 
took custody and interrogated the majority of detainees; Jose 
Rodriguez, Director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, a key player 
in the program; CIA General Counsel Scott Mueller; CIA Deputy Director 
of Operations James Pavitt; CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo; CIA 
Deputy Director John McLaughlin; and a variety of interrogators, 
lawyers, medical personnel, senior counterterrorism analysts, and 
managers of the detention and interrogation program.
  The best place to start on how we got into this situation--and I am 
delighted that the previous Chairman Senator Rockefeller is on the 
floor--is a little more than 8 years ago, on September 6, 2006, when 
the committee met to be briefed by then-Director Michael Hayden.
  At that 2006 meeting the full committee learned for the first time--
the first time--of the use of so-called enhanced interrogation 
techniques or EITs.
  It was a short meeting, in part because President Bush was making a 
public speech later that day disclosing officially for the first time 
the existence of CIA black sites and announcing

[[Page S6407]]

the transfer of 14 detainees from CIA custody to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 
It was the first time the interrogation program was explained to the 
full committee, as details had previously been limited to the chairman 
and vice chairman.
  Then, on December 7, 2007, The New York Times reported that CIA 
personnel in 2005 had destroyed videotapes of the interrogation of two 
CIA detainees--the CIA's first detainee Abu Zubaydah, as well as Abd 
al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The committee had not been informed of the 
destruction of the tapes.
  Days later, on December 11, 2007, the committee held a hearing on the 
destruction of the videotapes. Director Hayden, the primary witness, 
testified the CIA had concluded the destruction of videotapes was 
acceptable, in part because Congress had not yet requested to see them. 
My source is our committee's transcript of the hearing on December 11, 
2007. Director Hayden stated that if the committee had asked for the 
videotapes, they would have been provided. But of course the committee 
had not known the videotapes existed.
  We now know from CIA emails and records that the videotapes were 
destroyed shortly after CIA attorneys raised concerns that Congress 
might find out about the tapes.
  In any case, at that same December 11 committee hearing, Director 
Hayden told the committee that CIA cables related to the interrogation 
sessions depicted in the videotapes were `` . . . a more than adequate 
representation of the tapes and therefore, if you want them, we will 
give you access to them.'' That is a quote from our transcript of the 
December 11, 2007, hearing.
  Senator Rockefeller, then-chairman of the committee, designated two 
members of the committee staff to review the cables describing the 
interrogation sessions of Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri. Senator Bond, 
then-vice chairman, similarly directed two of his staffers to review 
the cables. The designated staff members completed their review and 
compiled a summary of the content of the CIA cables by early 2009, by 
which time I had become chairman.
  The description in the cables of CIA's interrogations and the 
treatment of detainees presented a starkly different picture from 
Director Hayden's testimony before the committee. They described 
brutal, around-the-clock interrogations, especially of Abu Zubaydah, in 
which multiple coercive techniques were used in combination and with 
substantial repetition. It was an ugly, visceral description.
  The summary also indicated that Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri did not, 
as a result of the use of these so-called EITs, provide the kind of 
intelligence that led the CIA to stop terrorist plots or arrest 
additional suspects. As a result, I think it is fair to say the entire 
committee was concerned and it approved the scope of an investigation 
by a vote of 14 to 1, and the work began.
  In my March 11, 2014, floor speech about the study, I described how 
in 2009 the committee came to an agreement with the new CIA Director, 
Leon Panetta, for access to documents and other records about the CIA's 
detention and interrogation program. I will not repeat that here. From 
2009 to 2012, our staff conducted a massive and unprecedented review of 
CIA records. Draft sections of the report were produced by late 2011 
and shared with the full committee. The final report was completed in 
December 2012 and approved by the committee by a bipartisan vote of 9 
to 6.
  After that vote, I sent the full report to the President and asked 
the administration to provide comments on it before it was released. 
Six months later, in June of 2013, the CIA responded. I directed then 
that if the CIA pointed out any error in our report, we would fix it, 
and we did fix one bullet point that did not impact our findings and 
conclusions. If the CIA came to a different conclusion than the report 
did, we would note that in the report and explain our reasons for 
disagreeing, if we disagreed. You will see some of that documented in 
the footnotes of that executive summary as well as in the 6,000 pages.
  In April 2014, the committee prepared an updated version of the full 
study and voted 12 to 3 to declassify and release the executive 
summary, findings and conclusions and minority and additional views.
  On August 1, we received a declassified version from the executive 
branch. It was immediately apparent the redactions to our report 
prevented a clear and understandable reading of the study and prevented 
us from substantiating the findings and conclusions, so we obviously 
objected.
  For the past 4 months, the committee and the CIA, the Director of 
National Intelligence, and the White House have engaged in a lengthy 
negotiation over the redactions to the report. We have been able to 
include some more information in the report today without sacrificing 
sources and methods or our national security.
  I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record following my 
remarks a letter from the White House, dated yesterday, transmitting 
the unclassified parts of report, and it also points out that the 
executive summary is 93 percent complete and that the redactions amount 
to 7 percent.
  Mr. President, this has been a long process. The work began 7 years 
ago when Senator Rockefeller directed committee staff to review the CIA 
cables describing the interrogation sessions of Abu Zubaydah and al-
Nashiri. It has been very difficult, but I believe documentation and 
the findings and conclusions will make clear how this program was 
morally, legally, and administratively misguided and that this Nation 
should never again engage in these tactics.
  Let me now turn to the contents of the study. As I noted, we have 20 
findings and conclusions which fall into four general categories: 
First, the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques were not an 
effective way to gather intelligence information; second, the CIA 
provided extensive amounts of inaccurate information about the 
operation of the program and its effectiveness to the White House, the 
Department of Justice, Congress, the CIA inspector general, the media, 
and the American public; third, the CIA's management of the program was 
inadequate and deeply flawed; and fourth, the CIA program was far more 
brutal than people were led to believe.
  Let me describe each category in more detail. The first set of 
findings and conclusions concern the effectiveness or lack thereof of 
the CIA interrogation program. The committee found that the CIA's 
coercive interrogation techniques were not an effective means of 
acquiring accurate intelligence or gaining detainee cooperation.
  The CIA and other defenders of the program have repeatedly claimed 
the use of so-called interrogation techniques was necessary to get 
detainees to provide critical information and to bring detainees to a 
``state of compliance,'' in which they would cooperate and provide 
information. The study concludes both claims are inaccurate.
  The report is very specific in how it evaluates the CIA's claims on 
the effectiveness and necessity of its enhanced interrogation 
techniques. Specifically, we used the CIA's own definition of 
effectiveness as ratified and approved by the Department of Justice's 
Office of Legal Counsel. The CIA claimed that the EITs were necessary 
to obtain ``otherwise unavailable'' information that could not be 
obtained from any other source to stop terrorist attacks and save 
American lives, that is a claim we conclude is inaccurate.
  We took 20 examples that the CIA itself claimed to show the success 
of these interrogations. These include cases of terrorist plots stopped 
or terrorists captured. The CIA used these examples in presentations to 
the White House, in testimony to Congress, in submissions to the 
Department of Justice, and ultimately to the American people.
  Some of the claims are well known: the capture of Khalid Shaikh 
Mohammed, the prevention of attacks against the Library Tower in Los 
Angeles, and the takedown of Osama bin Laden. Other claims were made 
only in classified settings to the White House, Congress, and 
Department of Justice.
  In each case, the CIA claimed that critical and unique information 
came from one or more detainees in its custody after they were 
subjected to the CIA's coercive techniques, and that information led to 
a specific counterterrorism success. Our staff reviewed every one of 
the 20 cases and not a single case holds up.
  In every single one of these cases, at least one of the following was 
true: One, the intelligence community had

[[Page S6408]]

information separate from the use of EITs that led to the terrorist 
disruption or capture; two, information from a detainee subjected to 
EITs played no role in the claimed disruption or capture; and three, 
the purported terrorist plot either did not exist or posed no real 
threat to Americans or U.S. interests.
  Some critics have suggested the study concludes that no intelligence 
was ever provided from any detainee the CIA held. That is false and the 
study makes no such claim. What is true is that actionable intelligence 
that was ``otherwise unavailable'' was not obtained using these 
coercive interrogation techniques.
  The report also chronicles where the use of interrogation techniques 
that do not involve physical force were effective. Specifically, the 
report provides examples where interrogators had sufficient information 
to confront detainees with facts, know when they were lying and when 
they applied rapport-building techniques that were developed and honed 
by the U.S. military, the FBI, and more recently the interagency High-
Value Detainee Interrogation Group, called the HIG, that these 
techniques produced good intelligence.
  Let me make a couple of additional comments on the claimed 
effectiveness of CIA interrogations. At no time did the CIA's coercive 
interrogation techniques lead to the collection of intelligence on an 
imminent threat that many believe was the justification for the use of 
these techniques. The committee never found an example of this 
hypothetical ticking timebomb scenario.

  The use of coercive technique methods regularly resulted in 
fabricated information. Sometimes the CIA actually knew detainees were 
lying. Other times the CIA acted on false information, diverting 
resources and leading officers or contractors to falsely believe they 
were acquiring unique or actionable intelligence and that its 
interrogations were working when they were not.
  Internally, CIA officers often called into question the effectiveness 
of the CIA's interrogation techniques, noting how the techniques failed 
to elicit detainee cooperation or produce accurate information.
  The report includes numerous examples of CIA officers questioning the 
agency's claims, but these contradictions were marginalized and not 
presented externally.
  The second set of findings and conclusions is that the CIA provided 
extensive inaccurate information about the program and its 
effectiveness to the White House, the Department of Justice, Congress, 
the CIA inspector general, the media, and the American public.
  This conclusion is somewhat personal for me. I remember clearly when 
Director Hayden briefed the Intelligence Committee for the first time 
on the so-called EITs at that September 2006 committee meeting. He 
referred specifically to a ``tummy slap,'' among other techniques, and 
presented the entire set of techniques as minimally harmful and applied 
in a highly clinical and professional manner. They were not.
  The committee's report demonstrates that these techniques were 
physically very harmful, and that the constraints that existed on paper 
in Washington did not match the way techniques were used at CIA sites 
around the world.
  Of particular note was the treatment of Abu Zubaydah over a span of 
17 days in August 2002. This involved nonstop interrogation and abuse, 
24/7, from August 4 to August 21, and included multiple forms of 
deprivation and physical assault. The description of this period, first 
written up by our staff in early 2009 while Senator Rockefeller was 
chairman, was what prompted this full review.
  But the inaccurate and incomplete descriptions go far beyond that. 
The CIA provided inaccurate memoranda and explanations to the 
Department of Justice while its Office of Legal Counsel was considering 
the legality of the coercive techniques.
  In those communications to the Department of Justice, the CIA claimed 
the following: The coercive techniques would not be used with excessive 
repetition; detainees would always have an opportunity to provide 
information prior to the use of the techniques; the techniques were to 
be used in progression, starting with the least aggressive and 
proceeding only if needed; medical personnel would make sure that 
interrogations wouldn't cause serious harm, and they could intervene at 
any time to stop interrogations; interrogators were carefully vetted 
and highly trained, and each technique was to be used in a specific way 
without deviation, and only with specific approval for the interrogator 
and detainee involved.
  None of these assurances, which the Department of Justice relied on 
to form its legal opinions, were consistently or even routinely carried 
out.
  In many cases, important information was withheld from policymakers. 
For example, foreign intelligence committee chairman Bob Graham asked a 
number of questions after he was first briefed in September of 2002, 
but the CIA refused to answer him, effectively stonewalling him until 
he left the committee at the end of the year.
  In another example, the CIA, in coordination with White House 
officials and staff, initially withheld information of the CIA's 
interrogation techniques from Secretary of State Colin Powell and 
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There are CIA records stating 
that Colin Powell wasn't told about the program at first because there 
were concerns that ``Powell would blow his stack if he were briefed.'' 
Source: Email from John Rizzo dated July 31, 2003.
  CIA records clearly indicate, and definitively, that after he was 
briefed on the CIA's first detainee, Abu Zubaydah, the CIA didn't tell 
President Bush about the full nature of the EITs until April 2006. That 
is what the records indicate.
  The CIA similarly withheld information or provided false information 
to the CIA inspector general during his conduct of a special review by 
the IG in 2004.
  Incomplete and inaccurate information from the CIA was used in 
documents provided to the Department of Justice and as a basis for 
President Bush's speech on September 6, 2006, in which he publicly 
acknowledged the CIA program for the first time.
  In all of these cases, other CIA officers acknowledged internally 
that information the CIA had provided was wrong.
  The CIA also misled other CIA and White House officials. When Vice 
President Cheney's counsel David Addington asked CIA General Counsel 
Scott Muller in 2003 about the CIA's videotaping the waterboarding of 
detainees, Muller deliberately told him that videotapes ``were not 
being made,'' but did not disclose that videotapes of previous 
waterboarding sessions had been made and still existed. Source: E-mail 
from Scott Muller dated June 7, 2003.
  There are many more examples in the committee's report. All are 
documented.
  The third set of findings and conclusions notes the various ways in 
which CIA management of the Detention and Interrogation Program--from 
its inception to its formal termination in January of 2009--was 
inadequate and deeply flawed.
  There is no doubt that the Detention and Interrogation Program was, 
by any measure, a major CIA undertaking. It raised significant legal 
and policy issues and involved significant resources and funding. It 
was not, however, managed as a significant CIA program. Instead, it had 
limited oversight and lacked formal direction and management.
  For example, in the 6 months between being granted detention 
authority and taking custody of its first detainee, Abu Zubaydah, the 
CIA had not identified and prepared a suitable detention site. It had 
not researched effective interrogation techniques or developed a legal 
basis for the use of interrogation techniques outside of the rapport-
building techniques that were official CIA policy until that time.
  In fact, there is no indication the CIA reviewed its own history--
that is just what Helgerson was saying in 2005--with coercive 
interrogation tactics. As the executive summary notes, the CIA had 
engaged in rough interrogations in the past.
  In fact, the CIA had previously sent a letter to the Intelligence 
Committee in 1989--and here is the quote--that ``inhumane physical or 
psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not 
produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.''

