Washington, DC – Today, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is returning to Congress copies of the 2014 Senate report on the Bush-era Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program. 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:
“When I served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, my colleagues and I worked hard to ensure a full accounting of the Bush Administration’s turn down the dark road to torture. Senators and staff reviewed millions of documents, and some put themselves at legal and professional risk to compile this report. It is accurate. The report’s public component has been stipulated as accurate by the United States military, and CIA ‘objections’ were quietly taken down from the website. The report contains difficult facts to face, but they must be aired. Purging history of unpleasant facts is not the American way; Putin and his Soviet forebears would approve, but we should not.”
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 Ranking Member 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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