[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 17337-17338]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




      SSCI STUDY OF THE CIA'S DETENTION AND INTERROGATION PROGRAM

  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I have served on the Senate Intelligence 
Committee for 14 years and came to the Senate floor in the spring of 
2005 to join with Senator Rockefeller in calling for the committee to 
investigate the CIA's interrogation activities and the possible use of 
torture. In 2009 I joined my Intelligence Committee colleagues in 
voting to approve Chair Feinstein's motion to launch an investigation 
into these activities.
  I said at the time, I continue to believe it today, that what this 
debate over torture requires is an infusion of facts. Americans can 
hear me and other policymakers argue that the CIA's so-called enhanced 
interrogation techniques constituted torture and did not work, and 
Americans can also hear various former officials argue that these 
techniques are not torture and that they produced uniquely valuable 
information. What is important is that today all Americans finally have 
access to the facts so they can make up their own minds. Personally, I 
hope this report closes the door on the possibility of our country ever 
resorting 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 chose to 
follow the advice of private, outside contractors who told them 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 would note that the CIA officials later paid these same contractors 
to evaluate the effectiveness of their own work.
  CIA officials repeatedly represented to the public, to the Congress, 
to the White House, and to the Justice Department that the 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 5 long years of investigation, our 
committee found that none of these claims held up. The CIA's so-called 
enhanced interrogation techniques included a number of techniques that 
our country has long considered torture. Furthermore, the CIA's own 
interrogation records make it clear that the use of these techniques in 
the CIA's secret prisons was far harsher than was described in 
representations by the CIA.
  CIA Director Michael Hayden testified that any deviation from 
approved procedures were reported and corrected, but CIA interrogation 
logs described a wide variety of harsh techniques that the Justice 
Department's infamous torture memos did not even consider. Practices 
such as placing detainees in ice water or threatening a detainee with a 
power drill were often not appropriately recorded 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 withheld waste buckets from detainees.
  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 the report's 
most important findings is that this did not seem to be 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 individual's 
family.
  At another point the 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 there was not information to detain them. The review 
even found email records that described Director Hayden instructing a 
CIA officer to underreport the total number of CIA detainees. To this 
day the CIA's 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, the report doesn't attempt to determine the motivation 
behind these misrepresentations. The report doesn't reach judgments 
about whether individuals deliberately lied or unknowingly passed along 
inaccurate information. It simply compares the representations the CIA 
made to Congress, the Justice Department, the public, and others to the 
information found in the CIA's own internal records, and it notes where 
those comparisons reveal significant contradictions.
  One of the biggest sets of contradictions revolve 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. The claim was repeated over and over and over again. Over the 
years CIA officials came up with a number of examples to try to support 
the 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 20 most prominent or frequently cited examples 
used by the CIA and our investigators spent years going through them. 
Twenty examples are going to seem like a lot to anybody who reads the 
report, but the committee members who were working on the report agreed 
it

[[Page 17338]]

was important to be comprehensive and avoid cherry-picking just one or 
two cases. In every one of these cases the CIA statements about the 
unique effectiveness of coercive interrogation techniques were 
contradicted in one way or another by the Agency's own internal 
records.
  I am going to repeat that because I think it is a particularly 
important finding. In every one of these 20 cases, CIA statements about 
the unique effectiveness of coercive interrogation was contradicted in 
one way or another by the Agency's own internal records. We are not 
talking about minor inconsistencies. We are talking about fundamental 
contradictions.
  For example, in congressional testimony and documents prepared for 
White House briefings, the CIA claimed that a detainee had identified 
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks after he 
was detained by the CIA and subjected to the CIA's coercive 
interrogation techniques, but in fact CIA records clearly show that Abu 
Zubaydah provided this information during noncoercive interrogations by 
the FBI prior to the beginning of his coercive CIA interrogations and 
days before he was even moved to the CIA's secret detention site. I 
personally expected that there would be at least one or two cases where 
vague or incomplete records might appear to support the Agency's 
claims, but in fact in every one of these 20 examples they and the 
arguments for them crumble under close scrutiny.
  The report that is being released today includes a number of 
redactions aimed at protecting our national security. I will say in my 
view some of these redactions are unnecessary and a few of them even 
obscure some details that would help Americans understand parts of the 
report. Overall I am satisfied that the redactions do not make the 
report unreadable and it would be possible for Americans to read the 
report to learn not only what happened but how it happened, and 
learning that is essential to keep it from happening again.
  One of the reasons this public release is necessary is that the 
current CIA leadership has been resistant to acknowledging the full 
scope of the mistakes and misrepresentations that have surrounded this 
program. Some of this resistance is made clear in the Agency's official 
response to the committee's report, and I suspect some of it will be 
echoed by former officials who were involved in the program.
  Finally, I want to wrap up by reminding people about the documents 
that have come to be known as the Panetta review. When former CIA 
Director Panetta came to the Agency in 2009, he made it clear from the 
outset that he wanted to work to put the Agency's history of torture 
behind it and that he wanted to cooperate with the Intelligence 
Committee inquiry. He also sensibly asked CIA personnel to review 
internal CIA records and get a sense of what this investigation could 
be expected to find.
  The review got off to a solid start. It began to identify some of the 
same mistakes and misrepresentations that are identified in our 
committee's report. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this review 
ever made it to the Director's desk. Instead, publicly available 
documents made it clear this review was quietly terminated by CIA 
attorneys who thought it was moving too fast.
  Earlier this year the Agency conducted an unprecedented and secret 
search of Senate files in an effort to find out whether the committee 
had obtained copies of the Panetta review. After it was found that 
committee investigators had in fact obtained the Panetta review, the 
CIA actually attempted to file unsupported criminal allegations against 
Senate staff members. After the search was publicly revealed by the 
press, the CIA's own spokesperson acknowledged in USA Today that the 
search had taken place and it had been done because the CIA was looking 
to see if our investigators had found a document the CIA didn't want 
the Congress to have. Incredibly, that same week CIA Director John 
Brennan told reporter Andrea Mitchell of NBC that the CIA had not spied 
on Senate files and that ``nothing could be further from the truth.''
  I think this incident and the difference between what was said to 
Andrea Mitchell and what the Agency's own people said to USA Today 
reflects once again what I call an alarming culture of misinformation. 
Instead of acknowledging the serious organizational problems that are 
laid out in this report, the Agency's leadership seems inclined to try 
to sweep them under the rug. This means organizational problems aren't 
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 don't have all the facts about the CIA's 
experience. That is why the release today is so important.
  In concluding, I thank all of the staff who have put in hours and 
hours and nights and weekends and time away from their families to get 
this investigation completed. I praise Chair Feinstein and our former 
Chair Senator Rockefeller, who together were resolute in pushing for 
this kind of congressional oversight.

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