Sen. Dianne Feinstein
Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., will hold a a committee vote Thursday on a comprehensive report on U.S. torture (“enhanced interrogation techniques”) since 9/11, but anti-torture advocates said its findings could be swamped by a hot new movie that glorifies torture.
Zero Dark Thirty, set for release Dec. 19 in New York and Los Angeles and nationally Jan. 11, is getting rave reviews, as well as criticism for suggesting that torture is okay and works. The Intelligence Committee report is expected to rebut that view but the public will not get to see its findings.
Sen. Feinstein said last year that none of the information that led to the killing of arch terrorist Osama bin Laden came from torture or harsh detention policies practiced under the George W. Bush administration. She and Senate Armed Services chair Carl Levin, D-Mich. released a statement last April rebutting recent claims by a former CIA official that torture was effective in locating Bin Laden. They said the claims were “inconsistent with CIA records.”
The committee report was three years in the making, runs nearly 6,000 pages and reviews six million pages of documents from the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency — virtually everything the agencies had on the subject. Committee Republicans boycotted the investigation, and a party-line vote is expected in closed-door session.
Feinstein said the report “is comprehensive, it is strictly factual, and it is the most definitive review of this CIA program to be conducted. Any decision on declassification and release of any portion of the report will be decided by committee members at a later time.”
In a conference call sponsored by Human Rights First, retired Brigadeer General David Irvine said he and two other retired generals, Ed Soyster, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Bill Nash, commander of troops in Bosnia met with Feinstein last summer to encourage her to release the report with as few redactions as possible.
“I don’t think I have seen her looking quite so burdened as she appeared last June when we had that meeting,” Irvine said. “She was very supportive of the request we made, I believe. I think she appreciated it’s important for people to understand what happened….The rest of world knows what we did; it’s the American people who are who are in the dark.”
Irvine belongs to a group of about 60 retired generals and admirals who have publicly condemned what he listed as “waterboardings, stress positions, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, beatings, drenching with cold water in cold temperatures, sleep deprivation for days at a time, sensory deprivation.” Irvine, who taught interrogation in the Army and served four terms as a Republican in the Utah House of Representatives, said the Senate report “won’t be made into a Hollywood movie, but the next generation “needs to understand at the very highest level that democracy and torture cannot exist in the same body politic.”
“We are confident the findings will show that all of the waterboarding and all of the brutality and everything else that trashed the Geneva Conventions produced nothing but a national tragedy” and no valuable intelligence.
Others, including former President Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney, have claimed that torture did provide good information. The CIA inspector general also released a 2009 report critical of the techniques.
Melina Milazzo, a fellow at Human Rights First, said the Senate report is important because it will be “the official government narrative of what happened.” Curt Goering, executive director of the Center for Victims of Torture, a St. Paul, MN-based torture survivor rehabilitation center, said he is “very afraid that the power of the movie and the broad swathes of society that will see it will come away with..an absolutely false impression” that torture works.