Congress and the CIA Clash Over Counter-Terrorism Report

A classified report being composed by the Senate Intelligence Committee concerning the CIA's counter-terrorism practices has been continually disputed by the agency.

A classified report being composed by the Senate Intelligence Committee concerning the CIA's counter-terrorism practices has been continually disputed by the agency. Reuter reports that the intelligence agency disputes a draft approved by the committee last year, which runs thousands of pages and has not been made public.

The committee, under Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein launched a sweeping investigation of counter-terrorism practices such as waterboarding, but CIA officials apparently complained that researchers failed to interview key people, drawing the objectivity of the report into question. The committee hopes to have an updated version soon.

Today, December 13, marks the one-year anniversary of the committee's adoption of the report, which has not been released to the public. Over at Politico, W. Paul Smith has compiled a number of politicians' statement regarding the 6,300-page compilation of the CIA's detainment and torture policies. War veteran Senator John McCain said a year ago that,

What I have learned confirms for me what I have always believed and insisted to be true – that the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience, but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence. 

Officials told Reuters that "Committee Democrats concluded that the CIA obtained little or no critical intelligence from the use of secret prisons and harsh interrogations tactics…which could not have been obtained through non-coercive methods." The CIA disputes that assertion, which would make sense if they wanted to avoid the appearance that they had supposedly spent the last few years committing human rights violations with little to show for it.

The report cost more than $40 million to produce. At least eight U.S. senators want the report to see the light of day, although there is no timeline for when that might actually happen.