Feinstein readies anti-torture legislation

Sen. Dianne Feinstein has no plans to let up on her crusade against the CIA’s history of enhanced interrogation techniques — known to many congressional Democrats as “torture.”

One month after finally releasing a long-awaited report detailing the Central Intelligence Agency’s brutal history of exposing suspected terrorists to waterboarding, stress positions and secret overseas prisons, Feinstein, the outgoing chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Monday announced plans to introduce legislation aimed at explicitly preventing the practice in the future, regardless of who is president.


In a letter last week to President Barack Obama, the California Democrat issued a series of recommendations to the president and also proposed a quartet of bills aimed at making permanent Obama’s executive orders that curbed much-criticized CIA interrogation practices run under the administration of George W. Bush.

“These recommendations are intended to make sure that the United States never again engages in actions that you have acknowledged were torture,” Feinstein wrote in the letter, which was released on Monday.

Feinstein plans to file legislation that would ban the long-term detention of CIA detainees, limit the list of interrogation techniques used by intelligence officials and provide swift Red Cross access to detainees — all elements of Obama’s 2009 anti-torture executive order. Feinstein would also seek to go further and explicitly prohibit the use of “coercive and abusive interrogation techniques.”

Whether she gets a vote on any of these proposals is uncertain as Republicans prepare to take over the Senate, though incoming Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has vowed to increase the number of amendment votes in the Senate for members of both parties.

In the letter to the president, Feinstein also recommended that the White House move unilaterally to improve oversight of covert programs, hold CIA officials accountable for individual overseas programs, limit contractors’ participation in these programs, among other reforms. She also is pushing for all interrogations related to national security to be videotaped.

Of particular concern to Feinstein is reforming the declassification process, which took more than eight months for her committee to conclude after voting in April to declassify a 525-page executive summary of a long-researched 6,000-page report. Democrats, the CIA and the White House haggled for months over how much information should be redacted, and toward the end of the process frustrated Democrats even threatened to spill the report’s contents on the Senate floor if the White House did not allow declassification to go forward before Republicans took control of the Senate.

“Members of the Committee have found the declassification process to be slow and disjointed, even for information that Congress has identified as being of high public interest,” Feinstein wrote. “Significant parts of the declassification process were inconsistent and negotiated while the process was ongoing, instead of being determined in advance.”

The arduous nature of the committee’s work has also not been forgotten. Other than the committee’s chairman and vice chairman, investigative staff and rank-and-file lawmakers were said to have been shut out of briefings on the interrogation programs until 2006 — leading Feinstein to push for greater congressional oversight in her letter to Obama.

“Adequate staff access, as determined by the committees, should be provided to ensure that the committees as well as individual Members can carry out their oversight responsibilities. The committees should have access, upon request, to any documentation required to conduct effective oversight,” Feinstein wrote in her letter.

Finally, Feinstein asked that the president publicly support her legislation and recommendations when her letter was made public.

“We are reviewing Senator Feinstein’s specific recommendations. As a general matter, however, we share the Senator’s goal of ensuring the techniques that led to those recommendations are never employed again,” said National Security Council spokesman Ned Price in an email.

A CIA spokesman said the agency has already implemented several of Feinstein’s recommendations, including improved vetting of CIA officers and increasing internal accounability.