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“SSCI STUDY OF THE CIA'S DETENTION AND INTERROGATION PROGRAM” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the Senate section on pages S6433-S6434 on Dec. 9, 2014.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
SSCI STUDY OF THE CIA'S DETENTION AND INTERROGATION PROGRAM
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I had a chance briefly earlier, when Chairman Dianne Feinstein of the Senate Intelligence Committee and her predecessor as Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller, were on the floor, to express my appreciation to them for the leadership they showed in bringing the Senate Intelligence Committee report through a very long ordeal and finally before the American public today.
I am not going to revisit what the report says. I was on the Intelligence Committee as it was prepared. I was closely involved in its preparation. The points I would like to make here today are, first, to once again thank Chairman Rockefeller and Chairman Feinstein for persisting through this process, particularly Chairman Feinstein, who I think saw very intense resistance both within the Senate and within the CIA to this effort. They, I think, have done something that is in the very best traditions of the Senate.
The second thing I will say is that in my opinion, in America, an open democracy like ours lives and dies by the truth. If we have done something wrong, if we have done something we should not have done, then we should come clean about it. That is what this report does, in excruciating, painstaking detail.
Let me credential the report for a minute. When the CIA was offered a chance to challenge the facts of the report, they had it for 6 months. My understanding is they came up with one factual correction which was accepted. You hear a lot of blather in the talk show circuit now about how the report is inaccurate. Well, the agency that least wanted to see this report come out and most wanted to hammer at it had 6 months with full access to all of the files and the underlying knowledge of what was done. The best they could come up with was a single correction. So I hope we can get past whether it was correct.
The other thing we should get past is this was a bunch of second-
armchair thinking by people who approved the program originally and now, on reflection, want to look good. The Senate was not briefed on this program until the public found out about it. The Senate Intelligence Committee was not briefed on this program until the public found out about it. The only people who were briefed on it were the Chairs, the Chair and the Vice Chair on the House and the Senate side. They were told strictly not to talk to anybody, not to talk to staff, not to consult with lawyers, in some cases not even to talk with each other. So the idea that the Senate is now having some kind of second thoughts about this, having once approved it--part of the findings of the report are that the Senate was misled. Not only was the Senate misled, but it appears the executive branch was misled as well.
The point that I would like to conclude with is that when you have a wrong, a considerable wrong that has taken place--and I think that for an American agency to torture a human being is a very considerable wrong--it tends to affect nearby areas. You cannot contain the wrong. So congressional oversight was compromised in order to protect this program. People simply were not told. When they were told, they were given watered-down, misleading, or outright false versions.
The separation of powers has been compromised by this. A Federal executive agency has actually used its technological skills to hack into the files of a congressional investigative committee. That has to be a first in this country's history. A subject of a congressional investigation was allowed to file a criminal referral with the Department of Justice against members of the investigative committee's staff. That, I believe, is a first in the history of separation-of-
powers offenses in this country.
The integrity of reporting not only through congressional oversight, but up into the executive branch, appears to have been compromised to protect this program with information that the government already knew, from legitimate, proper, professional interrogation, being ascribed to the torture program. You can line up the timeline. You can see that the information was disclosed first. You can see where higher-ups in the executive branch were told that that information was due to the torture which occurred after the information was received. That simply does not meet the test of basic logic.
The final thing is that it compromised the integrity of the way we look at our law. The Department of Justice and the Office of Legal Counsel wrote opinions designed to allow and protect this program that were so bad that they have since been withdrawn by the Department of Justice.
The Presiding Officer is a very able and experienced lawyer. Those of us who have been in the Department of Justice know well that the Office of Legal Counsel stands at the pinnacle of the Department of Justice in terms of legal talent, ability, and acumen. Many of us believe the Department of Justice stands at the pinnacle of the American legal profession. So those are the people who ordinarily are the best of the best. When they write legal opinions so shoddy that they have to be withdrawn, when they overlook and fail to even address the U.S. Circuit Court decisions that describe waterboarding as torture when they are answering the question, is waterboarding torture, that is shoddy legal work.
When I first got a look at this and came to the Senate floor to speak about it, I described it as ``fire the associate'' quality legal work. That is what we got from the very top of the Department of Justice. It is not because there was a lack of talent there. It is because things were bent and twisted to support this program. So it is very important that the truth just came out.
I am very glad this has happened. It is a sad day in many respects because these are hard truths. These are hard facts to have to face. But we are better off as a country if we face hard truths and hard facts.
I will close by saying this. I have traveled all over that theater looking at the way our Central Intelligence Agency operates and the way our other covert operations operate. I am extremely proud of what our intelligence services do. I am incredibly impressed by the courage and the talent of the young officers who go overseas into often very difficult and dangerous situations and do a brilliant job. In many respects, it is for them that I think this report needs to be out. It needs to be known that this was not the whole department, that there are many officers who had nothing to do with it and would want nothing to do with it and knew better. There were many people who were professionals in interrogation who knew how amateurish this was. It was done by a bunch of contractors, basically.
So I think we should be well aware, as we reflect on this, of their courage and of the sacrifice and of the ability and of the discipline of the young men and women who put themselves in harm's way to make sure that this country has the information and the intelligence it needs to succeed in the world. I am proud of them.
I am also proud of the Intelligence Committee and our staffs who worked so hard to perform this extraordinary service.
I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. REID. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
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