PressTV-CIA destroys 6,700-page torture report
Senate report on CIA torture is one step closer to disappearing
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has “mistakenly” deleted its only copy of a Senate report into the agency’s brutal interrogation techniques.
The CIA Office of Inspector General (OIG), the spy agency’s internal watchdog, told the Congress that the electronic copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,700-page report and a hard disk were destroyed last summer.
A 500-page summary of the report was released to the public by then-Senate Intelligence chair Dianne Feinstein in 2014.
Feinstein said in letters to the agency and Justice Department that the CIA inspector general “has misplaced and/or accidentally destroyed” its only copy of the report.
The deletion of the document has been portrayed by agency officials to Senate investigators as an “inadvertent” foul-up by the inspector general. In what one intelligence community source described as a series of errors straight “out of the Keystone Cops,” CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation methods.
“It’s breathtaking that this could have happened, especially in the inspector general’s office — they’re the ones that are supposed to be providing accountability within the agency itself,” said Douglas Cox, a City University of New York School of Law professor who specializes in tracking the preservation of federal records. “It makes you wonder what was going on over there?”
The incident was privately disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department last summer, the sources said. But the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report has never been made public. Nor was it reported to the federal judge who, at the time, was overseeing a lawsuit seeking access to the still classified document under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a review of court files in the case.
A CIA spokesman, while not publicly commenting on the circumstances of the erasure, emphasized that another unopened computer disk with the full report has been, and still is, locked in a vault at agency headquarters. “I can assure you that the CIA has retained a copy,” wrote Dean Boyd, the agency’s chief of public affairs, in an email.
Senate report on CIA torture is one step closer to disappearing
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has “mistakenly” deleted its only copy of a Senate report into the agency’s brutal interrogation techniques.
The CIA Office of Inspector General (OIG), the spy agency’s internal watchdog, told the Congress that the electronic copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,700-page report and a hard disk were destroyed last summer.
A 500-page summary of the report was released to the public by then-Senate Intelligence chair Dianne Feinstein in 2014.
Feinstein said in letters to the agency and Justice Department that the CIA inspector general “has misplaced and/or accidentally destroyed” its only copy of the report.
The deletion of the document has been portrayed by agency officials to Senate investigators as an “inadvertent” foul-up by the inspector general. In what one intelligence community source described as a series of errors straight “out of the Keystone Cops,” CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation methods.
“It’s breathtaking that this could have happened, especially in the inspector general’s office — they’re the ones that are supposed to be providing accountability within the agency itself,” said Douglas Cox, a City University of New York School of Law professor who specializes in tracking the preservation of federal records. “It makes you wonder what was going on over there?”
The incident was privately disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department last summer, the sources said. But the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report has never been made public. Nor was it reported to the federal judge who, at the time, was overseeing a lawsuit seeking access to the still classified document under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a review of court files in the case.
A CIA spokesman, while not publicly commenting on the circumstances of the erasure, emphasized that another unopened computer disk with the full report has been, and still is, locked in a vault at agency headquarters. “I can assure you that the CIA has retained a copy,” wrote Dean Boyd, the agency’s chief of public affairs, in an email.
