WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee issued a sweeping indictment Tuesday of the Central Intelligence Agency’s program to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, drawing on millions of internal CIA documents to illuminate practices that it said were more brutal — and far less effective — than the agency acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.
The long-delayed report delivers a withering judgment on one of the most controversial tactics of a twilight war waged over a dozen years. The Senate committee’s investigation, born of what its chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said was a need to reckon with the excesses of this war, found that CIA officials routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained, and failed to provide basic oversight of the secret prisons it established around the world.
In exhaustive detail, the report gives a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the CIA used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects. Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in US custody. With the approval of the CIA’s medical staff, some CIA prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the CIA’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” CIA medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”
The report also suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three the CIA has acknowledged in the past. The committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the prison in Afghanistan commonly known as the Salt Pit, a facility where the CIA had claimed that waterboarding was never used. One clandestine officer described the prison as a “dungeon,” and another said that some prisoners there “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”
The release of the report was severely criticized by current and former CIA officials, leaving the White House trying to chart a middle course between denouncing a program that President Obama ended during his first week in office, and defending a spy agency he has championed.
Obama welcomed the release of the report, but in a written statement made sure to praise the CIA employees as “patriots” to whom “we owe a profound debt of gratitude” for trying to protect the country. But in a later television interview, he reiterated that the techniques “constituted torture in my mind” and were a betrayal of American values.
“What’s clear is that the CIA set up something very fast without a lot of forethought to what the ramifications might be,” he told Telemundo, adding: “Some of these techniques that were described were not only wrong, but also counterproductive because we know that oftentimes when somebody is being subjected to these kinds of techniques, that they’re willing to say anything in order to alleviate the pain.”
Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, said repeatedly that the detention and interrogation program was humane and legal. The intelligence gleaned during interrogations, he said, was instrumental both in thwarting terrorism plots and in capturing senior figures of Al Qaeda. Bush, former vice president Dick Cheney, and a number of former CIA officials have said more recently that the program was essential for ultimately finding Osama bin Laden, who was killed by members of the Navy SEALs in May 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The intelligence committee’s report tries to refute each of these claims, using the CIA’s internal records to present 20 case studies that bolster its conclusion that the most extreme interrogation methods played no role in disrupting terrorism plots, capturing terrorist leaders, or even finding bin Laden.
The report said that senior officials — including former CIA directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss, and Michael V. Hayden — repeatedly inflated the value of the program in secret briefings both at the White House and on Capitol Hill, and in public speeches.
Months before the operation that killed bin Laden in 2011, the CIA secretly prepared a public relations plan that would stress that information gathered from its disputed interrogation program had played a critical role in the hunt. Starting the day after the raid, agency officials in classified briefings made the same point to Congress.
But in page after page of previously classified evidence, the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, released Tuesday, rejects the notion that torturing detainees contributed to finding bin Laden — a conclusion that was also strongly implied in “Zero Dark Thirty,” the 2012 movie about the hunt for the Al Qaeda leader.
“The vast majority of the intelligence” about the Al Qaeda courier who led the agency to bin Laden “was originally acquired from sources unrelated to the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, and the most accurate information acquired from a CIA detainee was provided prior to the CIA subjecting the detainee to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” according to the Senate report.
It added that most of “the documents, statements and testimony” from the CIA regarding a connection between the torture of detainees and the bin Laden hunt were “inaccurate and incongruent with CIA records.”
On Tuesday, the CIA disputed the committee’s portrayal that it had been misleading and disingenuous about the role of that program in the hunt for bin Laden.
In a speech in the Senate, moments after the report was released Tuesday morning, Feinstein described the tumultuous history of her investigation and called the CIA interrogation program “a stain on our values and our history.”
She said, “History will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again.’ ”
As she was preparing to speak, John O. Brennan, the CIA director, issued a response that both acknowledged mistakes and angrily challenged some of the findings of the Senate report as an “incomplete and selective picture of what occurred.”
“As an agency, we have learned from these mistakes, which is why my predecessors and I have implemented various remedial measures over the years to address institutional deficiencies,” Brennan said.
But despite the mistakes, he added, “the record does not support the study’s inference that the agency systematically and intentionally misled each of these audiences on the effectiveness of the program.”
The report is more than 6,000 pages long, but the committee voted in April to declassify only its 524-page executive summary and a rebuttal by Republican members of the committee. The investigation was conducted by the committee’s Democratic majority and their staffs.
Many of the CIA’s most extreme interrogation methods, including waterboarding, were authorized by Justice Department lawyers during the Bush administration.
But the report also found evidence that a number of detainees had been subjected to other, unapproved methods while in CIA custody.
The torture of prisoners at times was so extreme that some CIA personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior agency officials to continue the interrogation sessions.
The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a CIA facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some CIA officers were “to the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.
During one waterboarding session, Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” The interrogations lasted for weeks, and some CIA officers began sending messages to the agency’s headquarters in Virginia questioning the utility — and the legality — of what they were doing. But such questions were rejected.
“Strongly urge that any speculative language as to the legality of given activities or, more precisely, judgment calls as to their legality vis-à-vis operational guidelines for this activity agreed upon and vetted at the most senior levels of the agency, be refrained from in written traffic (e-mail or cable traffic),” wrote Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.
“Such language is not helpful.”
Many Republicans have said that the report is an attempt to smear both the CIA and the Bush White House, and that the report cherry-picked information to support a stance that the CIA’s detention program yielded no valuable information. Former CIA officials have already begun a vigorous public campaign to dispute the report’s findings.
In its response to the Senate report, the CIA said that to accept the committee’s conclusions, “there would have had to have been a yearslong conspiracy among CIA leaders at all levels, supported by a large number of analysts and other line officers.”
Taken in its entirety, the report is a portrait of a spy agency that was wholly unprepared for its new mission as jailers and interrogators, but that embraced its assignment with vigor. The report chronicles millions of dollars in secret payments between 2002 and 2004 from the CIA to foreign officials, aimed at getting other governments to agree to host secret prisons.