WASHINGTON — Not a single word of a 6,000-page Senate report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of torture in the context of the war on terror has been deemed fit for the public and declassified.

A year after the Senate Intelligence Committee adopted the landmark, reportedly comprehensive investigation, the report remains bottled up despite substantial clamor for its at least partial release to the public, including from important voices within the national security sector, civil society and on Capitol Hill.

“A full, public accounting of how U.S. government policies and practices failed is essential to understanding what went wrong and to prevent such abuse from happening again,” William H. Taft IV, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and deputy defense secretary, wrote last week. “It is time for the CIA to open itself up to oversight and implement changes in order to emerge stronger.”

Other prominent policy leaders to have voiced similar concerns in recent months include Vice-President Joe Biden and Sen. John McCain. (The St. Paul-based Center for Victims of Torture has a notably impressive petition on the subject.)

On Tuesday the shadowy debate again spilled into public, this time during a hearing on the nomination of Caroline Krass to be the CIA’s general counsel.

“I’m convinced more than ever that we need to declassify the report so that those with a political agenda can no longer manipulate public opinion,” Sen. Martin Heinrich said at the hearing, echoing similar frustrations voiced by other lawmakers.

While the CIA has stated that it is ready to work with the committee to facilitate the report’s partial declassification, the agency and some lawmakers appear to continue to disagree over some of the report’s findings. Lawmakers have said that any errors in the report were minor and have been fixed.

Further, there is already important precedent for such a declassification. Another Senate body, the Armed Services Committee, publicly released a major report on military abuse of detainees in 2009, and that process has been credited with helping the Pentagon devise new policies and procedures in response.

While it now appears that the Senate Intelligence Committee, as led by Sen. Diane Feinstein, could vote in coming weeks on whether and how to declassify the CIA report, neither this timeframe nor a robust declassification is assured. And even as the debate has taken place behind closed doors, the Obama administration has yet to publicly declare its stance.

“Not many people are talking about torture, so this report, if released, would bring attention back to the issue,” Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney for the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group, told MintPress.

“As long as there is no attention on the issue, there is this sense that somehow the use of these techniques was effective. But with everything that we have seen so far, we know that this is not the case. The reason the report has been held up in the Senate is precisely because torture wasn’t effective in its application over the last decade but actually counter-productive.”

Ineffective technique

While the CIA is now formally prohibited from using enhanced interrogation techniques, the report is seen as the public’s last chance to glean real insight into the extent of the intelligence agency’s actions in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In particular, the investigation is said to cast notably critical light on the effectiveness of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” regime.

While there have been no leaks of any part of the report as yet, lawmakers who have seen the document have discussed its general outlines. By all accounts, the Senate’s investigation – which took three years to produce and cost $40 million – is detailed and devastating, offering thousands of pages of findings and analysis.

“Senator Feinstein has said the report would show that abuse and torture by the CIA was more widespread than we previously thought, and also that it was less effective at gathering intelligence than proponents of enhanced interrogations – such as former Vice President Dick Cheney – claim,” Raha Wala, a senior counsel in the law and security program at Human Rights First, an advocacy group here, told MintPress.

“We also know that the report has some sections that talk about how the CIA misled Congress and the White House, even during the Bush years, about enhanced interrogation programs. I’ll be particularly interested in the claims about what the CIA knew about the intelligence being gathered – every interrogator and intelligence professional I’ve spoken with say that, by and large, torture is not a good way to get intelligence.”

In June, the CIA presented a formal rebuttal to the Senate Intelligence Committee on its investigation’s findings, but the details of this too remain classified. That counter-report was delivered by John Brennan, the current head of the agency and previously a high-level counter-terror official when the “enhanced interrogation” program was in full swing.

“Our response agreed with a number of the study’s findings, but also detailed significant errors in the study,” Dean Boyd, a CIA spokesman, told the media.

Critics worry that the hold-up in the report’s release has been damaging on multiple levels.

On one hand, much of the discussion over CIA rendition, detention and interrogation has proceeded with former officials, including those who authorized torture within the Bush administration, making serious and dogged claims about the program’s efficacy. Given that those claims have always been based on secret knowledge, however, any informed public discussion has been, by definition, impossible.

On the other hand, Wala and others suggest that the lag is having noticeable detrimental impacts on the broader American understanding of and ideas on government-overseen torture.

“Torture is torture – it’s wrong and unlawful either way – but the reality is that many Americans feel that these programs led to significant intelligence successes,” Wala said.

“In fact, increasingly we’re seeing this view reflected in the media, with shows like ‘24’ and others shaping the public narrative about torture and how we should conduct the war on terror. There is clearly strengthening support for these kinds of tactics based on fictional entertainment shows and baseless claims by former government officials.”

Indeed, multiple polls have found a distinct, double-digit increase in the proportion of Americans who say that some form of enhanced interrogation – some pollsters even use the word “torture” – is acceptable, over just the past decade.

One particularly worrying survey, carried out by the American Red Cross in 2011, found almost 60 percent of teens approved of the use of certain forms of enhanced interrogation “sometimes.” More than 40 percent also thought it acceptable for U.S. military personnel to be tortured overseas.

‘No justification’ for secrecy

Today, the Senate report on CIA practices constitutes the most prominent response by the government to consternation by the public and policymakers that the country’s intelligence programs were reportedly overstepping national, constitutional and international legal safeguards on the use of torture.

Yet the report is actually a mere shadow of the response that some have urged. Sen. Patrick Leahy, for instance, the head of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, went so far as to introduce legislation that would have created a full-truth commission to explore the broad U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks and its impact on human and civil rights. But Congress failed to get behind the idea, and in 2009 President Obama too refused to support such a plan.

For the moment, a gold standard for sober, deliberate public review of the CIA’s alleged abuse of detainees could be a report put out by a bipartisan task force organized by the Constitution Project, a watchdog group here. The nearly 600-page report, release in April, collated unclassified information on the treatment of suspected terrorists by U.S. agents in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo and elsewhere, as well as the historical and legalistic debates around what constitutes torture.

Ultimately, it concluded that the U.S. had indeed engaged in a systematic program of torture, although much of it was perhaps never formally authorized.

“After conducting our own two-year investigation, weighing the credibility of all sources and studying the current public record, we have come to the regrettable, but unavoidable, conclusion that the United States did indeed engage in conduct that is clearly torture,” Asa Hutchinson, a former undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush and a co-chair of the Constitution Project task force, said when the report was unveiled.

One of the task force’s primary recommendations is the public release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report.

“The high level of secrecy surrounding the rendition and torture of detainees since September 11 cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security,” it states.

“Ongoing classification of these practices serves only to conceal evidence of wrongdoing and make its repetition more likely … Apart from redactions needed to protect specific individuals and to honor specific diplomatic agreements, the executive branch should declassify evidence regarding the CIA’s and military’s abuse and torture of captives.”