wyden: floor statement - interrogation report

of 11

Statement of Senator Ron Wyden on the Senate Intelligence Committees

Investigation of the Central Intelligence Agencys Detention and Interrogation

Program

As prepared for delivery

December 9, 2014

M. President, I have now served on the Senate Intelligence Committee for

fourteen years, so I have long experience with the Senates efforts to investigate

the CIAs detention and interrogation program. I came to the Senate floor in

spring 2005 to join Senator Rockefeller, who was then the committees Vice

Chairman, in calling for the committee to investigate the CIAs interrogation

activities and the possible use of torture. In 2009, I joined my colleagues on the

committee in voting 14-1 to approve Chairman Feinsteins motion to launch an

investigation of these activities.

As I said at the time, I believed that what the debate over torture and coercive

interrogation needed was an infusion of facts. People today can hear me and

other policymakers argue that the CIAs so-called enhanced interrogation

techniques constituted torture, and did not work. And they can also hear

various former officials argue that these techniques are not torture, and that they

of 11

produced uniquely valuable information. I want the American people to have

access to the facts, so that they can make up their own minds about this

important issue. I believe that when they read this report they will see that it is a

meticulously documented examination of this issue, and I hope that they will

agree that the United States should never resort to torture again.

Americans have known since the days of the Salem witch trials that torture is an

unreliable means of obtaining truthful information, in addition to being morally

reprehensible. But following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a small

number of CIA officials decided to listen to the advice of outside contractors who

told them that the way to quickly get important information from captured

terrorist suspects was by using coercive interrogation techniques that had been

developed and used by communist dictatorships during the Cold War. I will note

that CIA officials later paid these same contractors to evaluate the effectiveness

of their own work.

CIA officials repeatedly represented that these techniques were safe, that they

were only used against high-level terrorist captives, and that their use provided

unique, otherwise unavailable intelligence that saved lives. After five years of

of 11

investigation, our committee found that none of these claims holds up under

close scrutiny.

The CIAs so-called enhanced interrogation techniques included a number of

techniques that the United States has long recognized as torture. Furthermore,

the CIAs own interrogation records make it clear that the use of these techniques

in the CIAs secret prisons was far harsher than was described in representations

by the CIA.

CIA Director Michael Hayden testified [in closed session] that any deviations from

approved procedures were reported and corrected, but CIA interrogation logs

describe a wide variety of harsh techniques that even the Justice Departments

infamous torture memos did not consider. Incidents like placing detainees in ice

water or threatening a detainee with a power drill were often not appropriately

reported or corrected when they happened.

Director Hayden also testified that detainees at a minimum [have] always had a

bucket to dispose of their human waste. But in fact CIA detainees were routinely

placed in diapers for extended periods of time, and CIA cables show multiple

instances in which interrogators deliberately withheld waste buckets from

detainees.

of 11

Even more chillingly, CIA records indicate that some CIA prisoners may not have

been terrorists at all. Some of these individuals were in fact ruthless terrorists

with blood already on their hands, but one of this reports most alarming findings

is that this does not seem to have been the case in every instance. In one

particularly troubling case, the CIA held an intellectually challenged man

prisoner and attempted to use tapes of him crying as leverage against another

member of the mans family. At another point, a CIA official noted in writing that

the CIA was holding a number of detainees about whom we know very little.

And the CIA on multiple occasions continued to hold people even after CIA

officers concluded that there was not enough information to detain them. Our

review even found email records that describe Director Hayden instructing a CIA

officer to under-report the total number of CIA detainees. To this day the CIAs

official response to this report indicates that senior CIA officials are alarmingly

uninterested in determining exactly how many detainees the CIA even held.

To be clear, our report does not attempt to determine the motivation behind

these misrepresentations. This report does not reach judgments about whether

individuals were deliberately lying or unknowingly passing along inaccurate

information. It simply compares the representations that the CIA made to

Congress, the Justice Department, the public, and others to the information found

of 11

in the CIAs own internal records, and it notes where these comparisons reveal

significant contradictions.

One of the biggest sets of contradictions revolves around the repeated claim that

the use of these techniques produced unique, otherwise unavailable intelligence

that saved lives. CIA officials made this claim to the White House, the Justice

Department, the Congress and the public. And they repeated this claim over and

over and over again.

Over the years CIA officials came up with a number of examples to try to support

this claim, such as the names of particular terrorists supposedly captured as a

result of coercive interrogations, or plots that had been supposedly thwarted

based on this unique, otherwise unavailable information.

