Story highlights
CIA detainees were tortured, but those enhanced interrogations didn't yield actionable intelligence, the report concludes
The report also claims coercive interrogations did not lead to the capture of Osama bin Laden
Grisly details of torture emerge in the report, including one who died after being chained, partially naked to a concrete floor
The CIA misled the White House, Congress and other agencies to maintain a program that had little oversight
The Senate Intelligence Committee spent five years reading and analyzing more than 6.3 million pages of CIA documents to assess the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the post-9/11 era.
That review produced a more than 6,000 page review that was condensed into a 525-page summary the committee released Tuesday that delivered a brutal assessment of the CIA’s practices.
Here are the report’s biggest conclusions and revelations:
1. “Enhanced interrogation” includes torture
Sen. Dianne Feinstein writes in the report that the Committee’s findings reveal that “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,” she writes.
Feinstein isn’t alone. President Obama said over the summer that, in the past, “we tortured some folks.” And Sen. John McCain, who was himself tortured as a POW during Vietnam, said on the Senate floor Tuesday that the harsh interrogations described in the report amount to torture.
