After an explosive indictment of the CIA’s torture practices in the name of enhanced interrogation of detainees after the 9/11 terror attacks, a fierce political battle has erupted between the Democrats and the Republicans over the Senate Intelligence Committee’s damning report released on Tuesday.
While President Barack Obama promptly denounce the extreme measures that the CIA resorted to during the preceding Bush era, former President George W. Bush himself and his deputy Dick Cheney rebutted the findings, and Senate Republicans came out with their own voluminous note of dissent.
The monumental report, running into more than 6,000 pages, speaks not only of such harsh practices as “near drowning” and “rectal rehydration” of detainees, but goes on to say that the CIA routinely misled the White house and Congress about its methods or the information it obtained in the process.
Although many details have been known for long, a declassified summary of the report discloses for the first time details of all 119 prisoners held in CIA custody, with at least 26 of them held because of mistaken identities or bad intelligence.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the Democrat-controlled Intelligence Committee, commented that the practices that the CIA followed in the name of enhanced interrogation techniques represented a “stain on our values and on our history”. Not only were they “deeply flawed”, but they often resulted in “fabricated” information, she said. The methods were more brutal than what had been acknowledged by the CIA to the Bush administration officials.
Senate Republicans, who had boycotted the committee’s investigation, came out with their 167-page response to the majority findings. While pushing back against the committee’s conclusions, the dissenting Republicans, led by Senator Saxby Chambliss, said the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme “saved lives and played a key role in weakening Al Qaeda”.
President Obama, who cried a halt to the CIA programme when he took over from Bush, said the Senate report “reinforces my long-held view that these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests”.
“Our nation did many things right in those difficult years. At the same time, some of the actions were contrary to our values. That is why I unequivocally banned torture when I took office, because one of our most effective tools in fighting terrorism is staying true to our ideals at home and abroad,” Obama said in a statement.