Dem Sens. Rip Obama's Hindrance of Investigation of Torture

Udall, Rockefeller (US Senate Historical Office)

Last week, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the executive summary of its investigation of the Detention and Interrogation Program of the Central Intelligence Agency.  In statements made later from the floor of the Senate, two Democrats on the said committee -- Mark Udall, who is the senior senator from Colorado, and John "Jay" Rockefeller IV, who is the senior senator from West Virginia -- spoke of President Obama's interference with their work on this matter and of his refusal to appropriately respond to many facts about it.  The following are excerpts from the speech by Udall, many of which were apparently not online in writing as delivered and that I therefore transcribed.  Boldface is added.
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The process of compiling, drafting, redacting and now releasing this report has been much harder than it needed to be...  By releasing the Intelligence Committee's landmark report, we reaffirm that we are a nation that does not hide from its past but learns from it, and that an honest examination of our shortcomings is not a sign of weakness but the strength of our great republic.  From the heavily redacted version... delivered to the committee by the CIA in August, we made significant progress in clearing away the thick, obfuscating fog these redactions represented...  [O]ur committee chipped away at over 400 areas of disagreement with the administration on redactions down to just a few...  [T]he redaction process itself was filled with unwarranted and completely unnecessary obstacles...

Congressional oversight is... especially important to those parts of the government that operate in secret, as the Church Committee discovered decades ago.  The challenges the Church Committee... discovered are still with us today: how to ensure secret government actions are conducted within the confines of the law...

In light of the president's... executive order disavowing torture, his... acknowledgement "we tortured some folks," and Asst. Secy. of State [Tomasz] Malinowski's statement... to the UN Committee against Torture that "we hope to lead by example" in correcting our mistakes, one would think this administration is leading the efforts to right the wrongs of the past and ensure the American people learn the truth about the CIA's torture program.  Not so.

The late Sen. Frank
Church, D-ID (US Senate
Historical Office)

In fact, it has been nearly a six-year struggle [with] a Democratic administration, no less, to get this study out...  I worried this administration would succeed in keeping this study entirely under wraps.  So, while the study clearly shows the CIA's detention and interrogation program itself was deeply flawed, the deeper, more endemic problem lies in a CIA, assisted by a White House, that continues to try to cover up the truth.  It's this deeper problem that illustrates the challenge we face today: reforming an agency that refuses to even acknowledge what it has done...

Those who criticize the committee's study for [supposedly] overly focusing on the past should understand its findings directly relate to how the CIA operates today...  We know about the nearly 1,000 documents the CIA electronically removed from the committee's dedicated database on two occasions in 2010, which the CIA claimed its personnel did at the direction of the White House...

From the beginning of his term as CIA director, John Brennan was openly hostile toward and dismissive of the committee's oversight and its efforts to review the detention and interrogation program.  During his confirmation hearing, I obtained a promise from John Brennan he would meet with committee staff on the study once confirmed.  After his confirmation, he changed his mind.

In December 2012, when the classified study was approved in a bipartisan vote, the committee asked the White House to coordinate any executive branch comments prior to declassification.  The White House provided no comment.  Instead, the CIA responded for the executive branch... on June 27, 2013.  The CIA's formal response to this study under Director Brennan clings to false narratives about the CIA's effectiveness when it comes to the CIA's detention and interrogation program.  It includes many factual inaccuracies, defends the use of torture, and attacks the committee's oversight and findings...  I believe its flippant and dismissive tone represents the CIA's approach to oversight and the White House's willingness to let the CIA do whatever it likes...

In March 2009, then-CIA director Leon Panetta announced the formation of a director's review group to look at the agency's detention and interrogation program...  The director's review group looked at the same CIA documents that were being provided to our committee and they produced a series of documents that became the Panetta Review...  [T]he Panetta Review corroborates many of the significant findings of the committee's study.  Moreover, the Panetta Review frankly acknowledges significant problems and errors made in the CIA's detention and interrogation program.  Many of these same errors are denied or minimized in the Brennan Response...

Brennan (CIA)

[D]rafts of the Panetta Review had been provided by the CIA unknowingly to our committee's staff years before...  So, when the committee received the Brennan Response, I expected a recognition of errors and a clear plan to ensure the mistakes identified would not be repeated...  Instead, the CIA continued not only to defend the program and deny any wrongdoing but also to deny its own conclusions to the contrary found in the Panetta Review.  In light of those clear factual disparities..., committee staff grew concerned the CIA was knowingly providing inaccurate information to the committee in the present day, which is a serious offense...  I've requested the full document, a request that has been denied by Dir. Brennan...  Dir. Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of torture.  In other words, the CIA is lying...

Let me turn to the search of the Intelligence Committee's... dedicated computers in January.  The CIA's illegal search was conducted out of concern the committee staff was provided with the Panetta Review...  Instead of just asking the committee if it had access to the Panetta Review, the CIA searched, without authorization or notification, the committee computers the agency had agreed were off limits, and in so doing, the agency may have violated... the Constitution as well as federal criminal statues and Executive Order 12333...  [D]espite admitting behind closed doors to the committee the CIA conducted the search, Dir. Brennan publicly... said such allegations of computer hacking were beyond "the scope of reason."