The Committee took the twenty most prominent or frequently cited examples

used by the CIA, and our investigators spent years going through them. Twenty

examples are going to feel like a lot to anyone who reads this report all the way

through, but the committee members who were working on this report agreed

that it was important to be thorough and avoid cherry-picking just one or two

cases.

of 11

In every single one of these cases, CIA statements about the unique effectiveness

of coercive interrogation techniques were contradicted in one way or another by

the CIAs own internal records. Im going to repeat that, because I think that is a

pretty stunning finding. In every single one of these twenty cases, CIA statements

about the unique effectiveness of coercive interrogation techniques were

contradicted in one way or another by the CIAs own internal records. I am not

talking about minor inconsistencies. Im talking about fundamental

contradictions. For example, in congressional testimony and documents prepared

for White House briefings, the CIA claimed that a detainee named Abu Zubaydah

had identified Khalid Shaykh Muhammed as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks

after he was detained by the CIA and subjected to the CIAs coercive interrogation

techniques. But in fact CIA records clearly show that Abu Zubaydah provided this

information during non-coercive interrogations by the FBI, prior to the beginning

of his coercive CIA interrogations, and days before he was even moved to the

CIAs secret detention site.

I had personally expected that there would be at least one or two cases where

vague or incomplete records might appear to support the CIAs claims. But in fact

every one of these twenty examples crumbles under close scrutiny.

of 11

And when I say close scrutiny, Im talking about one of the most thorough

investigations in the history of the United States Senate. The full version of this

report is over 6,700 pages long and contains almost 38,000 footnotes. The

summary report that is being released today is 500 pages long by itself, and also

contains literally thousands of footnotes. And it is based on a five-year review of

over six million pages of documents, including interrogation logs, interview

transcripts, internal emails and memoranda, official presentations to Congress,

the Justice Department and the White House, and other documents. Its findings

do not rest on speculation or incriminating fragments of communications, but on

a vast body of documentary evidence.

The report that is being released today includes a number of redactions aimed at

protecting national security. I will say quite frankly that I believe some of these

redactions are unnecessary, and a few of them even obscure some details that

would help people understand parts of the report. But overall I am satisfied that

these redactions do not make the report unreadable, and that it will be possible

for Americans who read the report to learn not only what happened, but how it

happened, which is of course essential to keeping it from happening again.

of 11

One of the reasons that this public release is necessary is that the current CIA

leadership has been alarmingly resistant to acknowledging the full scope of the

mistakes and misrepresentations that surrounded this program for so many years.

Some of this resistance is made clear in the CIAs official response to the

committees report, and I expect that some of it will be echoed by former officials

who were involved in the program.

So I think it is important to briefly remind people about a set of documents known

as the Panetta Review. When former CIA Director Panetta came in to the Agency

in 2009, he made it clear from the outset that he wanted to work to put the

Agencys history of torture behind it, and that he wanted to cooperate with the

Intelligence Committees investigation. He also quite sensibly asked some CIA

personnel to review internal CIA records and get a sense of what this investigation

could be expected to find. This review got off to a decent start, and it began to

identify some of the same mistakes and misrepresentations that are identified in

our committees report. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this review ever

made it to Director Panettas desk. Instead, publicly available documents make it

clear that this review was quietly terminated by CIA attorneys who thought that it

was moving too fast.

of 11

Earlier this year the CIA secretly conducted an unprecedented search of Senate

files in an effort to find out whether the committee had obtained any copies of

the Panetta Review. After they found that committee investigators had in fact

obtained the Panetta Review, the CIA actually attempted to file unsupported

criminal allegations against these Senate staff members. After this search was

publicly revealed by the press, the CIAs own spokesman acknowledged in USA

Today that this search had taken place, and that it had been done because the CIA

was looking to see if our investigators had found a document that the CIA did not

want Congress to have. That same week, CIA Director John Brennan told reporter

Andrea Mitchell that the CIA had not spied on Senate files, and that nothing

could be further from the truth.

I think this incident and the CIAs overall response to this report clearly

demonstrate an alarming culture of misinformation. Instead of acknowledging

the serious organizational problems that are laid out in this report, the CIAs

leadership seems inclined to try to sweep them under the rug. That means that

these organizational problems arent going to be fixed unless they are laid out

publicly. And there is also a danger that other countries or even future

administrations might be tempted to use torture if they dont have all the facts

about the CIAs experience. Thats why todays release is so important.

of 11

Id like to join my colleagues in thanking all of the staff who have poured so many

hours into this investigation over the past five years. Id also like to thank

Chairman Feinstein leading this effort, and our former Chairman, Senator

Rockefeller, who has fought hard for congressional oversight of Americas

intelligence agencies for many, many years.

And Id like to conclude by thanking my friend and colleague, Senator Mark Udall

of Colorado. Ive had the privilege of serving with Senator Udall on the

Intelligence Committee for the past several years, and Im genuinely impressed by

his commitment to protecting both American security and core American values.

Mark Udall is a man whos not afraid to stand alone and fight for what he believes

is right, and Ive seen that across a wide spectrum of issues, from mass

surveillance to war and peace to interrogation and torture. When the fight to

declassify this report got bumpy, there were some who suggested that it might

end up getting buried forever. Mark Udall made it clear that under no

circumstances would he allow that to happen. Over the years we lost our share

of 13 to 2 votes, but Mark never got deterred by setbacks, and as time went on a

lot of those debates eventually ended up swinging our way. But win or lose

Senator Udall has been an incredible partner, and Im grateful to have had the

opportunity to serve with him.

wyden: floor statement - interrogation report

Documents