Senators are considering the use of an obscure parliamentary procedure to compel the Obama administration to release more of a landmark Senate report into the Central Intelligence Agency's abusive post-9/11 interrogations should they be unsatisfied with the administration’s first version.



"If the redacted version of the Senate Intelligence Committee's study that we receive appears to be an effort to obscure its narrative and findings — and if the White House is not amenable to working toward a set of mutually agreed-upon redactions — I believe the committee must seriously consider its other option," Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat on the intelligence committee, told the Guardian on Monday.



It is believed that the White House will provide its completed redactions to sections of the Senate intelligence committee's landmark torture report in the coming days. The committee will subsequently review the redactions as preparation for the report's public release, something chairwoman Dianne Feinstein of California, a Democrat, had wanted to happen in early May.



The vast majority of a report stretching beyond 6,000 pages is unlikely to be seen by the public. Only its findings, conclusions and executive summary are undergoing a lengthy declassification review, after the Senate panel voted in April to release those portions alone. Accordingly, the redaction battle reaching its critical phase concerns only those sections, said to comprise hundreds of pages.



Fuelling congressional suspicions, the White House placed lead authority for reviewing the declassification in the hands of the CIA, which struck critics as a conflict of interest.



Udall joins Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat and civil libertarian on the committee with whom Udall often votes, in pointing to the parliamentary rule, Senate Resolution 400, as an additional tactic to force disclosure. Yet the never-before-used rule portends an uphill struggle: a majority of senators would need to vote for additional disclosure.



Steven Aftergood, a secrecy and intelligence scholar at the Federation of American Scientists, said invocation of the rule "does not offer a realistic alternative," since the Senate is far from united in favor of broad public access to the committee torture report. The committee itself, which would need to vote to request a full Senate disclosure vote, had three dissenters from any disclosure, and some Republicans on the panel, including the vice chairman, only voted for release "to get this behind us," the committee's senior Republican, Saxby Chambliss, said at the time.



"Talking about [the resolution] is a way of expressing frustration with current declassification procedures and of signaling determination to get the torture report released," Aftergood said.



The Senate Resolution 400 gambit, floated last week in an interview Wyden conducted with Yahoo News, is primarily designed to get the White House to move more expeditiously than it has to release portions of the torture report. The White House has said declassification is a presidential priority and is occurring as rapidly as possible.



But the Senate panel, inflamed by what it considers CIA duplicity to its overseers concerning torture, has warned the White House that extensive redaction will "itself indicate where we are on this," Feinstein said in April, an indication that the panel may seek further disclosures.



Invocation of the rule could lead to bizarre spectacles, as the rule bars senators from "divulging the information with respect to which the vote is being taken."



Acrimony over the Senate report hangs over the relationship between the CIA and the committee overseeing it. Each side has accused the other of spying on it and violating the terms of an agreement giving committee staff access to CIA data. Earlier this month, the Justice Department declined to pursue charges against either side, ending without resolution a loud dispute over the constitutional limits of either's authority.



For its part, the CIA is expected to provide an aggressive response to a committee report that hangs over its entire relationship with Congress. Director John Brennan, who was a senior agency official during the establishment of the torturous interrogations but has portrayed himself as an internal critic, told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month he will accept a measure of blame but will also "take issue with some other elements of the report that I believe are inaccurate or misleading."



The CIA director who established the agency's post-9/11 interrogations, detentions and renditions, George Tenet, is reportedly convening former CIA notables, including his fellow ex-directors, to discredit the report once it is released.



Tenet and others are expected to be criticized not only for the brutality of the interrogations, which took place in secret facilities like the Stare Kiejkuty military base in Poland, but for misrepresenting their utility to Congress and the public. For years, the agency has said its "enhanced" interrogations were instrumental in gleaning intelligence on al-Qaeda in the wake of 9/11, a contention the report is said to directly challenge. It has long been public that CIA torture led to false information that contributed to the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

It is unknown when the portions of the report will actually be released to the public. The Senate breaks for August recess after this week. A court filing from the Justice Department in June, resisting a disclosure suit by the journalist Jason Leopold, said the CIA expected the declassification process to end by 29 August.