The CIA is competing with the NSA for the title of "Most Secretive Organization in America". Prize unknown.

The release of a 6,000 page Senate report detailing the CIA’s torture and interrogation techniques during the Bush administration is being held up by intelligence officials and their Republican friends in the Senate, on the grounds that the report contains factual errors. Whether there actually are factual errors, we don’t know, because the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee maintain that the only errors the Agency pointed out to them was a “minor” one, which has since been corrected.

Why the Agency would want to stonewall the release of this report isn’t surprising, however. According to those familiar with the it, the report concludes that the interrogation techniques employed by the CIA during the Bush administration did not produce any information that led to the capture or death of any terrorist leaders, and in reality was counterproductive. This evidence would be damning to the proponents of torture, who claim that the country is safer because of these techniques, and that we would not have been able to kill Osama bin Laden and kill or capture any of his colleagues if not for using torture. 

It’s not clear if the CIA is hoping to block the release of the report forever, though. It could be. Another possibility is that the agency could be wrangling for time to present some sort of legal block to the release, on the grounds that the report could endanger national security, although this is unlikely. The most likely scenario, in my opinion, is that it is stalling to build concern around the veracity of the report’s facts, thus throwing the report’s conclusions into doubt right from the get go. It already has allies in the Republicans on the Committee, who have stated their opposition to the report’s damning of their former boss’s national security accomplishments. (A CBS/New York Times poll from earlier this year found that about half of Americans felt that George W. Bush had made the country safer during his presidency). You can bet that they would be making the rounds after the report’s release to fire shots at its findings. 

Which is all the more reason why we should hope that this report sees the light of day sooner rather than later. By revealing to the American people the facts around the effects of torture on our national security, it allows us to not only hold our current leaders more accountable, but make more informed decisions in the future. The same CBS/New York Times poll found that 37 percent of Americans thought waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques were sometimes justified. The number is less than half, but it’s not small enough, and it is no doubt buoyed by many people’s belief that these techniques have extracted useful information. The report would finally prove that notion to be false, a lie peddled by the organization and administration whose existence and MO depended on the American people believing it. Torturing our enemies not only damages our human rights record, it damages our national security record. It’s time for the current administration to push for this report’s release, hold those responsible for crimes accountable, and help the CIA and the entire country move past this regrettable chapter.