Major controversy surrounding the CIA‘s torture tactics have recently surfaced after the Intelligence Committee released a 500 page declassified summary report from an investigation that began in the spring of 2009.
The report concludes that interrogation techniques used by the CIA after the 9/11 attacks were not effective. Additionally, they were more brutal than the CIA had initially described to Congress and the public. It states at the beginning of the document that “the CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.”
Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif and the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee said in the report, “It is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured.”
Feinstein stressed that it was necessary to release the report so that U.S. official would never use torture again.
The report states that, “CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values.”
Despite President Obama’s signing of an executive order which prohibited the CIA from holding detainees other than on a “short-term, transitory basis,” torture took place.
The report was down-sized after Committee staff reviewed more than six million pages of materials from 2009 to 2012.