[[Page S6409]]

That was a letter from John Helgerson, CIA Director of Congressional 
Affairs, dated January 8, 1989.
  However, in late 2001 and early 2002, rather than research 
interrogation practices and coordinate with other parts of the 
government with extensive expertise in detention and interrogation of 
terrorist suspects, the CIA engaged two contract psychologists who had 
never conducted interrogations themselves or ever operated detention 
facilities.
  As the CIA captured or received custody of detainees through 2002, it 
maintained separate lines of management at headquarters for different 
detention facilities.
  No individual or office was in charge of the Detention and 
Interrogation Program until January of 2003, by which point more than 
one-third of CIA detainees identified in our review had been detained 
and interrogated.
  One clear example of flawed CIA management was the poorly managed 
detention facility referred to in our report by the code name COBALT to 
hide the actual name of the facility. It began operations in September 
of 2002. The facility kept few formal records of the detainees housed 
there, and untrained CIA officers conducted frequent unauthorized and 
unsupervised interrogations using techniques that were not, and never 
became, part of the CIA's formal enhanced interrogation program.
  The CIA placed a junior officer with no relevant experience in charge 
of the site. In November 2002, an otherwise healthy detainee--who was 
being held mostly nude and chained to a concrete floor--died at the 
facility from what is believed to have been hypothermia.
  In interviews conducted in 2003 by the CIA Office of the Inspector 
General, CIA's leadership acknowledged that they had little or no 
awareness of operations at this specific CIA detention site, and some 
CIA senior officials believed, erroneously, that enhanced interrogation 
techniques were not used there.
  The CIA, in its June 2013 response to the committee's report, agreed 
that there were management failures in the program, but asserted that 
they were corrected by early 2003. While the study found that 
management failures improved somewhat, we found they persisted until 
the end of the program.
  Among the numerous management shortcomings identified in the report 
are the following: The CIA used poorly trained and nonvetted personnel.
  Individuals were deployed--in particular, interrogators--without 
relevant training or experience. Due to the CIA's redactions to the 
report, there are limits to what I can say in this regard, but it is a 
clear fact that the CIA deployed officers who had histories of 
personnel, ethical, and professional problems of a serious nature. 
These included histories of violence and abusive treatment of others 
that should have called into question their employment with the U.S. 
Government, let alone their suitability to participate in a sensitive 
CIA covert action program.
  The two contractors that CIA allowed to develop, operate, and assess 
its interrogation operations conducted numerous ``inherently 
governmental functions'' that never should have been outsourced to 
contractors. These contractors, referred to in the report in special 
pseudonyms, SWIGERT and DUNBAR, developed the list of so-called 
enhanced interrogation techniques that the CIA employed.
  They developed a list of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques 
that the CIA employed. They personally conducted interrogations of some 
of the CIA's most significant detainees, using the techniques including 
the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and al-
Nashiri.
  The contractors provided the official evaluations of whether 
detainees' psychological states allowed for the continued use of the 
enhanced techniques, even for some detainees they themselves were 
interrogating or had interrogated. Evaluating the psychological state 
of the very detainees they were interrogating is a clear conflict of 
interest and a violation of professional guidelines.
  The CIA relied on these two contractors to evaluate the interrogation 
program they had devised and in which they had obvious financial 
interests. Again, it is a clear conflict of interest and an avoidance 
of responsibility by the CIA.
  In 2005, the two contractors formed a company specifically for the 
purpose of expanding their work with the CIA. From 2005 to 2008, the 
CIA outsourced almost all aspects of its detention and interrogation 
program to this company as part of a contract valued at more than $180 
million. Ultimately, not all contract options were exercised. However, 
the CIA has paid these two contractors and their company more than $80 
million.
  Of the 119 individuals found to have been detained by the CIA during 
the life of the program, the committee found that at least 26 were 
wrongfully held. These are cases where the CIA itself determined that 
it had not met the standard for detention set out in the 2001 
Memorandum of Notification which governed the covert action. Detainees 
often remained in custody for months after the CIA determined they 
should have been released. CIA records provide insufficient information 
to justify the detention of many other detainees.
  Due to poor recordkeeping, a full accounting of how many specific 
detainees were held and how they were specifically treated while in 
custody may never be known. Similarly, in specific instances we found 
that enhanced interrogation techniques were used without authorization 
in a manner far different and more brutal than had been authorized by 
the Office of Legal Counsel and conducted by personnel not approved to 
use them on detainees.
  Decisions about how and when to apply interrogation techniques were 
ad hoc and not proposed, evaluated, and approved in a manner described 
by the CIA in written descriptions and testimony about the program. 
Detainees were often subjected to harsh and brutal interrogation and 
treatment because CIA analysts believed, often in error, that they knew 
more information than what they had provided.
  Sometimes CIA managers and interrogators in the field were 
uncomfortable with what they were being asked to do and recommended 
ending the abuse of a detainee. Repeatedly in such cases they were 
overruled by people at CIA headquarters who thought they knew better, 
such as by analysts with no line authority. This shows again how a 
relatively small number of CIA personnel--perhaps 40 to 50--were making 
decisions on detention and interrogation despite the better judgments 
of other CIA officers.
  The fourth and final set of findings and conclusions concerns how the 
interrogations of CIA detainees were absolutely brutal, far worse than 
the CIA represented them to policymakers and others.
  Beginning with the first detainee, Abu Zubaydah, and continuing with 
others, the CIA applied its so-called enhanced interrogation techniques 
in combination and in near nonstop fashion for days and even weeks at a 
time on one detainee. In contrast to the CIA representations, the 
detainees were subjected to the most aggressive techniques 
immediately--stripped naked, diapered, physically struck, and put in 
various painful stress positions for long periods of time. They were 
deprived of sleep for days--in one case up to 180 hours; that is 7\1/2\ 
days, over a week, with no sleep--usually in standing or in stress 
positions, at times with their hands tied together over their heads, 
chained to the ceiling.
  In the COBALT facility I previously mentioned, interrogators and 
guards used what they called rough takedowns in which a detainee was 
grabbed from his cell, clothes cut off, hooded, and dragged up and down 
a dirt hallway while being slapped and punched.
  The CIA led several detainees to believe they would never be allowed 
to leave CIA custody alive, suggesting to Abu Zubaydah that he would 
only leave in a coffin-shaped box. That is from a CIA cable on August 
12, 2002.
  According to another CIA cable, CIA officers also planned to cremate 
Zubaydah should he not survive his interrogation. Source: CIA cable, 
July 15, 2002.
  After the news and photographs emerged from the U.S. military 
detention of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, the Intelligence Committee held a 
hearing on the matter on May 12, 2004. Without disclosing any details 
of its own interrogation program, CIA Director John

[[Page S6410]]

McLaughlin testified that CIA interrogations were nothing like what was 
depicted at Abu Ghraib, the U.S. prison in Iraq where detainees were 
abused by American personnel. This, of course, was false.
  CIA detainees at one facility, described as a dungeon, were kept in 
complete darkness, constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud 
noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste.
  The U.S. Bureau of Prisons personnel went to that location in 
November 2002 and, according to a contemporaneous internal CIA email, 
told CIA officers they had never ``been in a facility where individuals 
are so sensory deprived.'' Source: CIA email, sender and recipient 
redacted, December 5, 2002.

  Throughout the program, multiple CIA detainees subjected to 
interrogations exhibited psychological and behavioral issues including 
hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia, and attempts at self-harm and self-
mutilation. Multiple CIA psychologists identified the lack of human 
contact experienced by the detainees as a cause of psychiatric 
problems.
  The executive summary includes far more detail than I am going to 
provide here about things that were in these interrogation sessions, 
and the summary itself includes only a subset of the treatment of the 
119 known CIA detainees. There is far more detail--all documented--in 
the full 6,700-page study. This briefly summarizes the committee's 
findings and conclusions.
  Before I wrap up, I wish to thank the people who made this 
undertaking possible. First, I thank Senator Jay Rockefeller. He 
started this project by directing his staff to review the operational 
cables that described the first recorded interrogations after we 
learned that the videotapes of those sessions had been destroyed. That 
report was what led to this multiyear investigation, and without it we 
wouldn't have had any sense of what happened.
  I thank other Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of 
whom is on the floor today, from the great State of New Mexico. Others 
have been on the floor who voted to conduct this investigation and to 
approve its result and make the report public.
  Most importantly, I want to thank the Intelligence Committee staff 
who performed this work. They are dedicated and committed public 
officials who sacrificed a significant portion of their lives to see 
this report through to its publication. They have worked days, nights, 
and weekends for years in some of the most difficult circumstances. It 
is no secret to anyone that the CIA does not want this report coming 
out, and I believe the Nation owes them a debt of gratitude. They are 
Dan Jones, who has led this review since 2007, and more than anyone 
else, today's report is a result of his effort. Evan Gottesman and Chad 
Tanner, the two other members of the study staff, each wrote thousands 
of pages of the full report and have dedicated themselves and much of 
their lives to this project. Alissa Starzak, who began this review as 
co-lead, contributed extensively until her departure from the committee 
in 2011.
  Other key contributors to the drafting, editing, and review of the 
report were Jennifer Barrett, Nick Basciano, Mike Buchwald, Jim 
Catella, Eric Chapman, John Dickas, Lorenzo Goco, Andrew Grotto, Tressa 
Guenov, Clete Johnson, Michael Noblet, Michael Pevzner, Tommy Ross, 
Caroline Tess, and James Wolfe; and finally, David Grannis, who has 
been a never-faltering staff director throughout this review.
  This study is bigger than the actions of the CIA. It is really about 
American values and morals. It is about the Constitution, the Bill of 
Rights, our rule of law. These values exist regardless of the 
circumstances in which we find ourselves. They exist in peacetime and 
in wartime, and if we cast aside these values when convenient, we have 
failed to live by the very precepts that make our Nation a great one.
  There is a reason why we carry the banner of a great and just nation. 
So we submit this study on behalf of the committee to the public in the 
belief that it will stand the test of time, and with it the report will 
carry the message: ``Never again.''
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                                              The White House,

                                     Washington, December 8, 2014.
     Hon. Dianne Feinstein,
     Chairman, Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. Senate, 
         Washington, DC.
       Dear Chairman Feinstein: I write in response to your 
     letters to the President transmitting versions of the 
     executive summary, findings, and conclusions of the Senate 
     Select Committee on Intelligence's report regarding the 
     Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) former detention and 
     interrogation program.
       The President believes that the Agency's former detention 
     and interrogation program was inconsistent with our values as 
     a Nation. To reflect our values, one of his first acts in 
     office was to sign an Executive Order that brought an end to 
     the program.
       Since the Committee first delivered a version of its 
     executive summary, findings, and conclusions of the report 
     (report) in April, the Administration has worked in good 
     faith with the Committee on the declassification effort. On 
     August 1, the Administration provided a version of the 
     report, as well as minority and additional views that would 
     declassify 85 percent of the text. Since then, at the request 
     of the Committee, the Administration has continually sought 
     to reduce further the redactions in the report in a manner 
     that also protects U.S. national security. We have 
     appreciated the constructive dialogue with the Committee over 
     the last few months, which allowed us to work through more 
     than 400 of the Committee's requests for declassification.
       Today, we are delivering to the Committee a version of the 
     Committee report, as well as minority and additional views, 
     that are over 93 percent declassified. The minimal redactions 
     are the result of a considerable effort by the Director of 
     National Intelligence, working with the CIA, Department of 
     Defense, Department of State, and other agencies, to review 
     and declassify hundreds of pages of information related to 
     the historical CIA program.
       As we have shared with you in prior letters and 
     conversations, the President supports making public the 
     declassified version of the Committee's important report as 
     he believes that public scrutiny and debate will help to 
     inform the public's understanding of the program and to 
     ensure that such a program will never be repeated. As we have 
     also shared with you, in advance of release of the Committee 
     report, the Administration has planned to take a series of 
     security steps to prepare our personnel and facilities 
     overseas. We have already initiated those security 
     precautions and will continue to implement them consistent 
     with prior conversations about the timing of the Committee's 
     expected release of its report.
       The Committee report reflects a significant five year 
     effort, and we commend the Committee and its staff on its 
     completion. The report also reflects extraordinary 
     cooperation by the Executive Branch to ensure access to the 
     information necessary to review the CIA's former program, 
     including more than six million pages of records. We must 
     now, however, begin to look forward to the future. The men 
     and women in the Intelligence Community are fundamental to 
     America's national security. They perform an important 
     service to our country in very trying circumstances. They 
     make extraordinary sacrifices to keep the American people 
     safe, often without any expectation of credit or 
     acknowledgment. As they carry on the nation's critical work, 
     they have the President's support and appreciation, as I know 
     they have yours.
           Sincerely,
                                                W. Neil Eggleston,
                                         Counsel to the President.

  I very much appreciate your attention, and I yield to Senator McCain.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Heitkamp). The Senator from Arizona.
  Mr. McCAIN. Madam President, I wish to begin by expressing my 
appreciation and admiration to the personnel who serve in our 
intelligence agencies, including the CIA, who are out there every day 
defending our Nation.
  I have read the executive summary and I also have been briefed on the 
entirety of this report. I rise in support of the release--the long-
delayed release--of the Senate Intelligence Committee's summarized 
unclassified review of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques 
that were employed by the previous administration to extract 
information from captured terrorists. It is a thorough and thoughtful 
study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose to 
secure actionable intelligence to prevent further attacks on the United 
States and our allies, but actually damaged our security interests as 
well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.
  I believe the American people have a right--indeed a responsibility--
to know what was done in their name, how these practices did or did not 
serve our interests, and how they comported with our most important 
values.
  I commend Chairwoman Feinstein and her staff for their diligence in 
seeking a truthful accounting of policies I hope we will never resort 
to

[[Page S6411]]

again. I thank them for persevering against persistent opposition from 
many members of the intelligence community, from officials in two 
administrations, and from some of our colleagues.
  The truth is sometimes a hard pill to swallow. It sometimes causes us 
difficulties at home and abroad. It is sometimes used by our enemies in 
attempts to hurt us. But the American people are entitled to it 
nonetheless. They must know when the values that define our Nation are 
intentionally disregarded by our security policies, even those policies 
that are conducted in secret. They must be able to make informed 
judgments about whether those policies and the personnel who supported 
them were justified in compromising our values, whether they served a 
greater good, or whether, as I believe, they stained our national 
honor, did much harm, and little practical good.
  What were the policies? What was their purpose? Did they achieve it? 
Did they make us safer, less safe, or did they make no difference? What 
did they gain us? What did they cost us? What did they gain us? What 
did they cost us? The American people need the answers to these 
questions. Yes, some things must be kept from public disclosure to 
protect clandestine operations, sources, and methods, but not the 
answers to these questions. By providing them, the committee has 
empowered the American people to come to their own decisions about 
whether we should have employed such practices in the past and whether 
we should consider permitting them in the future.

  This report strengthens self-government and ultimately, I believe, 
American security and stature in the world. I thank the committee for 
that valuable public service.
  I have long believed some of these practices amounted to torture as a 
reasonable person would define it, especially but not only the practice 
of waterboarding, which is a mock execution and an exquisite form of 
torture. Its use was shameful and unnecessary, and, contrary to 
assertions made by some of its defenders and as the committee's report 
makes clear, it produced little useful intelligence to help us track 
down the perpetrators of 9/11 or prevent new attacks and atrocities.
  I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will 
produce more bad than good intelligence. I know victims of torture will 
offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors 
will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their 
torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their 
suffering. Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that 
which most distinguishes us from our enemies--our belief that all 
people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights which are 
protected by international conventions the United States not only 
joined but for the most part authored.
  I know too that bad things happen in war. I know that in war good 
people can feel obliged for good reasons to do things they would 
normally object to and recoil from. I understand the reasons that 
governed the decision to resort to these interrogation methods, and I 
know that those who approved them and those who used them were 
dedicated to securing justice for victims of terrorist attacks and to 
protecting Americans from further harm. I know their responsibilities 
were grave and urgent and the strain of their duty was onerous. I 
respect their dedication, and I appreciate their dilemma. But I dispute 
wholeheartedly that it was right for them to use these methods which 
this report makes clear were neither in the best interests of justice, 
nor our security, nor the ideals we have sacrificed so much blood and 
treasure to defend.
  The knowledge of torture's dubious efficacy and my moral objection to 
the abuse of prisoners motivated my sponsorship of the Detainee 
Treatment Act of 2005, which prohibits ``cruel, inhuman or degrading 
treatment'' of captured combatants, whether they wear a nation's 
uniform or not, and which passed the Senate by a vote of 90 to 9.
  Subsequently, I successfully offered amendments to the Military 
Commissions Act of 2006, which, among other things, prevented the 
attempt to weaken Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and 
broadened definitions in the War Crimes Act to make the future use of 
waterboarding and other ``enhanced interrogation techniques'' 
punishable as war crimes.
  There was considerable misinformation disseminated then about what 
was and wasn't achieved using these methods in an effort to discourage 
support for the legislation. There was a good amount of misinformation 
used in 2011 to credit the use of these methods with the death of Osama 
bin Laden. And there is, I fear, misinformation being used today to 
prevent the release of this report, disputing its findings and warning 
about the security consequences of their public disclosure.
  Will the report's release cause outrage that leads to violence in 
some parts of the Muslim world? Yes, I suppose that is possible and 
perhaps likely. Sadly, violence needs little incentive in some quarters 
of the world today. But that doesn't mean we will be telling the world 
something it will be shocked to learn. The entire world already knows 
we waterboarded prisoners. It knows we subjected prisoners to various 
other types of degrading treatment. It knows we used black sites, 
secret prisons. Those practices haven't been a secret for a decade. 
Terrorists might use the report's reidentification of the practices as 
an excuse to attack Americans, but they hardly need an excuse for that. 
That has been their life's calling for a while now.
  What might come as a surprise not just to our enemies but to many 
Americans is how little these practices did aid our efforts to bring 9/
11 culprits to justice and to find and prevent terrorist attacks today 
and tomorrow. That could be a real surprise since it contradicts the 
many assurances provided by intelligence officials on the record and in 
private that enhanced interrogation techniques were indispensable in 
the war against terrorism. And I suspect the objection of those same 
officials to the release of this report is really focused on that 
disclosure--torture's ineffectiveness--because we gave up much in the 
expectation that torture would make us safer--too much.
  Obviously, we need intelligence to defeat our enemies, but we need 
reliable intelligence. Torture produces more misleading information 
than actionable intelligence. And what the advocates of harsh and cruel 
interrogation methods have never established is that we couldn't have 
gathered as good or more reliable intelligence from using humane 
methods.
  The most important lead we got in the search for bin Laden came from 
using conventional interrogation methods. I think it is an insult to 
the many intelligence officers who have acquired good intelligence 
without hurting or degrading prisoners to assert that we can't win 
these wars without such methods. Yes, we can, and we will.
  But in the end torture's failure to serve its intended purpose isn't 
the main reason to oppose its use. I have often said and I will always 
maintain that this question isn't about our enemies; it is about us. It 
is about who we were, who we are, and who we aspire to be. It is about 
how we represent ourselves to the world.
  We have made our way in this often dangerous and cruel world not by 
just strictly pursuing our geopolitical interests but by exemplifying 
our political values and influencing other nations to embrace them. 
When we fight to defend our security, we fight also for an idea--not 
for a tribe or a twisted interpretation of an ancient religion or for a 
King but for an idea that all men are endowed by the Creator with 
inalienable rights. How much safer the world would be if all nations 
believed the same. How much more dangerous it can become when we forget 
it ourselves, even momentarily.
  Our enemies act without conscience. We must not. 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 are fighting. We should be grateful to have 
that truth affirmed.
  Now, let us reassert the contrary proposition: that is it essential 
to our success in this war that we ask those who fight it for us to 
remember at all times that they are defending a sacred ideal of how 
nations should be governed and conduct their relations with others--
even our enemies.
  Those of us who give them this duty are obliged by history, by our 
Nation's highest ideals and the many terrible sacrifices made to 
protect them, by our respect for human dignity, to make

