A long-awaited Senate report concludes that the CIA repeatedly misled the public, Congress and the White House about the agency’s aggressive questioning of detainees — including waterboarding, confinement in small spaces and shackling in stress positions — after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, minimizing the severity of the interrogations and exaggerating the usefulness of the information produced, including its role in setting in motion the U.S. raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report finds that the “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” program escaped effective scrutiny by outsiders long after its inception in 2002, with CIA records showing that President George W. Bush was never briefed by the agency on specific techniques such as waterboarding until 2006. Top Bush administration officials such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell were not told of the practices until September 2003.


The congressional review also says that the CIA’s actual tactics often went far beyond the terms laid out in Justice Department legal opinions, subjecting detainees to prolonged interrogation under a combination of harsh techniques and ignoring safeguards set forth in the legal memos such as ensuring that interrogators were well-trained and had high-level approvals before using the unusually aggressive tactics.

President Barack Obama issued a statement that stopped short of completely endorsing the report’s conclusions, but he reiterated his opposition to the Bush-era interrogation practices.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama's long arc on torture)

“The report documents a troubling program involving enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects in secret facilities outside the United States, and it reinforces my long-held view that these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as a nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests,” Obama said. “These techniques did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners.”

Obama was silent on the issues of whether the CIA misled outsiders about the program and about whether it produced important intelligence but he emphasized that he banned the harsh techniques soon after he took office

“Rather than another reason to refight old arguments, I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong — in the past,” he said.

Among the report’s key findings:

• Interrogation sessions were far more brutal than publicly revealed and went far beyond the scope of Justice Department approvals. Alleged Al Qaeda organizer Abu Zubaydah was interrogated continuously for 17 consecutive days, being subjected to 183 waterboarding sessions and confinement in stress positions. CIA staffers were prepared to cremate him if he died. During one waterboarding session, Abu Zubaydah lost consciousness and water and air bubbles began pouring out of his mouth. The incident was never reported to senior CIA management, but discovered by the Senate in emails of CIA medical personnel.

( Also on POLITICO: Full text of CIA torture report)

• The CIA had little grip on basic details such as the number of detainees in the program. According to agency records, at least 119 prisoners were involved, but CIA officials represented the number at less that 100. At least a sixth of the prisoners didn’t meet the stated criteria. Sometimes senior officials were confused about where detainees were located. Vice President Dick Cheney at one point ran into diplomatic trouble because he was unaware one country was hosting a so-called black site.

• While Bush has defended the program and taken responsibility for authorizing it, he was apparently told for the first time about the details of the interrogation techniques in 2006. CIA records show that at that briefing he expressed discomfort with the “image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper, and forced to go to the bathroom on himself.”

• Key Cabinet officials such as Powell and Rumsfeld were kept out of the loop about the program until September 2003. An email from CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo said White House staff insisted the reason was to avoid leaks, but Rizzo said it was “clear to us” that National Security Council officials feared Powell “would blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what’s going on.”

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) charged that the interrogation tactics amounted to “torture,” although the report itself doesn’t explicitly make that claim.

( Also on POLITICO: White House: U.S. prepared for torture report release)

“The CIA’s actions a decade ago are a stain on our history and our values … Releasing this report is an important step to restore our values and show the world we are in fact a just and lawful society,” she said in a speech on the Senate floor. “This program was morally, legally and administrative misguided … The CIA program was far more brutal than people were led to believe.”

Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday, at POLITICO’s Women Rule Summit, said the report’s public release would strengthen the United States.

“Think about it, name me another country that’s prepared to stand and say, ‘This was a mistake, we should not have done what we‘ve done and we will not do it again,’” Biden said. America will be the stronger for saying, “We made a mistake, we’re exposing it.”

CIA officials say the Senate review is deeply flawed, in large part because the study which formally began in 2009 relied solely on written CIA documents and did not include direct interviews with key players. The spy agency says the Senate report understates the value of intelligence received from detainees and that management problems identified in the report were rectified relatively early in the program.

CIA Director John Brennan conceded missteps in the agency’s interrogation effort, but sharply disagreed with other conclusions in the report.

“We acknowledge that the detention and interrogation program had shortcomings and that the Agency made mistakes,” the director said. “The most serious problems occurred early on and stemmed from the fact that the agency was unprepared and lacked the core competencies required to carry out an unprecedented, worldwide program of detaining and interrogating suspected al-Qa’ida and affiliated terrorists.

“In carrying out that program, we did not always live up to the high standards that we set for ourselves and that the American people expect of us,” Brennan added. “As an agency, we have learned from these mistakes.”

