WASHINGTON — A scathing Senate report on the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other torture techniques after the September 2001 terrorist attacks will be archived in President Obama’s presidential papers to ensure it is not destroyed, the White House said Monday.

Defenders of the controversial 6,700-page report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, which ran from 2002 to 2006, worried that Republicans who disputed the critical findings would try to round up and shred the few existing copies once Obama leaves office.

In December 2014, the committee released a partially redacted 450-page executive summary with key findings. The rest of the report remains classified.

It revealed that CIA officials not only had employed cruel and degrading techniques against detainees at secret prisons known as “black sites,” but also that the program was so poorly run that the CIA lost track of some detainees.

It said the CIA repeatedly had given Congress and the Justice Department inaccurate information about the interrogations, impeding oversight.

It also argued that the CIA’s use of what it called “enhanced interrogation techniques” – which included hitting, sleep deprivation, mock executions and rectal feeding – produced no useful intelligence about imminent threats.

Advertisement

The full Senate Intelligence Committee ordered the report in 2006 after it learned that a senior CIA officer had destroyed about 100 video tapes of the harsh interrogations.

The committee soon split on partisan lines, however. In December 2012, the committee approved the report 9-6, with only one Republican voting in favor.

Obama, who condemned the techniques as torture, signed an executive order when he took office in 2009 requiring the CIA to use only interrogation methods listed in the U.S. Army Field Manual “unless the Attorney General with appropriate consultation provides further guidance.”

Donald Trump, now the president-elect, said at a debate in March, “We should go for waterboarding, and we should go tougher than waterboarding.”

He repeated those assertions multiple times on the campaign trail. However, he recently said that he was impressed when Gen. James Mattis, his pick for secretary of defense, said he could get more reliable information by offering detainees cigarettes and beer.

The CIA’s inspector general mistakenly destroyed one of the few copies of the full report last summer.

That prompted Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, to ask what the White House was doing to ensure sure copies are preserved for future administrations and, ultimately, public release.

On Friday, Feinstein received an answer.

“The full Study will be preserved under the Presidential Records Act (PRA),” White House Counsel W. Neil Eggleston wrote in a letter to Feinstein and in a similar letter to the committee chair, Sen. Richard M. Burr, R-N.C.


Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.

Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.