[[Page S6412]]

clear we need not risk our national honor to prevail in this or any 
war. We need only remember in the worst of times, through the chaos and 
terror of war, when facing cruelty, suffering, and loss, that we are 
always Americans and different, stronger, and better than those who 
would destroy us.
  Madam President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia.
  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in 
a seated position.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Madam President, I come to the floor to wholly 
support the comments of my colleagues, the Senator from California and 
the Senator from Arizona, to speak about a matter of great importance 
to me personally but more importantly to the country.
  The Senate Intelligence Committee's entire study of the CIA's 
detention and interrogation program--I will just call it the program--
is the most in-depth, the most substantive oversight initiative the 
committee has ever taken. I doubt any committee has done more than 
this. It presents extremely valuable insights into crucial oversight 
questions and problems that need to be addressed by the CIA.
  Moreover, this study exemplifies why this committee was created in 
the first place following the findings of the Church Committee nearly 
40 years ago, and I commend my friend and the committee's leader, the 
Senator from California, for shepherding this landmark initiative to 
this point. For years, often behind closed doors, without any 
recognition, she has been a strong and tireless advocate, and she 
deserves our thanks and recognition.
  It is my hope and expectation that beyond the initial release of the 
executive summary and findings and conclusions, that the entire 6,800 
pages, with 37,500 footnotes, will eventually be made public--and I am 
sure it will--with the appropriate redactions. Those public findings 
will be critical to fully learning the necessary lessons from this dark 
episode in our Nation's history and to ensure that it never happens 
again. It has been a very long, very hard fight to get to this point. 
Especially in the early years of the CIA's detention program, it was a 
struggle for the committee to get the most basic information or any 
information at all about the program.
  The committee's study of the detention and interrogation program is 
not just the story of the brutal and ill-conceived program itself; this 
study is also the story of the breakdown in our system of governance 
that allowed the country to deviate in such a significant and horrific 
way from our core principles. One of the profound ways that breakdown 
happened was through the active subversion of meaningful congressional 
oversight--a theme mirrored in the Bush administration's warrantless 
wiretapping program during that same period.
  I first learned about some aspects of the CIA's detention and 
interrogation program in 2003 when I became vice chair of the 
committee. At that point and for years after, the CIA refused to 
provide me or anybody else with any additional information about the 
program. They further refused to notify the full committee about the 
program's existence. My colleagues will remember there was always the 
Gang of 4, the Gang of 6, or the Gang of 8. They would take the 
chairman and vice chairman, take them to the White House, give them a 
flip chart, 45 minutes for the Vice President, and off he would go. 
Senator Roberts and I went down by car and were instructed we couldn't 
talk to each other on the way back from one of those meetings. It was 
absurd. They refused to do anything to be of assistance.
  The briefings I received provided little or no insight into the CIA's 
program. Questions or followup requests were rejected, and at times I 
was not allowed to consult with my counsel. I am not a lawyer. There 
are legal matters involved here. They said we couldn't talk to any of 
our staff, legal counsel or not, or other members of the committee who 
knew nothing about this because they had not been informed at all.
  It was clear these briefings were not meant to answer any questions 
but were intended only to provide cover for the administration and the 
CIA. It was infuriating to me to realize I was part of a box checking 
exercise that the administration planned to use, and later did use, so 
they could disingenuously claim they had--in a phrase I will never be 
able to forget--``fully briefed Congress.''

  In the years that followed I fought and lost many battles to obtain 
credible information about the detention and interrogation program. As 
vice chair I tried to launch, as has been mentioned, a comprehensive 
investigation into the program, but that effort was blocked.
  Later in 2005, when I fought for access to over 100 specific 
documents cited in the inspector general report, the CIA refused to 
cooperate.
  The first time the full Senate Intelligence Committee was given any 
information about this detention program was September 2006. This was 
years after the program's inception and the same day the President 
informed the Nation.
  The following year when I became chairman, the vice chairman, Kit 
Bond, and I agreed to push for significant additional access to the 
program. For heaven's sake, at least allow both the Senate Intelligence 
Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, on a full basis, to be 
informed about this and also to include our staff's counsel on these 
matters. We finally actually prevailed and got this access. I think I 
withheld something from them until they agreed to do that which enabled 
us to have much-needed hearings on the program, which we proceeded to 
do.
  As chairman, I made sure we scrutinized it from every angle. However, 
the challenge of getting accurate information from the CIA persisted. 
It was during this period that the House and Senate considered the 2008 
Intelligence Authorization Act and a potential provision that set the 
Army Field Manual--which is the only way to go--as the standard for the 
entire American Government, including the CIA. This would have 
effectively ended the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques, a term 
eerily sanitized in bureaucratic jargon for what, in a number of cases, 
amounted to torture.
  As chairman, I knew the inclusion of the Army Field Manual provision 
would jeopardize the entire bill. I thought it might bring it down. 
People would think it was too soft or too radical or whatever, but I 
was committed to seeing the bill signed into law. In the end, it was an 
easy decision.
  I supported including the provision to end the CIA's program because 
it was the right thing to do. I did it because Congress needed to send 
a clear signal that it did not stand by the Bush administration's 
policy.
  The House and Senate went on to pass the bill with bipartisan votes. 
Although the Bush administration vetoed the bill to preserve its 
ability to continue these practices, it was an important symbolic 
moment.
  In the same period, I also sent two committee staffers, as our 
chairwoman has indicated, to begin reviewing cables at the CIA 
regarding the agency's interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri. I 
firmly believed we had to review those cables, which are now the only 
source of important historical information on this subject, because the 
CIA destroyed its tapes of some of their interrogation sessions. The 
CIA destroyed those tapes against the explicit direction from the White 
House and the Director of National Intelligence.
  The investigation that began in 2007 grew under Chairman Feinstein's 
dedication and tremendous leadership into a full study of the CIA's 
detention and interrogation program. The more the committee dug, the 
more the committee found, and the results we uncovered are both 
shocking and deeply troubling.
  First, the detention and interrogation program was conceived by 
people who were ignorant of the topic and made it up on the fly based 
on the untested theories of contractors who had never met a terrorist 
or conducted a real-world interrogation of any kind.
  Second, it was executed by personnel with insufficient linguistic and 
interrogation training and little, if any, real-world experience.
  Moreover, the CIA was aware that some of these personnel had a 
staggering array of personal and professional failings--enumerated by 
the committee's chairman--including potentially criminal activity, that 
should

[[Page S6413]]

have disqualified them immediately not only from being interrogators 
but from being employed by the CIA or anybody in government.
  Nevertheless, it was consistently represented that these 
interrogators were professionalized and carefully vetted--their term--
and that became a part of the hollow legal justification of the entire 
program.
  Third, the program was managed incompetently by senior officials who 
paid little or no attention to critical details. It was rife with 
troubling personal and financial conflicts of interest among the small 
group of the CIA officials and contractors who promoted and defended 
it. Obviously it was in their interest to do so.

  Fourth, as the chairman indicated, the program was physically very 
severe, far more so than any of us outside the CIA ever knew. Although 
waterboarding has received the most attention, there were other 
techniques I personally believe--one in particular--that may have been 
much worse.
  Finally, its results were unclear at best, but it was presented to 
the White House, the Department of Justice, the Congress, and the media 
as a silver bullet that was indispensable to saving lives. That was 
their mantra. In fact, it did not provide the intelligence it was 
supposed to provide or the CIA argued that it did provide.
  To be perfectly clear, these harsh techniques were not approved by 
anyone ever for the low-bar standard of learning useful information 
from detainees. These techniques were approved because the Bush 
officials were told, and therefore believed, that these coercive 
interrogations were absolutely necessary to elicit intelligence that 
was unavailable by any other collection method and would save American 
lives. That was simply not the case.
  For me, personally, the arc of this story comprises more than a 
decade of my 30 years of work in the Senate and one of the hardest 
fights--I think the hardest fight--I have ever been through. Many of 
the worst years were during the Bush administration.
  However, I did not fully anticipate how hard these last few years 
would be in this administration to get this summary declassified and to 
tell the full story of what happened. Indeed, to my great frustration, 
even after months of endless negotiations, significant aspects of the 
story remain obscured by black ink.
  I have great admiration for the President, and I am appreciative of 
the leadership role he has taken to depart from the practices of the 
Bush administration on these issues. His Executive order formally ended 
the CIA's detention program practices, and that is a good example. It 
is a great example.
  It was, therefore, with deep disappointment that over the course of a 
number of private meetings and conversations I came to feel that the 
White House's strong deference to the CIA throughout this process has 
at times worked at cross-purposes with the White House's stated 
interest in transparency and has muddied what should be a clear and 
unequivocal legacy on this issue.
  While aspiring to be the most transparent administration in history, 
this White House continues to quietly withhold from the committee more 
than 9,000 documents related to the CIA's programs. I don't know why. 
They won't say, and they won't produce.
  In addition to strongly supporting the CIA's insistence on the 
unprecedented redaction of fake names in the report, which obscures the 
public's ability to understand the important connections which are so 
important for weaving together the tapestry, the administration also 
pushed for the redaction of information in the committee's study that 
should not be classified, contradicting the administration's own 
Executive order on classification.
  Let me be clear.
  That order clearly states that in no case shall information fail to 
be declassified in order to conceal violations of law and efficiency or 
administrative error or prevent embarrassment to a person, 
organization, or agency.
  In some instances, the White House asked not only that information be 
redacted but that the redaction itself be removed so it would be 
impossible for the reader to tell that something was already hidden. 
Strange.
  Given this, looking back, I am deeply disappointed, rather than 
surprised, that even when the CIA inexplicably conducted an 
unauthorized search of the committee's computer files and emails at an 
offsite facility, which was potentially criminal, and even when it 
became clear that the intent of the search was to suppress the 
committee's awareness of an internal CIA review that corroborated parts 
of the intelligence committee's study and contradicted public CIA 
statements, the White House continued to support the CIA leadership, 
and that support was unflinching.
  Despite these frustrations, I have also seen how hard Chairman 
Feinstein has fought against great odds, stubborn odds, protective 
odds, mysterious odds, which are not really clear to me. I have tried 
to support her thoughtful and determined efforts at every opportunity 
to make sure as much as of the story can be told as possible, and I am 
deeply proud of the product the committee ended up with.
  Now it is time to move forward. For all of the misinformation, 
incompetence, and brutality of the CIA's program, the committee's study 
is not and must not be simply a backward-looking condemnation of the 
past. The study presents a tremendous opportunity to develop forward-
looking lessons that must be central to all future activities.
  The point has been made--I thoroughly agree--that the vast majority 
of people who work at the CIA--and there are tens and tens of thousands 
of them--do very good work and are working very hard and have 
absolutely nothing to do with any of this. But if this report had not 
been released, the country would have felt that everybody at the CIA--
and the world would have felt it--was involved in this program. It is 
important to say that that was not the case. It was just 30 or 40 
people at the top. Many of the people you see on television blasting 
this report were intimately involved in carrying it out and setting it 
up.
  The CIA developed the detention program in a time of great fear, 
anxiety, and unprecedented crisis. It is at these times of crisis when 
we need sound judgment, excellence, and professionalism from the CIA 
the most.
  When mistakes are made, they call for self-reflection and scrutiny. 
For that process to begin, we first have to make sure there is an 
absolutely accurate public record of what happened. We are doing that. 
The public release of the executive summary and findings and 
conclusions is a tremendous and consequential step toward that end.
  For some, I expect there will be the temptation to reject and cast 
doubt, to trivialize, to attack or rationalize parts of the study that 
are disturbing or are embarrassing. Indeed, the CIA program's dramatic 
divergence from the standards that we hold ourselves to is hard to 
reconcile. However, we must fight that shortsighted temptation to wish 
away the gravity of what this study found.
  How we deal with this opportunity to learn and improve will reflect 
on the maturity of our democracy. As a country, we are strong enough to 
bear the weight of the mistakes we have made. As an institution, so is 
the Central Intelligence Agency. We must confront this dark period in 
our recent history with honesty and critical introspection. We must 
draw lessons, and we must apply those lessons as we move forward. 
Although it may be uncomfortable at times, ultimately we will grow 
stronger, and we will ensure that this never happens again.
  I thank the Presiding Officer and yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Madam President, I know the time for recess for 
caucus is approaching and I know there are other Members on the 
Democratic side who want to speak. It is now time for a Member from the 
Republican side to speak.
  I ask unanimous consent that the recess be delayed for 5 minutes so 
the distinguished Senator from South Carolina might speak.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is ordered.
  The Senator from South Carolina.
  Mr. GRAHAM. Thank you very much. I have been a military lawyer for 
over 30 years. That has been one of the highlights of my life--to serve 
in the Air Force. During the debate about these

