Enhanced interrogationsFlawed U.S. Senate report on CIA torture doomed to "eternal controversy": Researcher
The U.S. Senate summary report on the allegations of CIA torture during the “war on terror” failed to live up to its original purpose, a Stanford scholar said. The researchers says that the U.S. Senate’s 2014 summary report on alleged CIA torture and interrogation Four key errors have doomed the Senate report to “eternal controversy,” she said: “It was not bipartisan, took too long to write, made little effort to generate public support along the way, and produced a declassified version that constituted a tiny portion of the full study.”
Cooperating states allowing CIA secret prisons operating under host country's laws // Source: commons.wikimedia.org
The U.S. Senate summary report on the allegations of CIA torture during the “war on terror” failed to live up to its original purpose, a Stanford scholar said.
In a new article in the journal Intelligence and National Security, Stanford political scientist Amy Zegart wrote that the report has “not changed minds on either side of the torture debate and is unlikely to do so.”
Stanford U reports that in December 2014, after five years of research, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a summary report of its investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency’s terrorist detention and interrogation program between 2001 and 2006.
As Zegart noted, the Senate’s summary released to the public amounted to less than a tenth of the full report, most of which remains classified. In an interview with Stanford News, she said the issue at hand should concern all Americans.
“How do secret agencies operate in a democratic society? Were the CIA’s interrogation methods effective? Were they legal or moral? What role should the Congress have played when decisions about detainees were being made? All of these are vital questions which, sadly, remain unanswered and hotly contested – in large part because they have been caught in the maw of politics on both sides,” said Zegart, the co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
“A tiny portion of the full study”
Zegart explained that four key errors have doomed the Senate report to “eternal controversy.”
“It was not bipartisan, took too long to write, made little effort to generate public support along the way, and produced a declassified version that constituted a tiny portion of the full study,” she said.
In contrast, Zegart said, the U.S. Senate’s 1975-76 Church Committee investigation of intelligence abuses made different calls on all four issues, which helped it achieve significantly more impact. That committee was formed in the wake of Watergate and disclosures in the New York Times that U.S. intelligence agencies had engaged in a number of illegal activities for years, including widespread domestic surveillance on American citizens.
She said the Church Committee was bipartisan and finished its job in 16 months. As a result, Congress passed new laws aimed at curbing aggressive spying on Americans and political assassinations abroad, among other measures.
Zegart wrote, “This was deliberate: As one Church Committee source told the New York Times
