Executive department policies that prohibit staff from reading the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report released last year have drawn the ire of lawmakers.
According to the New York Times on Tuesday, the Justice Department, the State Department, and the Pentagon are all in receipt of the 6,700-page classified report on the CIA’s post 9/11 enhanced interrogation program, but all have declined to even open it.
The dismissal of the findings runs counter to the urging of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the author of the report, who circulated the copies last December with instructions that the massive inquiry be reviewed.
“.@SenFeinstein produced the facts about the CIA’s use of torture. Unfortunately, some can’t handle the truth,” the official Senate Democrats account tweeted Tuesday in response to the story.
Complicating matters is Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who replaced Feinstein as the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in January. Upon assuming the post, Sen. Burr reclaimed Congressional ownership of the classified report, and called on the administration to return all the copies it had received.
The DOJ complied, according to the Times, and “prohibited officials from the government agencies that possess it from even opening the report, effectively keeping the people in charge of America’s counterterrorism future from reading about its past.”
The paper stated that copies of the torture reports are sitting in “vaults across Washington, still in their original envelops” at the various departments.
An unclassified summary of the report was released at the end of last year revealing in gruesome detail the torture methods employed by CIA officers against terror suspects at “black sites” around the world.
In March, Sen. Feinstein grilled FBI Director James Comey for having not read the classified version of the Intelligence Committee’s findings.
“One of my disappointments was to learn that the six year report of the Senate intelligence committee on the detention and interrogation program sat in a locker and no one looked at it,” she told Comey during a Senate hearing.
Comey claimed at the time that he was unaware of the physical whereabouts of the report.
Feinstein sent a follow-up letter last week to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, stating that the report should be unsheathed so that the mistakes of the past “are not repeated.”
To date, no one who participated in the CIA’s torture program has been held responsible for violating war crimes laws.