[[Page S6414]]

techniques, I was very proud of the fact that every military lawyer 
came out on the side that the techniques in question were not who we 
are and what we want to be.
  We are one of the leading voices of the Geneva Convention. We have 
stood by the Geneva Convention since its inception. I am convinced that 
the techniques in question violate the Geneva Convention. I am also 
convinced that they were motivated by fear, fear of another attack. Put 
yourself in the shoes of the people responsible for defending the 
country right after 9/11. We had been hit. We had been hit hard. 
Everybody thought something else was coming.
  As we rounded these guys up, there was a sense of urgency and a 
commitment to never let it happen again that generated this program.
  Who knew what, when? I do not know. All I can tell you is the people 
involved believed they were trying to defend the country and what they 
were doing was necessary. Did they get some good information? Probably 
so. Has it been a net loser for us as a country? Absolutely so. All I 
can say is the techniques in question were motivated by fear of another 
attack, and people at the time thought this was the best way to defend 
the Nation. I accept that on their part.
  But as a nation, I hope we have learned the following: In this 
ideological struggle, good versus evil, we need to choose good. There 
is no shortage of people who will cut your head off. The techniques in 
question are nowhere near what the enemies of this Nation and radical 
Islam would do to people under their control. There is no comparison.
  The comparison is between who we are and what we want to be. In that 
regard, we made a mistake. No one is going to jail because they should 
not, because the laws in question--the laws that existed at the time of 
this program--were, to be generous, vague.
  I spent about a year of my life with Senator McCain working with the 
Bush administration and colleagues on the Democratic side to come up 
with the Detainee Treatment Act which clearly puts people on notice of 
what you can and cannot do. Going forward we fixed this problem. How do 
I know it is a problem? I travel. I go to the Mideast a lot. I go all 
over the world. It was a problem for us. Whether we like it or not, we 
are seen as the good guys. I like it.
  Sometimes good people make mistakes. We have corrected the problem. 
We have interrogation techniques now that I think can protect the 
Nation and are within our values. The one thing I want to stress to my 
colleagues is that this is a war of an ideological nature. There will 
be no capital to conquer. We are not going to take Tokyo. We are not 
going to take Berlin. There is no air force to shoot down; there is no 
navy to sink. You are fighting a radical extreme ideology that is 
motivated by hate. In their world, if you do not agree with their 
religion, you are no longer a human being.
  The only way we can possibly defeat this ideology is to offer 
something better. The good news for us is that we stand for something 
better. We stand for due process. We stand for humane treatment. We 
stand for the ability to have a say when you are accused of something. 
Our enemies stand for none of that. That is their greatest weakness. 
Our greatest strength is to offer a better way.
  When you go to Anbar Province and you go to other places in the 
Mideast that have experienced life under ISIS--ISIL--and Al Qaeda, the 
reaction has almost been universal: We do not like this. When America 
comes over the hill, and they see that flag, they know help is on the 
way.
  To the CIA officers who serve in the shadows, who intermingle with 
the most notorious in the world, who are always away from home never 
knowing if you are going back: Thank you. There is a debate about 
whether this report is accurate line by line. I do not know. Is this 
the definitive answer to the program's problems? I do not know, but I 
do know the program hurt our country.
  Those days are behind us. The good guys air their dirty laundry. I 
wished we had waited because the world is in such a volatile shape 
right now. I do fear this report will be used by our enemies. But I 
guess there is no good time to do things like this.
  So to those who helped prepare the report, I understand where you are 
coming from. To those on my side who believe that we have gone too far, 
I understand that too. But this has always been easy for me. I have 
been too associated with the subject matter for too long. Every time 
our Nation cuts a corner, and every time we act out of fear and abandon 
who we are, we always regret it. That has happened forever. This is a 
step toward righting a wrong. To our enemies: Take no comfort from the 
fact that we have changed our program. We are committed to your demise. 
We are committed to your incarceration and killing you on the 
battlefield, if necessary.
  To our friends, because we choose a different path, do not mistake 
that for weakness. What we are doing today is not a sign of weakness. 
It is a sign of the ultimate strength--that you can self correct, that 
you can reevaluate and you can do some soul searching, and you can come 
out with a better product. The tools available to our intelligence 
community today over time will yield better results, more reliable 
results. The example we are setting will, over time, change the world.
  To defeat radical Islam you have to show separation. Today is a 
commitment to show separation. The techniques they employ to impose 
their will have been used for thousands of years. They are always, over 
time, rejected. The values we stand for--tolerance, humane treatment of 
everyone; whether you agree with them or not--have also stood the test 
of time. Over time, we will win, and they will lose. Today is about 
making that time period shorter. The sooner America can reattach itself 
to who she is, the worse off the enemy will be.

  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.

                          ____________________


[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 149 (Tuesday, December 9, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6417-S6419]


      SSCI STUDY OF THE CIA'S DETENTION AND INTERROGATION PROGRAM

  Mr. CHAMBLISS. Madam President, I rise today as the vice chairman of 
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to respond to the public 
release of the declassified version of the executive summary and 
findings and conclusions from the committee's study of the CIA's 
detention and interrogation program.
  This is not a pleasant duty for me. During my 4 years as the vice 
chairman of the Intelligence Committee, I have enjoyed an excellent 
relationship with our chairman, Senator Dianne Feinstein. We have 
worked closely to conduct strong bipartisan oversight of the U.S. 
intelligence community, including the passage and enactment of 
significant national security legislation. However, this particular 
study has been one of the very, very few areas where we have never been 
able to see eye-to-eye.
  Putting this report out today is going to have significant 
consequences. In addition to reopening a number of old wounds both 
domestically and internationally, it could be used to incite unrest and 
even attacks against our servicemembers, other personnel overseas, and 
our international partners. This report could also stoke additional 
mistreatment or death for American or other Western captives overseas. 
It will endanger CIA personnel, sources, and future intelligence 
operations. This report will damage our relationship with several 
significant international counterterrorism partners at a time when we 
can least afford it. Even worse, despite the fact that the 
administration and many in the majority are aware of these 
consequences, they have chosen to release the report today.
  The United States today is faced with a wide array of security 
challenges across the globe, including in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, 
Iraq, Yemen, north Africa, Somalia, Ukraine, and the list goes on. 
Instead of focusing on the problems right in front of us, the majority 
side of the Intelligence Committee has spent the last 5 years and over 
$40 million focused on a program that effectively ended over 8 years 
ago, while the world around us burns.
  In March 2009, when the committee first undertook the study, I was 
the only member of the Intelligence Committee who voted against moving 
forward with it. I believed then, as I still do today, that vital 
committee and intelligence community resources would be squandered over 
a debate that Congress, the executive branch, and the Supreme Court had 
already settled. This issue has been investigated or reviewed 
extensively by the executive branch, including criminal investigations 
by the Department of Justice, the Senate Armed Services Committee, the 
International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as other entities.
  Congress has passed two separate acts directly related to detention 
and interrogation issues--specifically, the Detainee Treatment Act of 
2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The executive branch 
terminated the CIA program and directed that future interrogations be 
conducted in accordance with the U.S. Army Field Manual on 
Interrogation. Also, the Supreme Court decided Rasul v. Bush in 2004, 
Hamdi v. Rumsfeld in 2004, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in 2006, as well as 
Boumediene v. Bush in 2008, all of which established that detainees 
were entitled to habeas corpus review and identified certain 
deficiencies in both the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military 
Commissions Act.
  By the time I became the vice chairman, the minority had already 
withdrawn from active participation in the study as a result of 
Attorney General Holder's decision to reopen the criminal inquiry 
related to the interrogation of certain detainees in the CIA's 
detention program. This unfortunate decision deprived the committee of 
the ability to interview key witnesses who participated in the CIA 
program and essentially limited the committee's study to the review of 
a cold documentary record. Now, how can any credible investigation take 
place without interviewing witnesses? This is a 6,000-page report, and 
not one single witness was ever interviewed in this study being done. 
This is a poor excuse for the type of oversight the Congress should be 
conducting.
  There is no doubt that the CIA's detention and interrogation 
program--which was hastily executed in the aftermath of the worst 
terrorist attack in our Nation's history--had flaws. The CIA has 
admitted as much in its June 27, 2013, response to the study. There is 
also no doubt that there were instances in which CIA interrogators 
exceeded their authorities and certain detainees may have suffered as a 
result. However, the executive summary and findings and conclusions 
released today contain a disturbing number of factual and analytical 
errors. These factual and analytical shortfalls ultimately led to an 
unacceptable number of incorrect claims and invalid conclusions that I 
cannot endorse.
  The study essentially refuses to admit that CIA detainees--especially 
CIA detainees subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques--provided 
intelligence information which helped the U.S. Government and its 
allies to neutralize numerous terrorist threats. On its face, this 
refusal does not make sense given the vast amount of information gained 
from these interrogations, the thousands of intelligence reports that 
were generated as a result of them, the capture of additional 
terrorists, and the disruption of the plots those captured terrorists 
were planning.
  Instead of acknowledging these realities, the study adopts an 
analytical approach designed to obscure the value of the intelligence 
obtained from the program. For example, the study falsely claims that 
the use of enhanced interrogation techniques played ``no role'' in the 
identification of Jose Padilla because Abu Zubaydah, a senior member of 
Al Qaeda with direct ties to Osama bin Laden, provided the information 
about Padilla during an interrogation by FBI agents who were 
``exclusively'' using what is called ``rapport-building'' techniques 
against him more than 3 months prior to the CIA's ``use of DOJ-approved 
enhanced interrogation techniques.'' What the study ignores, however, 
is the fact that Abu Zubaydah's earlier interrogation in April of 2002 
actually did involve the use of interrogation techniques that were 
later included in the list of enhanced interrogation techniques. 
Specifically, the facts demonstrate that Abu Zubaydah was subjected to 
``around the clock'' interrogation that included more than 4 days of 
dietary manipulation, nudity, and more than 126 hours--which is about 5 
days--of sleep deprivation during a 136-hour period by the time the FBI 
finished up the 8.5-hour interrogation shift in which Abu Zubaydah 
finally yielded the identification of Jose Padilla. So during a 5-day 
time period, Abu Zubaydah got less than 10 hours of sleep, yet the 
majority does not acknowledge that this was an enhanced interrogation. 
In light of these facts,

[[Page S6418]]

the study's claims that the FBI was exclusively using ``rapport-
building'' techniques is nothing short of being dishonest.
  More important, the actionable intelligence gleaned from the enhanced 
interrogation of Abu Zubaydah that started in April of 2002 served as 
the foundation for the capture of additional terrorists and the 
disruption of the plots those captured terrorists were planning. His 
information was also used to gather additional actionable intelligence 
from these newly captured terrorists, which in turn led to a series of 
successful capture operations and plot disruptions. By the study's own 
count, the numerous interrogations of Abu Zubaydah resulted in 766 
sole-source disseminated intelligence reports. That is an awful lot of 
actionable intelligence collected under the CIA program that this study 
tries to quietly sweep under the carpet in an effort to support its 
false headline that the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques 
was not effective.
  The study also overlooks several crucial intelligence successes that 
prevented terror attacks against the United States and our allies 
around the world. Al Qaeda-affiliated extremists subjected to the 
program's enhanced interrogation techniques made admissions that led to 
the identification of the man responsible for plotting the September 11 
attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, or KSM.
  The program also helped stop terrorist attacks in the U.S. homeland 
and against our military forces overseas. Al Qaeda affiliate Abu 
Zubaydah's statements to interrogators led to the identification of 
Jose Padilla--an Al Qaeda operative tasked with conducting a terrorist 
attack inside the United States. The interrogation of KSM and Guleed 
Hassan Ahmed disrupted Al Qaeda's plotting against Camp Lemonier in 
Djibouti, a critical base of operations in the war on terror in Africa 
and at that time home to some 1,600 U.S. military personnel. There is 
no telling how many lives this program saved in those particular 
interrogations alone.
  Intelligence gathered under the detention and interrogation program 
also prevented terrorist attacks on our allies in the United 
Kingdom. Terrorist plots against London's Heathrow Airport and Canary 
Wharf--a major London financial center--were disrupted because key 
conspirators were apprehended and questioned on the basis of 
intelligence gathered using several interrogation techniques, including 
enhanced interrogation techniques.

  Finally, information from detainees held in the program was critical 
to ascertaining the true significance of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the Al 
Qaeda facilitator who served as Osama bin Laden's personal courier and 
the man who ultimately lead CIA intelligence analysts and the Navy 
Seals to bin Laden himself.
  For anyone interested in a nice, chronological survey of the 
significant intelligence gained from the program and how it was used to 
capture additional terrorists and disrupt terrorist plots, I would 
invite my colleagues to read two pages of our minority views. Pages 96 
and 97 delineate exactly a chronology of significant intelligence that 
allowed for the takedown of individuals.
  It seems as though the study takes every opportunity to unfairly 
portray the CIA in the worst light possible, presupposing improper 
motivations and the most detestable behavior at every turn. The very 
enemies whom the program helped keep at bay for all of those years, as 
well as adversarial nations, will be able to exploit what is 
essentially a dangerously insightful and instructive treasure trove of 
information about our intelligence operations. I am all for pointing 
out and correcting problems with the intelligence community and I have 
been very outspoken on some of them, but I prefer our oversight be 
conducted quietly and in a manner that does not jeopardize the national 
security of the United States.
  Ultimately, our minority views examined eight of the study's most 
problematic conclusions, many of which attack the CIA's integrity and 
credibility in developing and implementing the program. These 
problematic claims and conclusions created the false impression that 
the CIA was actively misleading policymakers and impeding the 
counterterrorism efforts of other Federal Government agencies during 
the program's operation. We found these claims and conclusions were 
largely not supported by the documentary record and were based upon 
flawed reasoning.
  Specifically, we found that:
  No. 1, the CIA's detention and interrogation program was effective 
and produced valuable and actionable intelligence.
  No. 2, most of the CIA's claims of effectiveness with respect to the 
use of EITs were accurate.
  No. 3, the CIA attempted to keep the Congress informed of its 
activities and did so on a regular basis. As a member of the committee, 
I can attest to that.
  No. 4, the CIA did not impede White House oversight. The White House 
was very involved in doing oversight of the program.
  No. 5, the CIA was not responsible nor did it have control over 
sharing or dissemination of information to other executive branch 
agencies or to members of the Principals Committee.
  No. 6, many of the study's claims about the CIA providing inaccurate 
information to the Department of Justice were themselves totally 
inaccurate.
  No. 7, the CIA did not significantly impede oversight by the CIA 
Office of the Inspector General.
  No. 8, the White House determined that the CIA would have the lead on 
dealing with the media regarding detainees.
  These findings are not meant as a defense of the CIA. The CIA is 
fully capable of defending its own actions, and I know it will do so. 
Rather, these findings are a critique of certain aspects of this 
particular study. As a general rule, I want our committee findings, 
conclusions, and recommendations to be unassailable in every 
investigation we conduct. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, and I am 
very concerned about the unintended consequences that will result from 
the study's erroneous and inflammatory conclusions.
  I imagine some members of the media may choose to repeat the study's 
false headlines contained in the report without checking the underlying 
facts. By doing so they will only be damaging their own credibility. I 
invite anyone who reads the study's executive summary and findings and 
conclusions to pay particular attention to how often the text uses 
absolutes, such as ``played no role,'' ``no connection'' or ``no 
indication.'' Please then read our minority views to find the clear 
counter examples that disprove most of these absolute claims. I suspect 
the readers who make this effort will be disappointed, as I was, that 
this study makes so many inaccurate claims and conclusions.
  Our minority views also explain how this study was crippled by 
numerous procedural irregularities that hampered the committee's 
ability to conduct a fair and objective review of the CIA's detention 
and interrogation program. These procedural defects resulted in a 
premature committee vote in December of 2012 to approve the study 
before the text was adequately reviewed by the committee membership or 
subjected to a routine fact check by the intelligence community.
  Typically, once a Senate committee report has been approved, staff 
are only authorized to make technical and conforming changes. The 
executive summary and findings and conclusions released this week have 
undergone such extensive and unprecedented revisions since the study 
was approved back in December of 2012 that the traditional concept of 
technical and conforming changes has now been rendered meaningless. 
Amazingly, the majority made significant changes in the substance of 
the study for months after it was voted on by the committee. In 
addition, after we submitted our minority views, the majority staff 
then went back and made a few changes to specifically correct some of 
the more blatant errors that we identified in the views and that the 
CIA identified in their review. While I am pleased our views led to 
some minor improvements in the study, those untimely changes required 
us to add text explaining the validity of our initial conclusions and 
criticisms. Simply put, the documents released today are very different 
from the documents that were approved almost exactly 2 years ago by the 
committee at the end of the last Congress on a partisan basis.
  Another significant weakness of this study is its disregard of the 
context

