Some of the most revealing information from the Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Tuesday is what’s not there.

The 528-page summary had 7 percent of its words blacked out, obscuring the titles of CIA staffers and dates of critical events. On top of that, there are code names for so-called black sites and pseudonyms for two key CIA contractors who carried out the bulk of the harshest interrogations.


Sometimes the public version of the report piles opacity on opacity, deleting codes already intended to obscure basic information. The original Senate report used letters to represent the foreign countries involved, but the CIA and the White House insisted that even those letters be blacked out before the review was made public.

The result is a report that states what happened but defies many attempts to establish a chain of responsibility.

The White House claimed the redactions were necessary to protect the safety of individuals and preserve relationships with allies. But the result, according to some Democratic senators and other critics, is an unnecessary level of obfuscation.

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“I am disappointed that … honorable staffers had to spend so many months arguing with this White House about redactions to this report — a White House that is supposed to be dedicated to transparency,” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said Tuesday. “This report should have been issued months ago, and it still contains more redactions than it should.”

“There are parts of the report where they make some of the pages almost incomprehensible,” said Chris Anders of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“It looks like some kind of piece of art,” he joked about a specific page on information about Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “They’re literally making it unreadable.”

Some of the redactions reduce disagreements between the committee and the CIA to a hard-to-resolve he-said-she-said dispute, Anders argued.

( Read the executive summary here)

“The description of what information was provided about KSM and whether that information was available elsewhere goes to the central point Sen. [Dianne] Feinstein was trying to make about whether this program was central to getting important intelligence,” Anders said. “It takes away from the committee’s ability to show factual support from the conclusions that they’ve made.”

Blacking out most CIA officers’ names rather than providing pseudonyms made it almost impossible to track what knowledge they had from emails, memos or experience with other interrogations.

“It makes it very difficult to track the chain of knowledge,” said Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch. “You don’t know if the same person who got memos saying this isn’t working later said everything’s fine, this guy’s talking and then decided to up the severity of the abuse. … It’s designed to obfuscate.”

“You can’t tell who are the repeat actors and that’s hard for accountability,” added Mieke Eoyang of the Democratic centrist group Third Way. “Is it a small number people pursuing an agenda coming up repeatedly, or is it a wider element within the community? … That’s a challenge for public accountability.”

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) didn’t complain publicly about the redactions Tuesday, but did describe a “lengthy negotiation” with the White House and the CIA over deletions from the report. That process stretched for months and involved a face-to-face meeting between White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and Feinstein at her home in San Francisco. President Barack Obama also became personally involved, aides said.

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Feinstein claimed the deletions obscure derogatory details about the history of several of the CIA officers who helped carry out the interrogation program.

“Due to the CIA’s redactions to the report, there are limits to what I can say in this regard, but it is clear fact that the CIA deployed officers who had histories of personal, ethical and professional problems of a serious nature,” she said. “These included histories of violence and abusive treatment of others and should have called into question their employment with the United States government, let alone their suitability to participate in a sensitive CIA covert action program.”

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) expressed bitterness about the redaction process but said the negotiations with the White House reversed 400 “unnecessary” deletions the CIA proposed at the outset.

“We didn’t make all the progress we wanted. The redaction process was filled with unwarranted and completely unnecessary obstacles,” Rockefeller complained. Still, he said, the report “tells the story that needs to be told.”

( Also on POLITICO: Torture report divides GOP)

The White House and other officials argued Tuesday that the deletions were not significant because so much of the report escaped the censor’s pen. An official said 93 percent of the summary made it through the redaction process.

“There are numerous CIA officials referenced in true name in the study, including officially declared officers [such as former directors, deputy directors, etc.] and those who publicly declared themselves as being associated with the detention and interrogation program. However, there are other CIA officers whose identities are not revealed because there is a reasonable possibility that these officers would be subject to threats and possible violence if their identities were revealed,” said a U.S. intelligence official who asked not to be named.

“CIA conducted extensive analysis of the use of pseudonyms in the SSCI report and determined that to do so would risk publicly revealing the true names of those officers, as well as the names of officers not associated with the program,” the official added. “The administration did not support making disclosures that would put U.S. government personnel at additional risk.”

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) described a "lengthy negotiation" with the White House and the CIA over deletions. | AP Photo

A senior administration official added: “The redactions focused on our most acute national security concerns.”

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However, some of the handful of code names employed in the report seem largely pointless, even cosmetic. It took reporters mere moments to identify the “black site” code-named “COBALT” in the report as the so-called Salt Pit in Afghanistan, where detainee Gul Rahman apparently died from exposure in 2002 after being stripped from the waist down and shackled on a bare concrete floor in cold temperatures. (Gul’s detention was a case of mistaken identity, the Senate report says in a footnote.)

Journalists and advocates also quickly decoded detention site “GREEN” as a facility in Thailand where prisoner Abu Zubaydah was sent in 2002 after he was captured in Pakistan.

Two contractors whose company was paid $81 million to run much of the interrogation program are named in the report as “Grayson Swigert” and “Hammond Dunbar.” The men are obviously psychologists Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were profiled more than five years ago in The New York Times. A Senate aide said the pseudonyms were created by the CIA.

Other information gaps in the Senate report could stem from a deliberate effort at the agency to limit email and memo traffic about the sensitive interrogation effort.

The report notes that it fails to resolve certain mysteries, such as why the CIA suddenly stopped waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

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Mohammed was waterboarded some 15 times, slapped and “walled”; his were sons threatened; and he eventually began making up stories about potential terror attacks to try to placate his captors. But on March 24, 2003, the agency officers abruptly stopped using the “enhanced” technique, according to the report — perhaps because they’d been ordered to do so outside the CIA’s official chain of command.

“There are no CIA records directing the interrogation team to cease using the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques against KSM, nor any contemporaneous documentation explaining the decision,” the report says.

The Senate report later quotes a “senior” CIA officer that the agency’s official records omit a great deal. “All of the fighting and criticism is done over the phone and is not put into cables,” the officer said. “Cables reflect things that are ‘all rosy.’”

The redactions also obscure what favors were done for countries that hosted the secret prisons.

“The day after the rendition of Abu Zubaydah to Detention Site Green, the [redacted] which was responsible for the security of the detention facility, linked its support for the CIA’s detention site to a request for [redacted] support from the CIA [redacted],” the report said. “The CIA eventually provided the requested [redacted] support, [redacted.]” The report gives no hints as to what kind of deal the CIA made to open the detention site, but new local leaders called for it to be closed three weeks later. “Continued lobbying by the chief of station, however, eventually led Country [redacted] to reverse this decision.”

Philip Ewing contributed to this report.