CIA torture report cover-up

This video from the United States Senate says about itself:

Feinstein: CIA Spied on Intelligence Committee (Full Speech)

11 March 2014

Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein on Tuesday accused the CIA of spying on her committee’s computers without authorization — in possible violation of the law and the Constitution — and suggested the CIA may have also tried to engage in an effort to intimidate her staff.

Read the full story here.

From the Huffington Post in the USA:

Torture Report Fight Erupts In Chaos

Posted: 11/20/2014 6:11 pm EST Updated: 11/20/2014 6:28 pm EST

WASHINGTON — Before White House chief of staff Denis McDonough came to brief Senate Democrats on Thursday afternoon, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had a little pep talk with his flock. Every Tuesday, during the weekly caucus lunches, he said, you all gripe and moan about the White House. But then when the White House comes by, there’s never a peep.

The talk may not have been necessary. The White House’s briefing to Democrats on immigration Thursday erupted instead into a confrontation over the Senate’s classified torture report, Senate sources told The Huffington Post.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, waited for the immigration discussion to end and then pulled out a prepared speech that she read for five or six minutes, making the case for the release of the damning portrayal of America’s post-9/11 torture program. …

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who served as intelligence committee chair before Feinstein, was furious after the meeting, and accused the administration of deliberately stalling the report.

“It’s being slow-walked to death. They’re doing everything they can not to release it,” Rockefeller told HuffPost.

“It makes a lot of people who did really bad things look really bad, which is the only way not to repeat those mistakes in the future,” he continued. “The public has to know about it. They don’t want the public to know about it.”

As negotiations continue, Rockefeller said Democrats were thinking creatively about how to resolve the dispute. “We have ideas,” he said, adding that reading the report’s executive summary into the record on the Senate floor would probably meet with only limited success. “The question would be how much you could read before they grabbed you and hauled you off.”

Besides Rockefeller, Sens. Martin Heinrich (N.M.), Ron Wyden (Ore.), Mark Udall (Colo.) and Mark Warner (Va.) all spoke up in defense of Feinstein, a source with knowledge of the situation said.

Senate Democrats have for years been pursuing an accounting of the acts committed in the name of the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks. Having finished preparing a 6,000-page report, Democrats are now locked in a struggle with the White House over releasing even a redacted summary.

Feinstein had hoped to release the summary during the summer, but has clashed with the White House over the use of aliases for CIA officials mentioned in the report. …

Rockefeller said the administration’s unwillingness to use aliases reflects a broader contempt for congressional oversight.

“The White House doesn’t want to release this. They don’t have to. And all we do is oversight, and they’ve never taken our oversight seriously,” he said. (He then added that he did allow for one exception, the Church Committee.) “Under Bush there was no oversight at all. Remember the phrase, ‘Congress has been briefed’? What that meant was that I and our chairman […] and two comparable people in the House had met with [former Vice President Dick] Cheney in his office for 45 minutes and given a little whirley birdie and a couple charts.”

“They had a specialty for being unforthcoming in our efforts at oversight,” he added, “and therefore there is no incentive for them to change their behavior.”

Democrats aren’t the only ones who want to see the report released. A number of Republicans, most of whom opposed the so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques used at Guantanamo Bay and other facilities, also say America needs to come clean in order to restore its moral standing. …

Rockefeller said that the administration itself is the one doing harm to the nation. “They’re doing enormous damage to the country,” he said.

UN torture report condemns sleep deprivation among US detainees: here.

THE WORD TORTURE WON’T BE IN THE CIA TORTURE REPORT “The summary [of the impending CIA torture report] is expected to reignite the debate over whether the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques in the first years of the war on terror amounted to torture. Although the summary report is said to not use the word ‘torture,’ officials said it would describe practices that any layman would understand as torture. ‘We tortured some folks,’ President Barack Obama said in July. ‘We did some things that are contrary to our values.’” [Bloomberg]