[[Page S6419]]

under which the CIA's detention and interrogation program was 
developed. It is critical to remember that the intelligence community 
was inundated by a surge of terrorist threat reporting after the 
September 11 attacks. The fear of a follow-on attack was pervasive, and 
it was genuine. The Nation was traumatized by the horrific murders of 
nearly 3,000 Americans and at the CIA there was no greater imperative 
than stopping another attack from happening. This context is entirely 
absent from the study.
  In addition, everyone must remember that the CIA was directed to 
conduct this program by the President. I have spoken with a number of 
CIA officers over the years who remember the contentious debates about 
the program at the time it was being considered, but at the end of the 
day the Agency did what the President directed them to do under the 
color of law and based upon opinions issued and updated by the 
Department of Justice.
  Many of my colleagues continue to discuss the brutality of many of 
the enhanced interrogation techniques. I agree that waterboarding, 
which only occurred against three detainees, is particularly severe. 
Many of the other techniques were not. By comparison, KSM, who was one 
of the detainees who was subjected to waterboarding, personally 
beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and a number of 
other U.S. citizens have been tortured and beheaded by Al Qaeda-
inspired groups since.
  In my opinion, the current threat level posed by ISIL and other Al 
Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups may be greater today than what we 
faced prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They are better funded, 
better equipped, and have recruited hundreds of terrorists who have 
American as well as European passports. ISIL terrorists are using 
social media to encourage new recruits to conduct ``lone wolf'' attacks 
in their home countries such as the United States. They are murdering 
and beheading captured hostages and planning terrorist attacks against 
U.S. citizens.
  In light of these significant threats, the President is still 
attempting to make good on a misguided campaign promise to close down 
Guantanamo Bay. It doesn't seem to matter to him that we are now down 
to the worst of the worst or that his own review groups have strongly 
recommended against the release of these remaining terrorists. Instead, 
he has returned to the pre-9/11 practice of treating terrorists like 
ordinary criminals. We are reading terrorists their Miranda rights 
instead of conducting extended intelligence interrogations to develop 
actionable intelligence that might lead to additional captures or plot 
disruptions.
  I think we would be better off if we were to return to a mindset 
where we attempt to capture the enemy and use authorized interrogation 
techniques to obtain the actionable intelligence information needed to 
neutralize these dangerous terrorist organizations. While there is no 
doubt there were indeed moments during the CIA detention and 
interrogation program where interrogators exceeded their authorized 
limits, such instances were relatively few and far between.
  In this, my last week of service on the floor of the U.S. Senate and 
as the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, I wish to thank the 
men and women of the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community and 
the members of our Armed Forces who have served us so well since the 9/
11 terrorist attacks. Their efforts and their sacrifices have not gone 
unnoticed. I will be forever grateful for their patriotic service to 
our beloved country. May God bless them all and may God bless the 
United States of America.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.

                          ____________________




[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 149 (Tuesday, December 9, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6424-S6425]



      SSCI STUDY OF THE CIA'S DETENTION AND INTERROGATION PROGRAM

  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I have served on the Senate Intelligence 
Committee for 14 years and came to the Senate floor in the spring of 
2005 to join with Senator Rockefeller in calling for the committee to 
investigate the CIA's interrogation activities and the possible use of 
torture. In 2009 I joined my Intelligence Committee colleagues in 
voting to approve Chair Feinstein's motion to launch an investigation 
into these activities.
  I said at the time, I continue to believe it today, that what this 
debate over torture requires is an infusion of facts. Americans can 
hear me and other policymakers argue that the CIA's so-called enhanced 
interrogation techniques constituted torture and did not work, and 
Americans can also hear various former officials argue that these 
techniques are not torture and that they produced uniquely valuable 
information. What is important is that today all Americans finally have 
access to the facts so they can make up their own minds. Personally, I 
hope this report closes the door on the possibility of our country ever 
resorting to torture again.
  Americans have known since the days of the Salem witch trials that 
torture is an unreliable means of obtaining truthful information in 
addition to being morally reprehensible. But following the terrorist 
attacks of September 11, 2001, a small number of CIA officials chose to 
follow the advice of private, outside contractors who told them the way 
to quickly get important information from captured terrorist suspects 
was by using coercive interrogation techniques that had been developed 
and used by Communist dictatorships during the Cold War.
  I would note that the CIA officials later paid these same contractors 
to evaluate the effectiveness of their own work.
  CIA officials repeatedly represented to the public, to the Congress, 
to the White House, and to the Justice Department that the techniques 
were safe, that they were only used against high-level terrorist 
captives, and that their use provided unique otherwise unavailable 
intelligence that saved lives. After 5 long years of investigation, our 
committee found that none of these claims held up. The CIA's so-called 
enhanced interrogation techniques included a number of techniques that 
our country has long considered torture. Furthermore, the CIA's own 
interrogation records make it clear that the use of these techniques in 
the CIA's secret prisons was far harsher than was described in 
representations by the CIA.
  CIA Director Michael Hayden testified that any deviation from 
approved procedures were reported and corrected, but CIA interrogation 
logs described a wide variety of harsh techniques that the Justice 
Department's infamous torture memos did not even consider. Practices 
such as placing detainees in ice water or threatening a detainee with a 
power drill were often not appropriately recorded or corrected when 
they happened. Director Hayden also testified that detainees at a 
minimum have always had a bucket to dispose of their human waste, but 
in fact CIA detainees were routinely placed in diapers for extended 
periods of time, and CIA cables show multiple instances in which 
interrogators withheld waste buckets from detainees.
  CIA records indicate that some CIA prisoners may not have been 
terrorists at all. Some of these individuals were in fact ruthless 
terrorists with blood already on their hands, but one of the report's 
most important findings is that this did not seem to be the case in 
every instance. In one particularly troubling case, the CIA held an 
intellectually challenged man prisoner and attempted to use tapes of 
him crying as leverage against another member of the individual's 
family.
  At another point the CIA official noted in writing that the CIA was 
holding a number of detainees about whom we know very little, and the 
CIA on multiple occasions continued to hold people even after CIA 
officers concluded there was not information to detain them. The review 
even found email records that described Director Hayden instructing a 
CIA officer to underreport the total number of CIA detainees. To this 
day the CIA's official response to this report indicates that senior 
CIA officials are alarmingly uninterested in determining exactly how 
many detainees the CIA even held.
  To be clear, the report doesn't attempt to determine the motivation 
behind these misrepresentations. The report doesn't reach judgments 
about whether individuals deliberately lied or unknowingly passed along 
inaccurate information. It simply compares the representations the CIA 
made to Congress, the Justice Department, the public, and others to the 
information found in the CIA's own internal records, and it notes where 
those comparisons reveal significant contradictions.
  One of the biggest sets of contradictions revolve around the repeated 
claim that the use of these techniques produced unique, otherwise 
unavailable intelligence that saved lives. CIA officials made this 
claim to the White House, the Justice Department, the Congress, and the 
public. The claim was repeated over and over and over again. Over the 
years CIA officials came up with a number of examples to try to support 
the claim, such as the names of particular terrorists supposedly 
captured as a result of coercive interrogations or plots that had been 
supposedly thwarted based on this unique, otherwise unavailable 
information.
  The committee took the 20 most prominent or frequently cited examples 
used by the CIA and our investigators spent years going through them. 
Twenty examples are going to seem like a lot to anybody who reads the 
report, but the committee members who were working on the report agreed 
it was important to be comprehensive and avoid cherry-picking just one 
or two cases. In every one of these cases the CIA statements about the 
unique effectiveness of coercive interrogation techniques were 
contradicted in one way or another by the Agency's own internal 
records.
  I am going to repeat that because I think it is a particularly 
important finding. In every one of these 20 cases, CIA statements about 
the unique effectiveness of coercive interrogation was contradicted in 
one way or another by the Agency's own internal records. We are not 
talking about minor inconsistencies. We are talking about fundamental 
contradictions.
  For example, in congressional testimony and documents prepared for 
White House briefings, the CIA claimed that a detainee had identified 
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks after he 
was detained by the CIA and subjected to the CIA's coercive 
interrogation techniques, but in fact CIA records clearly show that Abu 
Zubaydah provided this information during noncoercive interrogations by 
the FBI prior to the beginning of his coercive CIA interrogations and 
days before he was even moved to the CIA's secret detention site. I 
personally expected that there would be at least one or two cases where 
vague or incomplete records might appear to support the Agency's 
claims, but in fact in every one of these 20 examples they and the 
arguments for them crumble under close scrutiny.
  The report that is being released today includes a number of 
redactions aimed at protecting our national security. I will say in my 
view some of these redactions are unnecessary and a few of them even 
obscure some details that would help Americans understand parts of the 
report. Overall I am satisfied that the redactions do not make the 
report unreadable and it would be possible for Americans to read the 
report to learn not only what happened but how it happened, and 
learning that is essential to keep it from happening again.
  One of the reasons this public release is necessary is that the 
current CIA leadership has been resistant to acknowledging the full 
scope of the mistakes and misrepresentations that have surrounded this 
program. Some of this resistance is made clear in the Agency's official 
response to the committee's report, and I suspect some of it will be 
echoed by former officials who were involved in the program.
  Finally, I want to wrap up by reminding people about the documents 
that have come to be known as the Panetta review. When former CIA 
Director Panetta came to the Agency in 2009, he made it clear from the 
outset that he wanted to work to put the Agency's history of torture 
behind it

[[Page S6425]]

and that he wanted to cooperate with the Intelligence Committee 
inquiry. He also sensibly asked CIA personnel to review internal CIA 
records and get a sense of what this investigation could be expected to 
find.
  The review got off to a solid start. It began to identify some of the 
same mistakes and misrepresentations that are identified in our 
committee's report. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this review 
ever made it to the Director's desk. Instead, publicly available 
documents made it clear this review was quietly terminated by CIA 
attorneys who thought it was moving too fast.
  Earlier this year the Agency conducted an unprecedented and secret 
search of Senate files in an effort to find out whether the committee 
had obtained copies of the Panetta review. After it was found that 
committee investigators had in fact obtained the Panetta review, the 
CIA actually attempted to file unsupported criminal allegations against 
Senate staff members. After the search was publicly revealed by the 
press, the CIA's own spokesperson acknowledged in USA Today that the 
search had taken place and it had been done because the CIA was looking 
to see if our investigators had found a document the CIA didn't want 
the Congress to have. Incredibly, that same week CIA Director John 
Brennan told reporter Andrea Mitchell of NBC that the CIA had not spied 
on Senate files and that ``nothing could be further from the truth.''
  I think this incident and the difference between what was said to 
Andrea Mitchell and what the Agency's own people said to USA Today 
reflects once again what I call an alarming culture of misinformation. 
Instead of acknowledging the serious organizational problems that are 
laid out in this report, the Agency's leadership seems inclined to try 
to sweep them under the rug. This means organizational problems aren't 
going to be fixed unless they are laid out publicly, and there is also 
a danger that other countries or even future administrations might be 
tempted to use torture if they don't have all the facts about the CIA's 
experience. That is why the release today is so important.
  In concluding, I thank all of the staff who have put in hours and 
hours and nights and weekends and time away from their families to get 
this investigation completed. I praise Chair Feinstein and our former 
Chair Senator Rockefeller, who together were resolute in pushing for 
this kind of congressional oversight.

                          ____________________

[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 149 (Tuesday, December 9, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6425-S6426]


 SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE STUDY OF THE CIA'S DETENTION 
                       AND INTERROGATION PROGRAM

  Mr. UDALL of Colorado. Mr. President, today is a historic day, as 
Senator Wyden made clear, Senator Feinstein, Senator Rockefeller, and 
many other Senators to follow.
  Before I talk about my involvement in the efforts that were put forth 
to reach this day, I want to say to Senator Wyden, my good friend, you 
honor me with those comments. I want to acknowledge that when you are 
in a fight, it matters whom you are in the fight with. It has been my 
privilege and honor to fight on the side of transparency, on the side 
of protecting the Bill of Rights, and this has been a righteous cause. 
We are going to continue to work to find the right balance between 
privacy and security. As Ben Franklin famously implied, we can have 
both, but we don't end up with both if we set aside the Bill of Rights 
and those fundamental principles that are enshrined into the Bill of 
Rights. It has been my privilege to fight alongside you, and I wish you 
all the best. Yes, we westerners will stay in touch.
  Turning back to the matter at hand, today, almost 6 years after the 
Senate Intelligence Committee voted to conduct a study of the CIA's 
detention and interrogation program and nearly 2 years after approving 
the report, the American people will finally know the truth about a 
very dark chapter in our Nation's history.
  I had two goals at the beginning of this long process, and I still 
hold those two goals today. First, I have been committed to correcting 
the public record on the CIA's multiple misrepresentations to the 
American people, to other agencies, the executive branch, the White 
House, and to Congress.
  Second, my goal has been to ensure that the truth comes out about the 
terrible acts committed in the name of the American people. Why? 
Because I want this to be our way of going forward, that neither the 
CIA nor any future administration repeats the grievous mistakes this 
important oversight work reveals.
  This has been a careful and very deliberative process. We have 
compiled, drafted, redacted, and now released this report. It has been 
much harder than it needed to be. Senator Wyden and many others pointed 
it out.
  It brings no joy to discuss the CIA's brutal and appalling use of 
torture or the unprecedented actions that some in the intelligence 
community and the administration have taken in order to cover up the 
truth. By releasing the Intelligence Committee's landmark report, we 
affirm that we are a nation that does not hide from its past but learns 
from it. An honest examination of our shortcomings is not a sign of 
weakness but of the strength of our great Republic.
  We have made significant progress since the CIA first delivered its 
heavily--underline ``heavily''--redacted version of the executive 
summary to the committee in August. The report we released today cuts 
through the fog the CIA's redactions created and will give the American 
people a candid, brutal, and coherent account of the CIA's torture 
program.
  As the chairman said earlier today, even when public tensions were 
high, our committee continued to work behind the scenes to successfully 
whittle down 400 instances of unnecessary redactions to just a few. We 
didn't make all the progress we wanted, and the redaction process was 
filled with unwarranted and completely unnecessary obstacles, but all 
told, after reviewing the final version, I believe our landmark report 
accomplishes the goals I laid out at the outset and tells the story 
that needs to be told. It also represents a significant and essential 
step toward restoring faith in the crucial role of Congress to conduct 
oversight of the intelligence community. Congressional oversight is 
important to all of government's activities, but it

[[Page S6426]]

is especially important to those parts of government that operate in 
secret, as the Church committee discovered decades ago.
  The challenges the Church committee confronted four decades ago 
persists today--namely, how to ensure that those government actions 
which are necessarily conducted in secret are nonetheless conducted 
within the confines of the law.
  The release of this executive summary is testament to the power of 
effective oversight and the determination of Chairman Feinstein and 
members of the committee to doggedly beat back obstacle after obstacle 
in order to reveal the truth to the American people. I have much more 
to say about these obstacles and about the critical importance of 
reforming an agency that refuses to even acknowledge what it has done. 
I will deliver those remarks soon. For now, I wish to congratulate the 
chairman and her staff on this very important achievement.
  The document we are finally releasing today is the definitive history 
of what happened in the CIA's detention and interrogation program. We 
have always been a forward-looking nation, but to be so, we must be 
mindful of our own history. That is what this study is all about. That 
is why I have no doubt that we will emerge from this dark episode with 
our democracy strengthened and our future made even brighter.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
  Mr. LEAHY. I see the distinguished senior Senator from Texas on the 
floor seeking recognition. I have been told to come here at 3:30 p.m., 
but obviously I yield to my friend from Texas and ask unanimous consent 
that when he completes his remarks I be recognized.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Texas.
  Mr. CORNYN. I thank my friend from Vermont. All of this got pushed 
back a little bit with the laudatory speeches for our retiring 
colleague from Nebraska. We are backed up a little bit, but I won't be 
long.
  I have to say that I came to the floor when the Senators from Oregon 
and Colorado were talking about Senator Feinstein's decision to release 
this report. I get it that different people see the same subject matter 
sometimes through a different lens, but I can't think of any more 
reckless or irresponsible thing to do to our brave men and women who 
fight in our military, who have fought our wars for the last 13 years, 
and the intelligence community that has worked while risking their 
lives to keep us safe.
  We all remember what happened on 9/11/2001, but apparently with time 
our memories have faded. What we do know for a fact is we would not 
have avoided another attack on our own soil if it were not for the 
dedication and the patriotism of men and women in our intelligence 
community who were operating under color of law. In other words, this 
isn't just something they decided to cook up; this was something that 
was vetted at the highest levels of the Justice Department and the 
Department of Defense.
  We had hearing upon hearing on these various enhanced interrogation 
techniques. There were disagreements, but we do know they were 
effective in gleaning intelligence that helped keep Americans safer. 
That is not just me saying that. Ask Leon Panetta, the immediate past 
Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Secretary of the 
Department of Defense--a proud Democrat but also a patriot in his own 
right. Ask John Brennan, President Obama's choice to be the current CIA 
Director. He said virtually the same thing.
  So much of this should have proven to be unnecessary after two 
separate U.S. attorneys conducted criminal investigations. There was 
one done earlier and then one done later when Attorney General Eric 
Holder reopened the investigation. These men and women who risk their 
lives to do what their government asks them to do to keep us safe were 
subjected to at least two Justice Department investigations, and 
obviously no decision to proceed with any kind of criminal charges was 
decided upon.
  I think you have to wonder about the timing of this in a lameduck 
session where we have basically three items of business to do before we 
break for the Christmas holidays and a new Congress. It is clear that 
this report was pushed out in an attempt to make a political statement, 
but I have to tell you that I think it is a reckless act, and it is a 
disservice not only to the men and women who risked their lives but 
also to the American people who should expect more of us.
  This was not a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report. Once 
Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee figured out what was 
happening, they simply disassociated themselves from it. This is purely 
a partisan report. There are absolutely no recommendations made for any 
reforms in this report. It was simply done to embarrass and to hold up 
our brave men and women who serve our country and the intelligence 
community to ridicule, and it is a shame.

