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THE UNITED TORTURE STATES OF AMERICA
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"Die USA sind ein Folterstaat"
(Jakob Augstein, SPIEGEL, December 11, 2014)
"It is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term,
CIA detainees were tortured."
(Dianne Feinstein, Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence)
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The huge PDF (65 megabytes) of the scanned SSCI Study is downloadable
at various websites in the internet. Look for filename sscistudy1.pdf
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Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and
Interrogation Program
UNITED STATES SENATE
Foreword by Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Dianne Feinstein
Findings and Conclusions
Executive Summary
Approved December 13, 2012
Updated for Release April 3, 2014
Declassification Revisions December 3, 2014
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Foreword
On April 3, 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted
to send the
Findings and Conclusions and the Executive Summary of its final
Study on the
CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program to the President for
declassification
and subsequent public release.
This action marked the culmination of a monumental effort that officially
began
with the Committee's decision to initiate the Study in March 2009,
but which had
its roots in an investigation into the CIA's destruction of videotapes
of CIA
detainee interrogations that began in December 2007.
The full Committee Study, which totals more than 6,700 pages, remains
classified
but is now an official Senate report. The full report has been
provided to the White
House, the CIA, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense,
the
Department of State, and the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence in the
hopes that it will prevent future coercive interrogation practices
and inform the
management of other covert action programs.
As the Chairman of the Committee since 2009, I write to offer some
additional
views, context, and history.
I began my service on the Senate Intelligence Committee in January
2001. I
remember testimony that summer from George Tenet, the Director
of Central
Intelligence, that warned of a possible major terrorist event against
the United
States, but without specifics on the time, location, or method
of attack. On
September 11, 2001, the world learned the answers to those questions
that had
consumed the CIA and other parts of the U.S. Intelligence Community. ^
I recall vividly watching the horror of that day,to include the
television footage of
innocent men and women jumping out of the World Trade Center towers
to escape
the fire. The images, and the sounds as their bodies hit the pavement
far below,
will remain with me for the rest of my life.
It is against that backdrop - the largest attack against the American
homeland in
our history - that the events described in this report were undertaken.
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^ For information on the events at the CIA prior to September 11,
2001, see the Final Report of the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (9/11 Commission)
and Office of the Inspector General
Report on CIA Accountability With Respect to the 9/11 Attacks.
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Nearly 13 years later, the Executive Summary and Findings and Conclusions
of
this report are being released. They are highly critical of the
CIA's actions, and
rightfully so. Reading them,it is easy to forget the context in
which the program
began - not that the context should serve as an excuse, but rather
as a warning for
the future.
It is worth remembering the pervasive fear in late 2001 and how
immediate the
threat felt. Just a week after the September 11 attacks, powdered
anthrax was sent
to various news organizations and to two U.S. Senators. The American
public was
shocked by news of new terrorist plots and elevations of the color-coded
threat
level of the Homeland Security Advisory System. We expected further
attacks
against the nation.
I have attempted throughout to remember the impact on the nation
and to the CIA
workforce from the attacks of September 11, 2001. I can understand
the CIA's
impulse to consider the use of every possible tool to gather intelligence
and remove
terrorists from the battlefield,^ and CIA was encouraged by political
leaders and
the public to do whatever it could to prevent another attack.
The Intelligence Committee as well often pushes intelligence agencies
to act
quickly in response to threats and world events.
Nevertheless, such pressure, fear, and expectation of further terrorist
plots do not
justify, temper, or excuse improper actions taken by individuals
or organizations in
the name of national security. The major lesson of this report
is that regardless of
the pressures and the need to act, the Intelligence Community's
actions must
always reflect who we are as a nation, and adhere to our laws and
standards. It is
precisely at these times of national crisis that our government
must be guided by
the lessons of our history and subject decisions to internal and
external review.
Instead, CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided
to initiate a
program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation
techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our
values.
This Conomittee Study documents the abuses and countless mistakes
made
between late 2001 and early 2009. The Executive Summary of the
Study provides
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^ It is worth repeating that the covert action authorities approved
by the President in September 2001 did not provide
any authorization or contemplate coercive interrogations.
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a significant amount of new information, based on CIA and other
documents, to
what has already been made public by the Bush and Obama Administrations,
as
well as non-governmental organizations and the press.
The Committee's full Study is more than ten times the length of
the Executive
Summary and includes comprehensive and excruciating detail. The
Study
describes the history of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation
Program from its
inception to its termination, including a review of each of the
119 known
individuals who were held in CIA custody.
The full Committee Study also provides substantially more detail
than what is
included in the Executive Summary on the CIA's justification and
defense of its
interrogation program on the basis that it was necessary and critical
to the
disruption of specific terrorist plots and the capture of specific
terrorists. While the
Executive Summary provides sufficient detail to demonstrate the
inaccuracies of
each of these claims, the information in the full Committee Study
is far more
extensive.
I chose not to seek declassification of the full Committee Study
at this time. I
believe that the Executive Summary includes enough information
to adequately
describe the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program, and the
Committee's
Findings and Conclusions cover the entirety of the program. Seeking
declassification of the more than six thousand page report would
have significantly
delayed the release of the Executive Summary. Decisions will be
made later on the
declassification and release of the full 6,700 page Study.
