Flawed U.S. Senate report on CIA torture doomed to "eternal controversy": Researcher
in December 1975, ‘If you wait too long, both the public and the members of Congress forget what you’re trying to reform.’ He was right.”
On the other hand, she said, the Senate committee investigating CIA torture consisted entirely of Democrats and took five years to deliver what turned out to be a heavily redacted report. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) chaired the committee.
While Feinstein’s staff worked from 2009 to 2014, Zegart said, public outrage about torture faded — in fact, public support for coercive techniques actually increased. According to Zegart, a 2007 Rasmussen poll showed that 27 percent of Americans said the U.S. should torture captured terrorists, while 53 percent said the U.S. should not. A 2012 YouGov national poll conducted by Zegart found that support for torture rose 14 points while opposition fell 19 points.
Another problem was that the investigation did not hold a single public hearing to generate public attention or support, she said. In contrast, Church’s investigation held twenty-one public hearings in fifteen months.
Finally, the Senate report is still almost entirely classified, Zegart said.
“The ‘report’ released in December 2014 was a redacted executive summary of 500 pages — that’s less than 10 percent of the 6,700-page report. No one knows when the other 6,200 pages will see the light of day,” she wrote.
“Extraordinary resistance”
The aforementioned factors gave CIA defenders the upper hand when the report was eventually issued, she said.
“When the summary was released, former CIA officials launched an unprecedented public relations campaign replete with a web site, op-ed onslaught, and even a ‘CIAsavedlives’ Twitter hashtag,” Zegart wrote.
And so, the episode represented one of the controversial episodes in the history of the CIA’s relationship with the U.S. Senate, Zegart said.
“They [the Senate)] faced extraordinary resistance from the CIA that included spying on the investigation; stonewalling and whittling away what parts of the report would be declassified; and a publicity campaign to discredit the study as soon as it was released,” she wrote.
Zegart said the Feinstein investigation serves as a “cautionary tale” for Congress in its constitutional role of intelligence oversight.
“Even those who consider the interrogation and detention programs a dark mark on American history should be wary of calling the Senate report the definitive account of the subject or a model of intelligence oversight success,” she wrote.
— Read more in Mark Phythian, “An INS Special Forum: The US Senate Select Committee Report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” Intelligence and National Security (2 November 2015) (DOI:10.1080/02684527.2016.1103442)
