The outgoing chairman of the US Senate intelligence committee is urging a series of policy and legislative changes to ensure that the US government never again tortures detainees, even as polls show that a majority of Americans believe harsh CIA interrogations after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were justified.
Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein presided over a five-year investigation that resulted in last month’s release of parts of a report that harshly described the CIA practice of torture against terror detainees after the 2001 attacks.
The 525-page executive summary cited the CIA’s own documents in finding that the agency’s interrogation program was more brutal than previously understood and failed to produce unique intelligence that could not have been obtained through traditional methods.
US President Barack Obama has called the practices torture, something former CIA officials dispute. The executive summary of the Senate report, written by Feinstein staff members, documents CIA mismanagement and misrepresentations, some of which the agency has acknowledged.
In a letter to Obama released on Monday, Feinstein outlined a series of recommendations “intended to make sure that the United States never again engages in actions that you have acknowledged were torture.”
The documented shortcomings in the CIA’s decade-old interrogation program “should prompt additional oversight and better sharing of information for all covert action and significant intelligence collection programs,” she said.
Feinstein said she would introduce legislation in the upcoming Congress to codify Obama’s executive order banning torture and prohibiting the CIA from detaining prisoners.
Her office said she introduced similar legislation in 2009, but then began to focus on the investigation and wanted to wait for its outcome before pressing for changes.
“We didn’t know then that the study would not be completed until the end of 2014, so we went down the track of the investigation with the idea that recommendations would follow from what we found,” her top intelligence aide, David Grannis, said in an e-mail.
Feinstein also called for a series of policy changes designed to force the CIA to better manage its covert actions and more fully inform Congress about them. And she urged new rules to ensure better accountability at the CIA, an agency where managerial and operational negligence has often gone unpunished.
In a statement, CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said that the agency in June 2013 began implementing changes on its own in response to valid criticisms raised in the Senate study, including, for example, allowing agency “accountability boards” to examine systemic failures as well as the individual misconduct they have traditionally focused on.
CIA Director John Brennan has denounced brutal interrogations and acknowledged mistakes, but he criticized the Senate report as one-sided and says it is “unknowable” whether harsh techniques produced useful intelligence.
Feinstein’s proposals come amid polls showing that the Senate report, at least initially, has failed to convince a majority of the public that what the CIA did to detainees after the 9/11 terror attacks was unjustified.
By a margin of almost 2-to-1 — 59 percent to 31 percent — respondents interviewed for a Dec. 16 Washington Post-ABC News poll said they supported brutal methods the CIA employed from 2002 to 2005.
Another large majority, 58 percent, said the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified “often” or “sometimes.”
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese