Washington, DC – Today the executive summary of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s study of the Bush-era CIA Detention and Interrogation Program was declassified and made available to the public. U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a former member of the Intelligence Committee who was involved in the preparation of the report and who has advocated for its declassification, released the statement below:
“After years of effort and millions of documents reviewed, the Senate report at last lays out in painstaking detail how the CIA under President Bush and Vice President Cheney turned down the dark path to torture, and then to cover its tracks misled Congress and executive officials about the efficacy of the torture program. These are hard facts to face as Americans, but it’s important that the facts be known. Chairman Feinstein and our Intelligence Committee staff deserve our country’s deep appreciation for their extraordinary efforts.”
Whitehouse served on the Intelligence Committee from 2007 until 2011 and was deeply involved in the early stages of compiling the torture report. He currently serves as the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Crime & Terrorism of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he chaired a Judiciary Committee hearing in 2009 titled “What Went Wrong: Torture and the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration.”
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