                          ____________________

[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 149 (Tuesday, December 9, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6427-S6432]


      SSCI STUDY OF THE CIA'S DETENTION AND INTERROGATION PROGRAM

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I listened with interest to the tremendous 
statement made by the Senator from California, Mrs. Feinstein, earlier 
today. She has spoken of this issue on other occasions, and we 
Americans should listen.
  More than a decade ago the Central Intelligence Agency began 
detaining and torturing human beings in the name of the war on 
terrorism. Then employees and contractors of the U.S. Government, paid 
for by our taxpayers' dollars, abused and degraded, dehumanized people. 
They stripped them of their basic humanity. But more than stripping 
them of their basic humanity, they stripped America of its standing in 
the world as the leader of promoting and protecting human rights. 
Instead of protecting us as Americans, by their actions they hurt all 
Americans.
  President Obama banned torture and cruel treatment when he took 
office, but only now, because of the courage and conviction of Senator 
Feinstein and the other members of the Intelligence Committee and their 
staffs, do we have a full and public accounting of the CIA's actions--
an accounting the American people deserve.
  The decision to release this historic report, as Senator Feinstein 
has courageously said, has been difficult, but it was the right and 
moral thing to do. If something is right and something is moral, no 
matter how difficult it is, you should do it. Releasing the report 
demonstrates that America--the America I love--is different. As 
Americans, we cannot sweep our mistakes under the rug and pretend they 
did not happen. We have to acknowledge our mistakes. We have to learn 
from our mistakes. In this case, we as Americans must and will do 
everything we can to ensure that our government never tortures again.
  Five years ago, in 2009, I called for a commission of inquiry to 
review the Bush administration's detention and interrogation program 
and other sweeping claims of executive power by the Bush 
administration. I believe that in order to restore America's moral 
leadership, we have to acknowledge what happened in our name because 
much of the leadership we can show around the world is not based on our 
wealth or on the power of our military but on our moral leadership. Our 
Nation needed back then a full accounting of the CIA's treatment of 
detainees, and we need it today. With this report, at long last we have 
it.
  This is not the first report to record or condemn the detention and 
interrogation policies and practices that were used during the last 
administration, but it is the first to fully chronicle the actions of 
the most secretive of our government agencies, the Central Intelligence 
Agency. The final report lays bare the dark truth about their program. 
That truth is far worse and it is far more brutal than most Americans 
ever imagined.
  We have all seen the shocking pictures from Abu Ghraib. We have read 
the cold, clinical description of ``harsh'' or ``enhanced'' techniques 
written by Department of Justice attorneys to justify such treatment. 
We know that what was done at Abu Ghraib terribly diminished the image 
of the United States throughout the world. It did not make us safer by 
one iota. In fact, many would argue it made us less safe.
  The report makes clear one fundamental truth: The CIA tortured 
people. That is the bottom line. No euphemistic description or legal 
obfuscation or pettifoggery can hide that fact any longer. The 
Intelligence Committee report shows that techniques such as 
waterboarding and sleep deprivation were used in ways far more frequent 
and cruel and harmful than previously known. It shows that gross 
mismanagement by those in charge at the CIA and a shocking indifference 
to human dignity led to horrendous treatment and conditions of 
confinement that went far beyond even what they had been approving. It 
turns out that the senior CIA leadership did not even know that 
``enhanced'' techniques were being used at one CIA detention facility. 
In fact, in one instance, one of their prisoners died as a result, left 
shackled on a concrete floor in a dungeon room, and likely died of 
hypothermia.
  This is America? This is what we stand for? This is the image we want 
to give the rest of the world? This American does not think so. This 
American does not think so. It is not what brought my grandparents and 
great-grandparents to this country.
  These so-called ``enhanced'' interrogation techniques were not just 
used on the worst of the worst either. In some instances, the CIA did 
not even know whom it was holding. CIA records show that at least 26 
people detained by the CIA did not meet the CIA's own standard for 
detention. Some of these individuals were subjected to--and this is a 
wonderful slogan--``enhanced'' techniques. What an evil slogan. Some 
detainees were determined not even to be members of Al Qaeda.

  Moreover, the CIA relied on contractors--not even CIA personnel but 
contractors--who had no experience as interrogators to develop this 
program. They were happy to take American taxpayers' money. They did 
not know what they were doing, but they said: Give us the money. 
Eventually the CIA outsourced all aspects of the program to the company 
these contractors set up. Did they make a few thousand dollars? No. 
They made $80 million. This was a program out of control. It is yet 
another reason why Congress has to exercise its oversight 
responsibility.
  The report also disproves CIA claims that torture programs were 
necessary to protect our Nation, and that it thwarted attacks. How many 
times have we heard it before--that we need this to protect us; we need 
this to protect us from another 9/11? We had all of the evidence we 
needed to stop 9/11, but the government had not even bothered to 
translate some of the material that our intelligence people had already 
obtained. After the fact, they decided: We should really translate some 
of that material we have. Then we found it could have been stopped.
  This program of torture did not make us safer. As laid out in 
meticulous detail in the report, the use of these techniques did not 
generate uniquely valuable intelligence. In fact, the report thoroughly 
repudiates each of the most commonly cited examples of plots thwarted 
and terrorists captured. That should not come as a surprise.
  The Senate Judiciary Committee held numerous hearings on the Bush 
administration's interrogation policies and practices. What we heard 
time and again from witness after witness is that torture and other 
cruel treatments do not work. But there are still some who continue to 
argue, even in the face of overwhelming testimony and actually now hard 
evidence to the contrary, that the program thwarted attacks and saved 
lives. They defend the CIA's action. They argue that the report does 
not tell the full story. But these are often the same people who 
participated in the rampant misrepresentations detailed in this report.
  The report shows that CIA officials consistently misled virtually 
everyone outside the Agency about what was actually going on and about 
the results of the CIA interrogations--very similar to what we heard 
leading up to the war in Iraq after 9/11. I remember being in those 
hearings. I remember listening to the then-Vice President. I remember 
listening to others in those secret hearings and thinking: It does not 
ring true. I stated to others that I thought some of the things they 
were telling us did not ring true.
  I remember walking early one morning with my wife near our home and 
two joggers coming up, calling us by name. These were people we had 
never seen before in the neighborhood.
  One of them said, ``I hear you have some questions.'' He asked 
whether I had asked to see a particular document.
  I said, ``I haven't. I didn't know there was such a thing.''
  He said, ``You might find it interesting to read.''

[[Page S6428]]

  So I did. Then I raised even more questions about what I read there, 
which totally contradicted what the Vice President and others were 
saying. I mentioned that to some.
  A few days later we are out walking again. Both joggers--my wife 
remembers this so well--they said, ``I see you read the document.''
  I said, ``I did.''
  ``But did they tell you about this other document?''
  I said, ``I didn't know there was such a document.''
  ``You may find it interesting.''
  And so I then reviewed it. It was obvious from what I read that they 
were withholding evidence that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/
11, contrary to what the Vice President and others were saying; that 
there were no weapons of mass destruction; and that in fact, they were 
actually well penned in by the no-fly zone we had set up. But instead 
we rushed into war because we sought to avenge 9/11, even though they 
had nothing to do with 
9/11. Now almost $3 trillion later, look at the mess we are in.
  The report released today details how, like the run-up to the war in 
Iraq, material that was held back from people who should have seen it. 
This included Members of Congress, White House officials, even Justice 
Department lawyers who were being asked to review the legality of CIA 
techniques.
  In the coming weeks, as we go into the new Congress, we are going to 
hear a lot about the need for oversight. I would hope the new 
leadership would look at the report Senator Feinstein and her committee 
have come out with, because this is where oversight should be--at the 
top of the list. So too should the unprecedented spying by the CIA on 
the congressional staff investigating this program. Just think about 
that. They investigated Members of Congress who were asking them about 
things they had done wrong. Then there is also the troubling pattern of 
intimidation, which includes the CIA referring its own congressional 
overseers to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. My God, 
we are going back to the Joseph McCarthy days with things like this. 
This report and those actions show a CIA out of control. It is 
incumbent upon all of us--Republicans and Democrats alike--in the 
Congress to hold the Agency accountable.
  The Judiciary Committee should take a hard look at the role of the 
Department of Justice and its legal justifications for this program. 
Much ink has been spilled criticizing the OLC opinion written during 
the Bush administration by John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Stephen Bradbury. 
The OLC has always had a good reputation, but these opinions sullied 
the reputation of that office, and they have been rightly repudiated. 
But the report also demonstrates that even those opinions were the 
result of key misrepresentations by the CIA about the seniority of the 
people subjected to these techniques, the implementation of the 
techniques, and the intelligence resulting from them.
  As an institution, if we truly represent 325 million Americans, do we 
not have a responsibility to examine the systemic failure that allowed 
this to happen and then to ensure that it does not happen again?
  Those who attack the credibility of this report are wrong. This 
report is not based on conjecture or theory or insinuation. Anyone who 
reads it can see that this careful, thorough report was meticulously 
researched and written. It is based on more than 6 million pages of CIA 
cables, emails, and other documents containing descriptions that CIA 
employees and contractors themselves recorded.
  I believe Senator Feinstein and the other members of the Intelligence 
Committee who worked on this deserve our respect and our appreciation.
  Intelligence Committee staffers, too, have dedicated years of their 
lives to this report. They have demonstrated courage and dedication in 
the face of enormous challenges, because they thought first and 
foremost about the United States of America.
  In the past year they were even threatened with criminal prosecution. 
Why? For doing the job they are supposed to do for the United States of 
America. But they would not allow themselves to be intimidated. They 
have served their country well, and they have my deepest appreciation 
for bringing us this truly historic study.
  I thank their families, because they couldn't tell their families the 
things they were reading. I imagine the families knew of some of these 
attacks on them. Their families too deserve our thanks.
  I am disappointed that those same honorable staffers had to spend so 
many months arguing with this White House about redactions to this 
report--a White House that is supposed to be dedicated to transparency. 
This report should have been issued months ago, and it still contains 
more redactions than it should. I can think of some who will wonder why 
the redactions are there, but I am gratified that we can finally shed 
light on this dark chapter.
  Among the many lessons we can take from this report is that Americans 
deserve more government transparency, and that is essential to a strong 
democracy. Just yesterday the Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan 
bill, the Leahy-Cornyn FOIA Improvement Act. It significantly improves 
the Freedom of Information Act. Today's release of this report is 
another important victory for greater government transparency.
  I strongly disagree with those who argue that the reports should not 
come out and who have tried to pressure and silence Senator Feinstein. 
Don't place the blame on those who are telling the truth. Place the 
blame squarely where it belongs: on those who authorized and carried 
out a systematic program of torture and secret detention, which is in 
violation of domestic law, and in violation of international law. But 
more importantly it is in violation of the fundamental principles of 
morality on which our great Nation was founded.
  In trying times, such as those we faced after September 11 and those 
we face now, we look to our intelligence, military, and law enforcement 
professionals to keep us safe. We are fortunate to have so many 
dedicated and talented people serving in the intelligence community, 
military, and law enforcement. But one lesson for their sake, our sake, 
and our country's sake, is that we should never become so blinded by 
fear that we are willing to sacrifice our own principles, laws, and 
humanity.
  We are the greatest, most powerful Nation on Earth. We cannot turn 
our backs on our laws, our history, and our Constitution because we are 
afraid. This Senator is not afraid.
  No matter what, our enemies are human beings. And no matter how 
hardened and evil they are, no matter how repulsive their actions--and 
many are--no matter how horribly they have treated their own victims, 
we do not torture them--because we don't join them on that dark side of 
history. We stand on the other side of history as Americans. 
Generations of men and women have given their lives and many have even 
endured torture themselves in order to protect this Nation. They did so 
not to protect our way of life, but to protect our principles, our 
understanding of right and wrong, of humanity, of evil.
  The shameful actions uncovered by this report dishonored those men 
and women who have fought to protect what is the best of our Nation, as 
well as the men and women even today who continue to put their lives at 
risk for this country.
  Americans know, throughout this country, that we are better than 
this. As we heard after Abu Ghraib and we will hear now, we are better 
than this and we should never let this happen again. Let's show the 
rest of the world, too.
  I have spoken much longer than I normally do, but this is important 
to me.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.
  Mr. KING. Mr. President, I also want to address the report that was 
released this morning by the Chair of the Intelligence Committee. I 
come at this in a slightly different way than some of my colleagues, 
because I came to this process late.
  I joined the Intelligence Committee in January of 2013. By that time 
the report had been authorized, had been written, and actually had been 
finalized. So I came to it as a final product and the decision was 
whether it should be released.
  Before talking about the report, there are two very important points 
that should be made.

