Obama has agreed to preserve the Senate’s landmark investigation into the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11, but his decision ensures that the document remains out of public view for at least 12 years and probably longer
Despite Obama’s decision, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the intelligence committee and an advocate of the report, pledged to build “a bipartisan coalition” starting next month to declassify the report as a measure to check Trump’s pro-torture impulses.
“The American people deserve the opportunity to read this history rather than see it locked away in a safe for twelve years. When the president-elect has promised to bring back torture, it is also more critical than ever that the study be made available to cleared personnel throughout the federal government who are responsible for authorizing and implementing our country’s detention and interrogation policies,” Wyden said.
Wyden urged Obama to designate the torture report an agency record, which makes it releasable under the Freedom of Information Act, adding: “Burying the study achieves nothing but to create an information vacuum that gets filled with uninformed and highly dangerous propaganda.”
Daniel Jones was the chief investigator for the Senate intelligence committee’s inquiry into CIA detentions and interrogations carried out in the post-9/11 Bush era.... But before Jones’s investigation was released in December 2014, the CIA searched through Senate files on a shared, firewalled network that had been set up by the agency for Jones and his team to securely receive classified documents. The CIA accessed Jones’s work and even reconstructed his emails... “People who played a significant role in this program, who are in the report, continue to play significant roles in sensitive programs at the agency,” said Jones... Jones was so afraid the CIA would destroy important evidence, that he covertly removed from a CIA location a classified document, later described as a “smoking gun” by a senator on the committee https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/09/dan-jones-cia-torture-cover-report-senate