A Senate intelligence panel votes this week on findings of a three-year review of CIA “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on terror suspects and condemned by some US politicians as torture.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said Tuesday the 6,000-page report looking into Bush-era counter-terrorism practices will not be released to the public this week, saying such a decision would be made at a later date.
“The committee is, however, scheduled to vote to approve the report,” she said in a statement emailed to AFP before convening a closed-door hearing of the committee scheduled for later Tuesday.
“It is comprehensive, it is strictly factual, and it is the most definitive review of this CIA program to be conducted,” she added.
“Any decision on declassification and release of any portion of the report will be decided by committee members at a later time.”
It remains unclear whether the sensitive report will ever be made public, as several Republicans on the committee boycotted the investigation from the start, leaving it unclear whether the findings will be approved.
Investigators analyzed millions of pages of intelligence records detailing the treatment of detainees.
Top lawmakers said in April that the report will show that enhanced interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency were not effective in helping find terror suspects.
The senators also probed the effects of “waterboarding,” the simulated drowning technique which President Barack Obama and other US politicians have deemed to be torture.
Earlier this year, an in-depth account of CIA interrogation operations in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks was published by Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA deputy director for operations, who defended waterboarding.
He argued that top terror suspect and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom the CIA says was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, spilled key information as a result of the methods.
But Feinstein and Senator Carl Levin said in April that statements by Rodriguez and others about the CIA interrogation program’s role in locating Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, who was killed in a US military raid in Pakistan last year, were “inconsistent with CIA records.”
The CIA used coercive interrogation methods on dozens of detainees at so-called black sites around the world.
Rodriguez and others have said that information obtained from those interrogations led to bin Laden’s courier, which in turn led eventually to the Al-Qaeda leader himself.
Feinstein and Levin said the original information had no connection to CIA detainees, data which they said would be detailed in the report.
US Senate panel to vote on CIA interrogations report