[[Page S6429]]

  No. 1, one of my problems with this discussion is that everybody 
talks about the CIA. The CIA did this, the CIA did that. The fact is 
the CIA as an institution doesn't do anything. People do things.
  I have been around the world and met with CIA people in many 
countries. I have met with them here. They are patriotic, they are 
dedicated, they are smart, and they are brave. The problem with this 
situation is their reputation has been sullied by a relatively small 
group of people early in the prior decade.
  So I want to make clear, at least as far as I am concerned, this is 
not an attempt to discredit or otherwise undermine the CIA or the good 
people who are there, but to point out that mistakes were made.
  No. 2, I think we need to acknowledge that those were extraordinary 
times, the year or so after September 11. We thought there was going to 
be another attack. There was a lot of pressure to uncover that 
information. It is easy, 10 years later, to look back and say: Well, we 
shouldn't have done this or we shouldn't have done that. I understand 
that. We have to acknowledge that. However, those circumstances cannot 
justify a basic violation of who we are as Americans and what our 
values are.
  The process is the report was completed and accepted by the committee 
on a bipartisan basis. My predecessor, Olympia Snowe, voted in favor of 
the acceptance of the report in December of 2012.
  It was then sent to the CIA. They responded, a rather full response. 
It took about 6 months, and then they submitted their response to the 
committee.
  I knew the vote was going to be coming up last spring as to whether 
to release the report. I went to the secure site in one of our 
buildings and sat down every night for a week and read this executive 
summary, every single word--all 500 pages, all of the footnotes--and 
made my own judgment as one who was in no way invested in this report. 
Here are the conclusions I reached. I must say, until I sat and read 
it, I didn't fully comprehend what this issue was, why we needed this 
large report, why we needed to do this study. After reading it, I was 
shaken and convinced that the report was important and should be 
released.
  Basically, it has four conclusions. I am not going to go through them 
in detail, but No. 1 was: We committed torture. I am not going to argue 
that. I would say, as I said repeatedly, read the report. No person can 
read the description of what was done in our name and not conclude that 
it was way outside the values of our country and constituted torture by 
any definition.
  No. 2, it was terribly managed. That is not a very exciting point 
about management, but nobody was in charge. Contractors were actually 
designing the program and assessing whether it was successful--the 
people who had designed it and were implementing it. There was no 
central place at the CIA that managed it, so that was a problem.
  No. 3--and this we are going to talk about for a few minutes--it was 
not effective. The guts of this report are an analysis of the 20 
principal cases the CIA presented as justification for the torture to 
say that it worked, that it led to intelligence that was reliable and 
current, and the report goes through in excruciating detail looking at 
each one of those allegations.
  It basically finds that the information was either already available, 
it was available in our hands, it was available in other ways, and the 
witnesses had given up the data prior to their being subjected to these 
extraordinary measures. I am going to talk, as I mentioned, in a couple 
of minutes about this issue of effectiveness.
  I should have said this at the beginning. My poor words can't 
contribute a great deal to this debate, but the speech Senator John 
McCain made on this floor this morning should be required viewing for 
every schoolchild in America, every Member of this body, every Member 
of this Congress, and every American. He spoke eloquently about the 
violation of our ideals of this program and the fact that it cannot, 
will not, and could not work.
  The final point we take from the report is this program was 
continually misrepresented. It was misrepresented to the President, it 
was misrepresented to the Justice Department, it was misrepresented to 
the Congress, and it was misrepresented to the Intelligence Committee.

  The problem is that continues today. In the past few days we have 
seen an outburst of statements, speeches, and interviews on television 
saying it was effective. It wasn't effective, and the report makes that 
clear.
  There is a semantic sleight of hand going on, and I have already seen 
it in two or three interviews on television where people slide from the 
report and they say: The program of detention of people whom we 
captured after September 11 was effective in generating intelligence.
  Absolutely true. There is no doubt of that. People were detained, 
they were interrogated, they gave good intelligence, it taught us what 
we know about Al Qaeda, and it was very helpful to the country in 
preventing future plots.
  The question for the House, though, is was the torture effective? If 
you have somebody in custody, they give up good information, and then 
later you torture them and they don't give you anymore information, the 
torture didn't create that information or that intelligence. The 
question is did the extraordinary methods create additional evidence.
  People should cock their ears when they hear people say the program 
created this good intelligence. It did. But the program is not what we 
are talking about today. We are talking about so-called enhanced 
interrogation techniques.
  I would suggest when people come up with a euphemism such as enhanced 
interrogation techniques, that should tip us off that something is 
going on that we should be concerned about.
  I wrestled with this decision. It was not easy. There is risk 
involved. There has been a lot of commentary today. Our people are on 
alert. Will someone attack us because of this report?
  I can't deny that risk. I think it is impossible to say. But we have 
already learned that these people will attack us for any or no reason. 
They have been trying to attack us for 10 years. That is their reason 
for existing.
  ISIL has beheaded Americans, not because of this report, but because 
that is their agenda. Now they may issue a press release or a YouTube 
video and say we are doing this because of the report, but I would 
submit they are going to do it anyway.
  What they are going to cite--it is not the report, it is what we did 
that has inflamed opposition around the world, and it has done so for 
many years already.
  Finally, on the question of the risk, when the terrible activities at 
Abu Ghraib came to the attention of the Congress, we did a report. The 
Armed Services Committee did a study and issued a report in grisly 
detail of what was done, and at that point we had 100,000 troops in 
Iraq. If ever there was a report that would have inflamed public 
opinion in a foreign country and generated retribution against us, it 
was that. We cannot be intimidated by people who tell us that we cannot 
exercise and be true to our own ideals.
  But if there is any risk, why should we do it? Because these actions 
are so alien to our values, they are so alien to our principles that we 
simply can't countenance them.
  By the way, if this wasn't torture, if this wasn't a problem, why did 
the CIA destroy the tapes of one of these interrogations? That is what 
started all of this, when the Senate learned they had destroyed tapes. 
If they thought this was not torture--which is what they were telling 
us--then why are they destroying the tapes? That is what began this 
process.
  To me, one of the most telling quotes in the whole report was a back-
and-forth between the CIA and I think the White House--but I think it 
was within the CIA where the statement was made: ``Whatever you do, 
don't let Colin Powell find out about this, he'll blow his stack.'' Now 
that tells me they knew they were doing something that wasn't 
acceptable to our country and to the American people. But the second 
reason to release this report is the key: so it will never happen 
again. That is the whole deal here.

  The campaign of the last few days of people saying it worked and it 
wasn't torture and you shouldn't do it because

[[Page S6430]]

of the risk--that, to me, validates my concern because these people are 
essentially saying: We would do it again if we had the chance. And the 
only thing standing between them and doing it again is an Executive 
order signed by this President in January of 2009, which could be wiped 
out in the first week of a new Presidency or in the first month of a 
new Presidency. We cannot have this happen again.
  The oratory is that it works. I have a letter, which I will submit 
for the Record, from 20 former terrorist interrogators--Army, Air 
Force, CIA, FBI--saying these kinds of tactics don't work and, in fact, 
they produce bad intelligence. There is an article in Politico today by 
Mark Fallen, who is a 30-year interrogator, saying it doesn't work.
  We have to have this discussion and lay that to rest because the 
people who are saying it works are really saying: And we will do it 
again if we have to. And that is not who we are as people.
  Interestingly, in the CIA's response to the report--all during the 
early part of this past decade the argument was--and we are hearing it 
today--it works. We are certain it works. We got valuable intelligence. 
We got Osama bin Laden.
  The CIA is not saying that today. When they submitted their response 
to the committee's report, what they said about effectiveness was that 
it is unknowable whether it was effective. I believe the migration from 
the certainty they gave to Members of Congress and the President and 
the Department of Justice--the migration from ``certainty'' to 
``unknowable'' speaks volumes because they couldn't refute the facts 
that are in this report.
  If this idea that this kind of interrogation works becomes 
conventional wisdom, it will definitely happen again.
  I go back in conclusion to John McCain's statement this morning. I 
can't match his eloquence. It was one of the most powerful messages I 
have ever heard in this body or anywhere else. He talked about who we 
are as Americans, and he also talked from personal experience about 
what torture will do and whether it will produce good information, and 
I would submit that John McCain knows more about that particular 
subject than all the rest of us in this body put together.
  I got a critical note from a friend in Maine this morning that said 
``You know, you are naive'' and all those kinds of things. I just wrote 
him back and said, ``Don't take it from me; watch what John McCain had 
to say.''
  We are exceptional, but we are not exceptional because of natural 
resources or because we are smarter and better looking than anybody 
else; we are exceptional because of our values. We are one of the few 
countries in the world that was founded on explicit values and ideals 
and principles. And principles aren't something you discard when times 
get tough. That is when they are important. That is like saying: I am 
in favor of free press unless somebody says something offensive. These 
are principles that make us distinct and different.
  I believe this debate is about the soul of America. It is about who 
we want to be as a people. It is a hard debate. It is difficult. It is 
hard to talk about these things. This was a dark period. But I believe 
that having this discussion, having this debate, getting this 
information out--and by the way, all the information is going to be 
out: the report; the CIA's response was made public today; the minority 
had their own statement that is quite substantial. So the public is 
going to be able to look at all this information and make their own 
decisions. I looked at the information, and the decision I made was 
that this is important information the people of America are entitled 
to, they should understand, and we should move forward consistent with 
our ideals and our principles as a nation and see that something like 
this never happens again.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
the letter I referred to earlier.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                                                 February 4, 2014.
     Hon. Angus King,
     U.S. Senate, 359 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, 
         DC.
       Dear Senator King: We write to you as current and former 
     professional interrogators, interviewers, and intelligence 
     officials regarding the Senate Select Committee on 
     Intelligence's (SSCI) 6000-plus page study of the CIA's post-
     9/11 rendition, detention, and interrogation program. We 
     understand that the SSCI may soon take up the issue of 
     whether to pursue declassification and public release of the 
     study. In the interest of transparency and furthering an 
     understanding of effective interrogation policy, we urge you 
     to support declassification and release of as much of the 
     study as possible, with only such redactions as are necessary 
     to protect national security.
       Since the CIA program was established over a decade ago, 
     there has been substantial public interest in, and discussion 
     of, the fundamental efficacy of the so-called ``enhanced 
     interrogation techniques'' (EITs). Despite the employment of 
     these methods, critical questions remain unanswered as to 
     whether EITs are an appropriate, lawful, or effective means 
     of consistently eliciting accurate, timely, and comprehensive 
     intelligence from individuals held in custody. Based on our 
     experience, torture and other forms of abusive or coercive 
     techniques are more likely to generate unreliable information 
     and have repeatedly proven to be counterproductive as a means 
     of securing the enduring cooperation of a detained 
     individual. They increase the likelihood of receiving false 
     or misleading information, undermine this nation's ability to 
     work with key international partners, and bolster the 
     recruiting narratives of terrorist groups.
       We would like to emphasize that this view is further 
     supported by relevant studies in the behavioral sciences and 
     publicly available evidence, which show that coercive 
     interrogation methods can substantially disrupt a subject's 
     ability to accurately recall and convey information, cause a 
     subject to emotionally and psychologically ``shut down,'' 
     produce the circumstances where resistance is increased, or 
     create incentives for a subject to provide false information 
     to lessen the experience of pain, suffering, or anxiety.
       Despite this body of evidence, some former government 
     officials who authorized the CIA's so-called ``enhanced 
     interrogation'' program after 9/11 claim that it produced a 
     significant and sustained stream of accurate and reliable 
     intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots, save 
     American lives, and even locate Osama Bin Laden. While some 
     of the particular claimed successes of the program have been 
     disproven based on publicly available information, the 
     broader claim that the EIT program was necessary to disrupt 
     terrorist plots and save American lives is based on 
     classified information unavailable to the public.
       The SSCI study--based on a review of more than 6 million 
     pages of official records--provides an important opportunity 
     to shed light on these important questions. We understand 
     that the SSCI minority and CIA have separate views regarding 
     the meaning and significance of the official documentary 
     record. Those views are important and should also be made 
     public so that the American people have an opportunity to 
     decide for themselves whether the CIA program was ultimately 
     worth it.
       It is beyond time for this critical issue of national 
     importance to be driven by facts--not rhetoric or partisan 
     interest. We therefore urge you to vote in favor of 
     declassifying and releasing the SSCI study on the CIA's post-
     9/11 interrogation program.
           Sincerely,
         Tony Camerino, Glenn Carle, James T. Clemente, Jack 
           Cloonan, Gerry Downes, Mark Fallon, Brigadier General 
           David R. Irvine, USA (Ret.), Steven Kleinman, Marcus 
           Lewis, Mike Marks, Robert McFadden, Charles Mink, Joe 
           Navarro, Torin Nelson, Erik Phillips, William Quinn, 
           Buck Revell, Mark Safarik, Haviland Smith, Lieutenant 
           General Harry E. Soyster (Ret.).

  Mr. KING. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
  Mr. HEINRICH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator 
Levin be permitted to follow my remarks and speak for up to 10 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. HEINRICH. Mr. President, torture is wrong, it is un-American, and 
it doesn't work. Recognizing these important realities, the President 
signed an Executive order in January of 2009 that limited 
interrogations by any American personnel to the guidelines that are in 
the Army Field Manual, and he reinforced U.S. commitment to the Geneva 
Conventions. This closed the book on the Bush administration's 
interrogation program. But make no mistake--these weren't enhanced 
interrogations. This was torture. I would challenge anyone to read this 
report and not be truly disturbed by some of these techniques.
  Releasing the Intelligence Committee's study of the CIA's detention 
and interrogation program to the American people today will finally 
provide a thorough accounting of what happened and how it happened. In 
addition, like my colleague and friend from Maine

[[Page S6431]]

who spoke before me, I hope this process helps to ensure that it never 
ever happens again.
  This was a grave chapter in our history, and the actions taken under 
this program cost our Nation global credibility, and--let's be blunt--
they put American lives at risk. Some have suggested that releasing 
this report could put American lives at risk. But let's be clear. It 
has been the use of torture that has unnecessarily put Americans in 
harm's way.
  There is no question that there will never be a good time to release 
this study. We all know that for months, terrorists in the extremist 
group ISIS have been kidnapping and barbarically killing innocent 
Americans because of what we as a nation stand for. The response to 
their threats and terrorism should not be for us to change our American 
values; it should be to stand firm in our values and work with our 
allies to root out extremism and terrorism in all its forms.
  The release of this study will finally let us face what was done in 
the name of the American people and allow for future generations to use 
these findings to learn from the mistakes made by the architects of 
this program. This is an objective, fact-based study. It is a fair 
study. And it is the only comprehensive study conducted of this program 
and the CIA's treatment of its detainees in the aftermath of the 
September 11 attacks. Today marks an enormous, albeit painful, step 
into our future.
  It is important to know that these torture methods were the 
brainchild of a few CIA officials and their contractors. When I joined 
the Intelligence Committee two years ago, I began to read 
the classified report and was surprised to learn this. Frankly, it was 
not consistent with all of my assumptions. It wasn't what my prejudices 
told me to expect. But that is exactly why a fact-based study is so 
important.

  Furthermore, it is important to know that at every turn, CIA 
leadership avoided congressional oversight of these activities and, 
even worse, misled Congress. That leadership deliberately kept the vast 
majority of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees in the dark on 
the interrogation techniques until the day the President revealed the 
detention and interrogation program to the rest of the world in 2006--4 
years after it began.
  Even then, misrepresentations to the committee about the 
effectiveness of this program continued, in large part because the CIA 
had never performed any comprehensive review of the effectiveness of 
the interrogation techniques or the actions of its officers. Myths of 
the effectiveness of torture have been repeated, perpetuating the fable 
that this was a necessary program that somehow saved lives.
  The committee examined the CIA's claims of plots thwarted and 
detainees captured as a result of intelligence gained through torture. 
In each and every case, the committee found that the intelligence was 
already available from other sources or provided by the detainees 
themselves before they were tortured.
  However, we need to stop treating the issue of torture as one worthy 
of debate over its practical merits. This is about torture being 
immoral, being un-American. Reducing a human being to a state of 
despair through systematic subjugation, pain, and humiliation is 
unquestionably immoral. It should never happen again with the blessing 
of the Government of the United States of America.
  As my colleague who spoke before me--Senator King of Maine--said so 
well in an interview this morning, ``This is not America. This is not 
who we are.'' I think that sums up how I view the revelations in that 
report.
  The information in the study released today to the public will 
finally pull back the curtain on the terrible judgment that went into 
creating and implementing this interrogation program.
  The decision to use these techniques and the defense of the program 
were the work of a relatively small number of people at the CIA. This 
study is in no way a condemnation of the thousands of patriotic men and 
women at this great Agency who work tirelessly every day to protect and 
defend our Nation from very real and imminent threats using lawful 
measures; using effective measures. In fact, the insistence that so 
many intelligence successes were the result of enhanced interrogations 
negates and marginalizes the effective work done by thousands of other 
CIA officers not involved in these activities.
  What this study does is show that multiple levels of government were 
misled about the effectiveness of these techniques. If secretive 
government agencies want to operate in a democracy, there must be trust 
and transparency with those who are tasked with the oversight of those 
agencies.
  As the committee carries out future oversight, we will benefit from 
the lessons in this study. I hope we never again let the challenges of 
difficult times be used as an excuse to frustrate and defer oversight 
the way it was in the early years described in this report.
  Although President Obama ended the program by signing that Executive 
order in 2009, any future President could reverse it. It is worth 
remembering that years before this detention and interrogation program 
even began, the CIA had sworn off the harsh interrogations of its past. 
But in the wake of the terrorist attacks against the United States, it 
repeated those mistakes by once again engaging in brutal interrogations 
that undermined our Nation's credibility on the issue of human rights, 
produced information of dubious value, and wasted millions and millions 
of taxpayer dollars.
  The public interest in this issue too often has centered on the 
personalities involved and the political battle waged in the release of 
this study, but those stories are reductive, and I hope they will soon 
be forgotten. Because the story of what happened in this detention and 
interrogation program--and how it happened--is too important, and it 
needs to be fully understood so that future generations will not make 
the same mistakes that our country made out of fear.