In 2009, when this effort began, I stated (in a press release co-authored
with the
Vice Chairman of the Committee, Senator Kit Bond) that "the purpose
is to review
the program and to shape detention and interrogation policies in
the future." The
review is now done. It is my sincere and deep hope that through
the release of
these Findings and Conclusions and Executive Summary that U.S.
policy will
never again allow for secret indefinite detention and the use of
coercive
interrogations. As the Study describes, prior to the attacks of
September 2001, the
CIA itself determined from its own experience with coercive interrogations,
that
such techniques "do not produce intelligence," "will probably result
in false
answers," and had historically proven to be ineffective. Yet these
conclusions
were ignored. We cannot again allow history to be forgotten and
grievous past
mistakes to be repeated.
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President Obama signed Executive Order 13491 in January 2009 to
prohibit the
CIA from holding detainees other than on a "short-term, transitory
basis" and to
limit interrogation techniques to those included in the Army Field
Manual.
However, these limitations are not part of U.S. law and could be
overturned by a
future president with the stroke of a pen. They should be enshrined
in legislation.
Even so, existing U.S. law and treaty obligations should have prevented
many of
the abuses and mistakes made during this program. While the Office
of Legal
Counsel found otherwise between 2002 and 2007, it is my personal
conclusion
that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were
tortured. I also
believe that the conditions of confinement and the use of authorized
and
unauthorized interrogation and conditioning techniques were cruel,
inhuman, and
degrading. I believe the evidence of this is overwhelming and incontrovertible.
While the Conmiittee did not make specific recommendations, several
emerge
from the Committee's review. The CIA, in its June 2013 response
to the
Committee's Study from December 2012, has also already made and
begun to
implement its own recommendations. I intend to work with Senate
colleagues to
produce recommendations and to solicit views from the readers of
the Committee
Study.
I would also like to take this opportunity to describe the process of this study.
As noted previously, the Committee approved the Terms of Reference
for the
Study in March 2009 and began requesting information from the CIA
and other
federal departments. The Committee, through its staff, had already
reviewed in
2008 thousands of CIA cables describing the interrogations of the
CIA detainees
Abu Zubaydah and 'Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, whose interrogations
were the
subject of videotapes that were destroyed by the CIA in 2005.
The 2008 review was complicated by the existence of a Department
of Justice
investigation, opened by Attorney General Michael Mukasey, into
the destruction
of the videotapes and expanded by Attorney General Holder in August
2009. In
particular, CIA employees and contractors who would otherwise have
been
interviewed by the Committee staff were under potential legal jeopardy,
and
therefore the CIA would not compel its workforce to appear before
the Committee.
This constraint lasted until the Committee's research and documentary
review
were completed and the Committee Study had largely been finalized.
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Furthermore, given the volume and internal nature of relevant CIA
documents, the
CIA insisted that the Committee enter into an arrangement where
our staff would
review documents and conduct research at a CIA-leased facility
rather than at the Committee's offices on Capitol Hill.
From early 2009 to late 2012, a small group of Committee staff reviewed
the more
than six million pages of CIA materials, to include operational
cables, intelligence
reports, internal memoranda and emails, briefing materials, interview
transcripts,
contracts, and other records. Draft sections of the Study were
prepared and
distributed to the full Committee membership beginning in October
2011 and this
process continued through to the Committee's vote to approve the
full Committee
Study on December 13, 2012.
The breadth of documentary material on which the Study relied and
which the
Committee Study cites is unprecedented. While the Committee did
not interview
CIA officials in the context of the Committee Study, it had access
to and drew
from the interviews of numerous CIA officials conducted by the
CIA's Inspector
General and the CIA Oral History program on subjects that lie at
the heart of the
Committee Study, as well as past testimony to the Committee.
Following the December 2012 vote, the Committee Study was sent to
the President
and appropriate parts of the Executive Branch for comments by February
15, 2013.
The CIA responded in late June 2013 with extensive comments on
the Findings
and Conclusions, based in part on the responses of CIA officials
involved in the
program. At my direction, the Committee staff met with CIA representatives
in
order to fully understand the CIA's comments, and then incorporated
suggested
edits or comments as appropriate.
The Committee Study, including the now-declassified Executive Summary
and
Findings and Conclusions, as updated is now final and represents
the official views
of the Committee. This and future Administrations should use this
Study to guide
future programs, correct past mistakes, increase oversight of CIA
representations
to policy makers, and ensure coercive interrogation practices are
not used by our
government again.
Finally, I want to recognize the members of the staff who have endured
years of
long hours poring through the difficult details of one of the lowest
points in our
nation's history. They have produced the most significant and comprehensive
oversight report in the Committee's history, and perhaps in that
of the U.S. Senate,
and their contributions should be recognized and praised.
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Daniel Jones has managed and led the Committee's review effort from
its
inception. Dan has devoted more than six years to this effort,
has personally
written thousands of its pages,and has been integrally involved
in every Study
decision. Evan Gottesman, Chad Tanner, and Alissa Starzak have
also played
integral roles in the Committee Study and have spent considerable
years
researching and drafting specific sections of the Committee Study.
Other Comumittee staff members have also assisted in the review
and provided
valuable contributions at the direction of our Committee Members.
They include,
among others, Jennifer Barrett, Nick Basciano, Michael Buchwald,
Jim Catella,
Eric Chapman, John Dickas, Lorenzo Goco, Andrew Grotto, Tressa
Guenov, Clete
Johnson, Michael Noblet, Michael Pevzner, Tonmiy Ross, Caroline
Tess, and
James Wolfe. The Committee's Staff Director throughout the review,
David
Grannis, has played a central role in assisting me and guiding
the Committee
through this entire process. Without the expertise, patience, and
work ethic of our
able staff, our Members would not have been able to complete this
most important
work.
Dianne Feinstein
Chairman
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
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