Brennan insisted that information obtained through the program headed off deadly terrorist attacks and he rejected the idea that the CIA deliberately covered up its actions.

“Our review indicates that interrogations of detainees on whom EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives. The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al-Qa’ida and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day,” the director said. “While we made mistakes, the record does not support the study’s inference that the Agency systematically and intentionally misled each of these audiences on the effectiveness of the program.”

For his part, Obama was silent on the issues of whether the CIA misled outsiders about the program and about whether it produced important intelligence but he emphasized that he banned the harsh techniques soon after he took office.

“Rather than another reason to refight old arguments, I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong — in the past,” Obama said in the White House statement.

In August, Obama said bluntly: “We tortured some folks.” However, he did not explicitly describe the CIA’s Bush-era techniques as torture in his written statement Tuesday.

A senior administration official suggested the omission was an effort to prevent the White House from being drawn into a debate about whether every harsh practice in the report amounted to torture.

“The president has said that we committed torture. He’s been clear on that point for many years,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We’re not going to go case-by-case in a report like this and try to affix a label for each action.”

The president will not address the CIA’s claim that the tactics did produce significant useful intelligence because he has concluded the techniques were wrong and counterproductive in a broader sense regardless of their possible efficacy in specific cases, the senior official said. “We are not going into engage in this debate. That would miss the overriding point,” the official added.

The Intelligence Committee voted in April to declassify the 525-page executive summary of the 6,000-page report but the publication was delayed as lawmakers and the White House debated how to handle sensitive information such as agents’ names and other identifying characteristics.

Led by ranking member Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the Republican members of the committee issued a response Tuesday, challenging the methodology and accuracy of the Democrats’ findings. The Democrats’ “problematic claims and conclusions create the false impression that the CIA was actively misleading policy makers and impeding the counterterrorism efforts of other federal government agencies during the program’s operation,” the Republicans said.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was held captive and tortured for several years in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, spoke on the Senate floor immediately following Feinstein to voice his support for the report’s release. “I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will offer more bad information than good,” he said.

The Senate report says the program was built on an order Bush signed six days after Sept. 11. While the order did authorize detention of prisoners, it did not discuss interrogation.

Bush wrote in his memoirs that he knew about the enhanced interrogation program since 2002 and fully supported and approved it. But former CIA Directors George Tenet and Porter Goss told CIA investigators that Bush was not briefed by the agency about the interrogation techniques until 2006.

U.S. military commanders and embassies worldwide have been bracing for possible fallout and security threats because of the release of the report.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday that the release “may have an impact” on U.S. interests abroad, but said it’s nonetheless essential for the facts of the Bush administration’s practices to be made public, where possible.

“We want to be sure that we can release that report, be transparent about it and be clear about what American values are and be clear about the fact that the administration believes and that — in a way that’s consistent with American values — that something like this should never happen again,” Earnest said.

But Republicans are worried about the threats that the report’s release may stir up. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said Sunday on CNN that foreign leaders and U.S. intelligence officials have made clear their warnings that the report’s release “will cause violence and deaths.”

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho) said in a statement Monday night that the report’s publication “is reckless and irresponsible” given concerns about the international response. “This report does not qualify as either serious or constructive.”

Just after taking office in 2009, Obama signed executive orders ending the use of controversial Bush-era interrogation techniques and floated the idea of conducting a public accounting of the practices of his predecessor’s administration. But the review released Tuesday came not from the Obama administration but from Congress, and after administration officials engaged in a months-long tug-of-war over what would be made public.

The White House has said that Obama “strongly supports” making the report public, but the CIA and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough have been wrangling for months with Feinstein to limit details that Democratic senators say are crucial to understanding the narrative of the program.

“Without the leadership of [Intelligence panel chair] Sen. Feinstein and her determination and the support of Democrats on the committee, there’s no chance that this would see the light of day,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Monday.

Resistance from the administration included Secretary of State John Kerry’s Friday call to Feinstein, in which he asked her to “consider” the timing of the release “because a lot is going on in the world, and [Kerry] wanted to make sure that foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing,” State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said.

The CIA tapped into a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee and read the emails of staffers involved in the interrogation investigation, the agency’s own internal investigation this summer concluded. Feinstein first revealed knowledge of the breach in March, saying that the conflict between her panel and the CIA reflected “a defining moment for the oversight of our intelligence community.”

The Intelligence Committee’s Democratic majority voted in April to declassify the summary and time had almost run out before Tuesday’s release, since the panel’s incoming chair, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, and his fellow Republicans have made clear that they opposed its release.