  When America engages in these acts, with authorization from the 
highest levels of government, we invite others to treat our citizens 
and our soldiers the same way. This study should serve as a warning to 
those who would make similar choices in the future or argue about the 
efficacy of these techniques. Let us learn from the mistakes of the 
past, and let us never repeat these mistakes again.
  Before I close, I wish to say how important it is to acknowledge that 
the Intelligence Committee's study of the CIA's detention and 
interrogation program represents many, many years of hard work by 
Members and staff who faced incredible obstacles in completing their 
work. The fact that this study is finished is a testament to their 
dedication, and it is a testament to the dedication and focus of 
Chairman Rockefeller and Chairman Feinstein in deciding that oversight 
is our job, regardless of how long it takes.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The senior Senator from Michigan.
  Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, the report released today by the 
Intelligence Committee is an important addition to the public's 
knowledge about the CIA's use of torture, euphemistically described by 
some as ``enhanced interrogation techniques'' in the period following 
the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
  The use of these techniques was a failure, both moral and practical. 
These tactics violated the values this Nation has long stood for, while 
adding little benefit to our security. As GEN David Petraeus and others 
have pointed out, their use has placed U.S. personnel at greater risk 
of being tortured. They have tarnished America's standing in the world 
and undermined our moral authority to confront tyrants and torturers. I 
am glad this report will fully inform a public debate with facts that 
have remained classified for too long, and I hope it ensures that our 
Nation never again resorts to such brutal and misguided methods.
  The report lays out clearly that, contrary to claims by former CIA 
and Bush administration officials, these techniques did not produce 
uniquely valuable intelligence that saved lives. The report examines 20 
such specific representations that were used frequently by the CIA to 
make the case to policymakers for continued use of abusive techniques. 
In all 20 cases, the CIA's claims about the value of intelligence 
gathered through torture were inaccurate. At the same time the CIA

[[Page S6432]]

was making false claims about the effectiveness of these techniques, it 
was failing to mention that some detainees subjected to these 
techniques provided false, fabricated information--information that led 
to time-consuming wild-goose chases.
  This is not at all surprising when we consider the origin of these 
abusive interrogation techniques. In 2008 the Senate Armed Services 
Committee produced a detailed investigative report into the treatment 
of detainees in military custody. That report traced the path of 
techniques such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced nudity 
from the military's survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training, 
or SERE training, the path to interrogations of U.S. detainees. SERE 
training was not designed to train U.S. personnel to torture detainees. 
Rather, it was designed to prepare U.S. personnel to survive torture at 
the hands of our enemies. SERE training simulated techniques that were 
used by the Chinese interrogators during the Korean War--techniques 
designed to elicit a confession--any confession--whether true or false. 
Those who tortured U.S. troops were not after valuable actionable 
intelligence. They were after confessions they could use for propaganda 
purposes.
  Defenders of the CIA's actions have claimed that abusive techniques 
produced key intelligence on locating bin Laden that couldn't have been 
acquired through other means. This is false, as the Intelligence 
Committee's report demonstrates in detail. Not only was the key 
information leading to bin Laden obtained through other means not 
involving abusive interrogation techniques by the CIA, but, in fact, 
the CIA detainee who provided the most significant information about 
the courier provided the information prior to being subjected to 
abusive interrogation.

  There has been a great deal of conversation, and rightly so, about 
the need for effective congressional oversight of our intelligence 
community and the obstacles that exist to that oversight. This report 
highlights many such obstacles. In one case, this report makes public 
the likely connection between the Senate's efforts to oversee 
intelligence and the destruction of CIA tapes documenting abusive 
interrogation of detainees. In 2005 I sponsored a resolution, with the 
support of ten colleagues, to establish an independent national 
commission to examine treatment of detainees since 9/11. According to 
emails quoted in the report released today, Acting CIA General Counsel 
John Rizzo wrote on October 31, 2005, that the commission proposal 
``seems to be gaining some traction,'' and argued for renewed efforts 
``to get the right people downtown''--that is, at the White House--``on 
board with the notion of our destroying the tapes.'' Does it sound a 
little bit like Watergate? The videos were destroyed at the direction 
of Jose Rodriguez, then the head of the CIA's National Clandestine 
Service, just 1 day after the November 8, 2005, vote on our commission 
proposal in the Senate. It is just one striking example of the CIA's 
efforts to evade oversight.
  Some have argued against releasing this report, suggesting that it 
could spark violence against American interests. Fundamentally, the 
idea that release of this report undermines our security is a massive 
exercise in blame shifting. Telling the truth about how we engaged in 
torture doesn't risk our security. It is the use of torture that 
undermines our security. Release of this report is hopefully an 
insurance policy against the danger that a future President, a future 
intelligence community, and a future Congress might believe that we 
should compromise our values in pursuit of unreliable information 
through torture. If a future America believes that what America's CIA 
did in 2001, 2002, and 2003 was acceptable and useful, we are at risk 
of repeating the same horrific mistakes. That is a threat to our 
security.
  Torture is never the American way. Concealing the truth is never the 
American way. Our Nation stands for something better. Our people 
deserve something better--they deserve an intelligence community that 
conducts itself according to the law, according to basic human values, 
and with the safety of our troops always in mind. They deserve better 
than intelligence tactics that are likely to produce useless lies from 
people trying to end their torture being used against them, instead of 
producing valuable intelligence.
  I thank Chairman Feinstein for her leadership in completing and 
releasing this report. I thank Senator Rockefeller for his longstanding 
effort in this regard. I thank Senator McCain and others for speaking 
out on the need to ensure that the United States never again repeats 
these mistakes.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

                          ____________________



[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 149 (Tuesday, December 9, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6433-S6434]



      SSCI STUDY OF THE CIA'S DETENTION AND INTERROGATION PROGRAM

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I had a chance briefly earlier, when 
Chairman Dianne Feinstein of the Senate Intelligence Committee and her 
predecessor as Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Commerce 
Chairman Jay Rockefeller, were on the floor, to express my appreciation 
to them for the leadership they showed in bringing the Senate 
Intelligence Committee report through a very long ordeal and finally 
before the American public today.
  I am not going to revisit what the report says. I was on the 
Intelligence Committee as it was prepared. I was closely involved in 
its preparation. The points I would like to make here today are, first, 
to once again thank Chairman Rockefeller and Chairman Feinstein for 
persisting through this process, particularly Chairman Feinstein, who I 
think saw very intense resistance both within the Senate and within the 
CIA to this effort. They, I think, have done something that is in the 
very best traditions of the Senate.
  The second thing I will say is that in my opinion, in America, an 
open democracy like ours lives and dies by the truth. If we have done 
something wrong, if we have done something we should not have done, 
then we should come clean about it. That is what this report does, in 
excruciating, painstaking detail.
  Let me credential the report for a minute. When the CIA was offered a 
chance to challenge the facts of the report, they had it for 6 months. 
My understanding is they came up with one factual correction which was 
accepted. You hear a lot of blather in the talk show circuit now about 
how the report is inaccurate. Well, the agency that least wanted to see 
this report come out and most wanted to hammer at it had 6 months with 
full access to all of the files and the underlying knowledge of what 
was done. The best they could come up with was a single correction. So 
I hope we can get past whether it was correct.
  The other thing we should get past is this was a bunch of second-
armchair thinking by people who approved the program originally and 
now, on reflection, want to look good. The Senate was not briefed on 
this program until the public found out about it. The Senate 
Intelligence Committee was not briefed on this program until the public 
found out about it. The only people who were briefed on it were the 
Chairs, the Chair and the Vice Chair on the House and the Senate side. 
They were told strictly not to talk to anybody, not to talk to staff, 
not to consult with lawyers, in some cases not even to talk with each 
other. So the idea that the Senate is now having some kind of second 
thoughts about this, having once approved it--part of the findings of 
the report are that the Senate was misled. Not only was the Senate 
misled, but it appears the executive branch was misled as well.
  The point that I would like to conclude with is that when you have a 
wrong, a considerable wrong that has taken place--and I think that for 
an American agency to torture a human being is a very considerable 
wrong--it tends to affect nearby areas. You cannot contain the wrong. 
So congressional oversight was compromised in order to protect this 
program. People simply were not told. When they were told, they were 
given watered-down, misleading, or outright false versions.
  The separation of powers has been compromised by this. A Federal 
executive agency has actually used its technological skills to hack 
into the files of a congressional investigative committee. That has to 
be a first in this country's history. A subject of a congressional 
investigation was allowed to file a criminal referral with the 
Department of Justice against members of the investigative committee's 
staff. That, I believe, is a first in the history of separation-of-
powers offenses in this country.
  The integrity of reporting not only through congressional oversight, 
but up into the executive branch, appears to have been compromised to 
protect this program with information that the government already knew, 
from legitimate, proper, professional interrogation, being ascribed to 
the torture program. You can line up the timeline. You can see that the 
information was disclosed first. You can see where higher-ups in the 
executive branch were told that that information was due to the torture 
which occurred after the

[[Page S6434]]

information was received. That simply does not meet the test of basic 
logic.
  The final thing is that it compromised the integrity of the way we 
look at our law. The Department of Justice and the Office of Legal 
Counsel wrote opinions designed to allow and protect this program that 
were so bad that they have since been withdrawn by the Department of 
Justice.
  The Presiding Officer is a very able and experienced lawyer. Those of 
us who have been in the Department of Justice know well that the Office 
of Legal Counsel stands at the pinnacle of the Department of Justice in 
terms of legal talent, ability, and acumen. Many of us believe the 
Department of Justice stands at the pinnacle of the American legal 
profession. So those are the people who ordinarily are the best of the 
best. When they write legal opinions so shoddy that they have to be 
withdrawn, when they overlook and fail to even address the U.S. Circuit 
Court decisions that describe waterboarding as torture when they are 
answering the question, is waterboarding torture, that is shoddy legal 
work.
  When I first got a look at this and came to the Senate floor to speak 
about it, I described it as ``fire the associate'' quality legal work. 
That is what we got from the very top of the Department of Justice. It 
is not because there was a lack of talent there. It is because things 
were bent and twisted to support this program. So it is very important 
that the truth just came out.

  I am very glad this has happened. It is a sad day in many respects 
because these are hard truths. These are hard facts to have to face. 
But we are better off as a country if we face hard truths and hard 
facts.
  I will close by saying this. I have traveled all over that theater 
looking at the way our Central Intelligence Agency operates and the way 
our other covert operations operate. I am extremely proud of what our 
intelligence services do. I am incredibly impressed by the courage and 
the talent of the young officers who go overseas into often very 
difficult and dangerous situations and do a brilliant job. In many 
respects, it is for them that I think this report needs to be out. It 
needs to be known that this was not the whole department, that there 
are many officers who had nothing to do with it and would want nothing 
to do with it and knew better. There were many people who were 
professionals in interrogation who knew how amateurish this was. It was 
done by a bunch of contractors, basically.
  So I think we should be well aware, as we reflect on this, of their 
courage and of the sacrifice and of the ability and of the discipline 
of the young men and women who put themselves in harm's way to make 
sure that this country has the information and the intelligence it 
needs to succeed in the world. I am proud of them.
  I am also proud of the Intelligence Committee and our staffs who 
worked so hard to perform this extraordinary service.
  I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. REID. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call 
be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 149 (Tuesday, December 9, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6443-S6444]



      SSCI STUDY OF THE CIA'S DETENTION AND INTERROGATION PROGRAM

  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I would like to personally commend Senator 
Feinstein for releasing this report today. We have all heard the 
Justice Louis Brandeis quote that ``sunlight is the best disinfectant'' 
but occasionally we need a real world reminder. Today, Senator 
Feinstein and the members and staff of the Intelligence Committee have 
provided that. The findings of this report are truly remarkable, laying 
bare that the CIA interrogation program was simultaneously far more 
brutal and far less effective than previously claimed.
  This 600-page report is long overdue and makes clear that the CIA's 
so-called ``enhanced interrogation techniques'' failed to produce any 
otherwise unavailable intelligence that saved lives. At no time were 
these coercive interrogation techniques effective.
  But more critically, this report makes clear to all Americans that 
what took place was not in keeping with our ideals as a nation. We have 
no greater duty than to protect the American people and our national 
security. But the single best way to do that is--and always has been--
to do that in a manner consistent with our laws and our traditions. 
Horrific and torturous practices are explicitly prohibited and are 
never necessary. I thank Senator Feinstein, Senator Udall and other 
members of the committee for the months and years they have committed 
to making this release a reality.
  Ms. MIKULSKI. Mr. President, I rise today to speak on the release of 
the declassified Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on the 
CIA's past rendition, detention and interrogation practices.
  As a longtime member of the committee, I strongly support today's 
release of the declassified Executive Summary, Findings, Conclusions 
and Additional and Minority Views of the committee's report. With the 
release of this report, the American people finally have the 
information they need to understand the CIA's interrogation practices 
that spanned 2001 through 2009, when President Obama put an end to the 
Bush-era program.
  The CIA's practices went against our values as Americans and damaged 
America's global reputation. The committee's report shows not only that 
torture did not extract the ``otherwise unavailable'' intelligence that 
some CIA officials claimed, it did not work as a policy or in practice.
  I have consistently opposed the repugnance, legality and efficacy of 
torture. I supported FBI Director Robert Mueller's directive saying FBI 
agents may not participate in torture. I have repeatedly and publicly 
expressed my frustration about being lied to and manipulated by some 
CIA officials over many years. As I said during the Intelligence 
Committee's hearing confirming John Brennan as CIA Director, ``I'm 
going to be blunt and this will be no surprise to you, sir--but I've 
been on this Committee for more than 10 years, and with the exception 
of Mr. Panetta, I feel I've been jerked around by every CIA Director.''
  My views against torture have been consistent with those of Senator 
John McCain, whose stance against torture is particularly compelling 
given his own experiences as a prisoner of war. I have also supported 
the use of interrogation techniques as laid out in the Army Field 
Manual and have decried the use of contractors by the CIA in the 
torture of detainees.
  Some people have raised concerns about the timing of the release of 
this report and that our enemies could use it as a pretext for 
violence. Long before the release of this report, however, terrorist 
groups made their violent intentions towards America clear. They hate 
America and our freedoms. They use violence for the sake of violence. 
No public action is without risks, whether by President or Congress, 
but we also risk who we are as Americans by suppressing the facts in 
this report.
  I would like to reiterate that this report was reviewed and redacted 
in conjunction with the CIA and White House, and the Director of 
National Intelligence approved its declassification. It was a difficult 
process that took over a year, but we finally got to a place where the 
narrative of the report was adequately preserved while ensuring that 
CIA personnel and operations were not compromised. The DNI weighed the 
risks and ultimately certified the declassification of the report.
  To be clear, my support for this report in no way diminishes my 
respect for the men and women of the CIA, who are faithfully and 
legally doing their duties. The CIA's intelligence professionals put 
their lives at risk for our country. They deserve our support and 
respect.
  I would like to thank Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman 
Dianne Feinstein for her leadership, as well as my committee colleagues 
from both sides of the aisle who supported this investigation. 
Throughout the frustrating and sometimes contentious process of 
producing this report, we never gave up on pursuing the truth. Thanks 
also to the committee staff who worked tirelessly on this report at 
great sacrifice to themselves and their families.
  This report sheds light on a complicated episode in America's 
history, but it is also a testament to the value of never giving up on 
the search for truth and accountability. I hope that future generations 
will read it, study it, learn from it and make sure that torture is 
never again used by the U.S. government.

[[Page S6444]]



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