The CIA then made a criminal referral to the Dept. of Justice against the committee staff... working on the study.  Chairman [Dianne] Feinstein believed these actions were an effort to intimidate the committee staff -- the very staff charged with CIA oversight -- and I strongly agree with her...

The CIA's inspector general subsequently opened an investigation into the CIA's unauthorized search and found... CIA employees did, in fact, improperly access the committee's dedicated computers.  The investigation found no basis for the criminal referral on the committee staff.  The IG also found the CIA personnel involved demonstrated a "lack of candor about their activities" to the inspector general...  [T]he full report should be declassified and publicly released, in part because Dir. Brennan still refuses to answer the committee's questions about the search...

Panetta (Glenn Fawcett/
Dept. of Defense)

To date, there has been no accountability for the CIA's actions or for Dir. Brennan's failure of leadership.  Despite the facts presented, the president has expressed full confidence in Dir. Brennan and demonstrated that trust by making no effort at all to reign him in.  The president stated [it would not be] appropriate for him to wade into these issues that exist between the committee and the CIA...  [T]he committee should be able to do its oversight work consistent with our constitutional principle of the separation of powers without the CIA posing impediments or obstacles as it has and as it continues to do today.  For the White House to not recognize this principle and the gravity of the CIA's actions deeply troubles me...  Far from being a disinterested observer in the committee/CIA battles, the White House has played a central role from the start.  If... Panetta's memoir is to be believed, the president was unhappy about Dir. Panetta's initial agreement with the committee in 2009 to allow staff access to operational cables and other sensitive documents about the torture program...

There are more questions that need answers about the role of the White House in the committee's study.  For example, there are the 9,400 documents... withheld from the committee by the White House...  The White House has never made a formal claim of executive privilege over the documents, yet it has failed to respond to the chairman's request for the documents or to compromise-proposals she has offered to review a summary listing of them.  When I asked CIA general counsel Stephen Preston about the documents, he noted "the agency has deferred to the White House and has not been substantially involved in subsequent discussions about the disposition of these documents."  ...White House officials need to explain why they pulled back documents the CIA believed were relevant to the committee's investigation and responsive to our direct request.

The White House has not led on this issue in the manner we expected when we heard the president's campaign speeches in 2008 and read the executive order he issued...  [A]fter so much has come to light about the CIA's barbaric program... Pres. Obama's response was that we "crossed a line" as a nation and that "hopefully, we don't do it again..."  That's not good enough.  We need to be better than that.  There can be no cover-up.  There can be no excuses.  If there's no more leadership from the White House helping the public understand the CIA's torture program wasn't necessary..., what's to stop the next White House and CIA director from supporting torture?

Feinstein, D-CA (US
Senate Historical Office)

Finally, the White House has not led on transparency as then-Senator Obama promised...  [C]onsistent with his promise, Pres. Obama issued Executive Order 13526, which clarified information should be classified to protect sources and methods but not to obscure key facts or cover up embarrassing or illegal acts.  But actions speak louder than words.  This administration... has released information only when forced to by a leak or by a court order or by an oversight committee.  The redactions to the committee's executive summary... have been a case study in this refusal to be open.  Despite requests both the chairman and I made for the White House alone to lead the declassification process, it was given by the White House to the CIA -- the same agency that is the focus of this report -- and predictably, the redacted version that came back to the committee... obscured key facts and undermined key findings and conclusions of the study.  The CIA... included unnecessary redactions [of]... unclassified information..., presumably to make it more difficult for the public to understand the study's findings...

[T]he White House and the CIA would not agree to include any pseudonyms in the study to disguise the names of CIA officers...  [I]t's unprecedented for the CIA to demand and the White House agree every CIA officer's pseudonym in a study be blacked out...  We asked the CIA to identify any instances in the summary wherein a... pseudonym would result in the outing of any undercover officer, and they could not...  The CIA's insistence on blacking out even the fake names of its officers is problematic because the study is less readable and has lost some of its narrative thread...

[P]eople engaged in torture.  Some of these people are still employed by the CIA...  It's bad enough not to prosecute these officials, but to reward or promote them and risk the integrity of the US government to protect them is incomprehensible.  The president needs to purge his administration of high-level officials who were instrumental to... this program.  He needs to force a cultural change at the CIA.  The president also should support legislation limiting interrogation to non-coercive techniques to ensure his own executive order is codified and to prevent a future administration from developing its own torture program.  The president must ensure the Panetta Review is declassified and publicly released.  The full 6,800-page study on the CIA's detention and interrogation program should be declassified and released...

It is always easier to accept what we are told at face value than it is to ask tough questions.  [But i]f we rely on others to tell us what's behind their own curtain instead of taking a look for ourselves, we can't know for certain what's there...  [I]t's incumbent on government leaders... to live up to the dedication of [government] employees and to make them proud of the institutions they work for...  [F]or Dir. Brennan, that means resigning.  For the next CIA director, that means immediately correcting the false record and instituting the necessary reforms to restore the CIA's reputation for integrity and analytical rigor.  The CIA cannot be its best until it faces the serious and grievous mistakes of the detention and interrogation program.  And for Pres. Obama, that means taking real action to live up to the pledges he made early in his presidency. 
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The additional information Rockefeller's remarks provided about Obama's efforts to frustrate the committee's performance was, "In some instances, the White House asked not only that information be redacted but that the redaction itself be removed so it would be impossible for the reader to tell something was hidden.  Strange."