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Statement of Senator Ron Wyden on the Senate Intelligence Committees

Investigation of the Central Intelligence Agencys Detention and Interrogation
Program
As prepared for delivery
December 9, 2014
M. President, I have now served on the Senate Intelligence Committee for
fourteen years, so I have long experience with the Senates efforts to investigate
the CIAs detention and interrogation program. I came to the Senate floor in
spring 2005 to join Senator Rockefeller, who was then the committees Vice
Chairman, in calling for the committee to investigate the CIAs interrogation
activities and the possible use of torture. In 2009, I joined my colleagues on the
committee in voting 14-1 to approve Chairman Feinsteins motion to launch an
investigation of these activities.
As I said at the time, I believed that what the debate over torture and coercive
interrogation needed was an infusion of facts. People today can hear me and
other policymakers argue that the CIAs so-called enhanced interrogation
techniques constituted torture, and did not work. And they can also hear
various former officials argue that these techniques are not torture, and that they

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produced uniquely valuable information. I want the American people to have

access to the facts, so that they can make up their own minds about this
important issue. I believe that when they read this report they will see that it is a
meticulously documented examination of this issue, and I hope that they will
agree that the United States should never resort to torture again.
Americans have known since the days of the Salem witch trials that torture is an
unreliable means of obtaining truthful information, in addition to being morally
reprehensible. But following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a small
number of CIA officials decided to listen to the advice of outside contractors who
told them that the way to quickly get important information from captured
terrorist suspects was by using coercive interrogation techniques that had been
developed and used by communist dictatorships during the Cold War. I will note
that CIA officials later paid these same contractors to evaluate the effectiveness
of their own work.
CIA officials repeatedly represented that these techniques were safe, that they
were only used against high-level terrorist captives, and that their use provided
unique, otherwise unavailable intelligence that saved lives. After five years of

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investigation, our committee found that none of these claims holds up under
close scrutiny.
The CIAs so-called enhanced interrogation techniques included a number of
techniques that the United States has long recognized as torture. Furthermore,
the CIAs own interrogation records make it clear that the use of these techniques
in the CIAs secret prisons was far harsher than was described in representations
by the CIA.
CIA Director Michael Hayden testified [in closed session] that any deviations from
approved procedures were reported and corrected, but CIA interrogation logs
describe a wide variety of harsh techniques that even the Justice Departments
infamous torture memos did not consider. Incidents like placing detainees in ice
water or threatening a detainee with a power drill were often not appropriately
reported or corrected when they happened.
Director Hayden also testified that detainees at a minimum [have] always had a
bucket to dispose of their human waste. But in fact CIA detainees were routinely
placed in diapers for extended periods of time, and CIA cables show multiple
instances in which interrogators deliberately withheld waste buckets from
detainees.

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Even more chillingly, CIA records indicate that some CIA prisoners may not have
been terrorists at all. Some of these individuals were in fact ruthless terrorists
with blood already on their hands, but one of this reports most alarming findings
is that this does not seem to have been the case in every instance. In one
particularly troubling case, the CIA held an intellectually challenged man
prisoner and attempted to use tapes of him crying as leverage against another
member of the mans family. At another point, a CIA official noted in writing that
the CIA was holding a number of detainees about whom we know very little.
And the CIA on multiple occasions continued to hold people even after CIA
officers concluded that there was not enough information to detain them. Our
review even found email records that describe Director Hayden instructing a CIA
officer to under-report the total number of CIA detainees. To this day the CIAs
official response to this report indicates that senior CIA officials are alarmingly
uninterested in determining exactly how many detainees the CIA even held.
To be clear, our report does not attempt to determine the motivation behind
these misrepresentations. This report does not reach judgments about whether
individuals were deliberately lying or unknowingly passing along inaccurate
information. It simply compares the representations that the CIA made to
Congress, the Justice Department, the public, and others to the information found

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in the CIAs own internal records, and it notes where these comparisons reveal
significant contradictions.
One of the biggest sets of contradictions revolves around the repeated claim that
the use of these techniques produced unique, otherwise unavailable intelligence
that saved lives. CIA officials made this claim to the White House, the Justice
Department, the Congress and the public. And they repeated this claim over and
over and over again.
Over the years CIA officials came up with a number of examples to try to support
this claim, such as the names of particular terrorists supposedly captured as a
result of coercive interrogations, or plots that had been supposedly thwarted
based on this unique, otherwise unavailable information.
The Committee took the twenty most prominent or frequently cited examples
used by the CIA, and our investigators spent years going through them. Twenty
examples are going to feel like a lot to anyone who reads this report all the way
through, but the committee members who were working on this report agreed
that it was important to be thorough and avoid cherry-picking just one or two
cases.

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In every single one of these cases, CIA statements about the unique effectiveness
of coercive interrogation techniques were contradicted in one way or another by
the CIAs own internal records. Im going to repeat that, because I think that is a
pretty stunning finding. In every single one of these twenty cases, CIA statements
about the unique effectiveness of coercive interrogation techniques were
contradicted in one way or another by the CIAs own internal records. I am not
talking about minor inconsistencies. Im talking about fundamental
contradictions. For example, in congressional testimony and documents prepared
for White House briefings, the CIA claimed that a detainee named Abu Zubaydah
had identified Khalid Shaykh Muhammed as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks
after he was detained by the CIA and subjected to the CIAs coercive interrogation
techniques. But in fact CIA records clearly show that Abu Zubaydah provided this
information during non-coercive interrogations by the FBI, prior to the beginning
of his coercive CIA interrogations, and days before he was even moved to the
CIAs secret detention site.
I had personally expected that there would be at least one or two cases where
vague or incomplete records might appear to support the CIAs claims. But in fact
every one of these twenty examples crumbles under close scrutiny.

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And when I say close scrutiny, Im talking about one of the most thorough
investigations in the history of the United States Senate. The full version of this
report is over 6,700 pages long and contains almost 38,000 footnotes. The
summary report that is being released today is 500 pages long by itself, and also
contains literally thousands of footnotes. And it is based on a five-year review of
over six million pages of documents, including interrogation logs, interview
transcripts, internal emails and memoranda, official presentations to Congress,
the Justice Department and the White House, and other documents. Its findings
do not rest on speculation or incriminating fragments of communications, but on
a vast body of documentary evidence.
The report that is being released today includes a number of redactions aimed at
protecting national security. I will say quite frankly that I believe some of these
redactions are unnecessary, and a few of them even obscure some details that
would help people understand parts of the report. But overall I am satisfied that
these redactions do not make the report unreadable, and that it will be possible
for Americans who read the report to learn not only what happened, but how it
happened, which is of course essential to keeping it from happening again.

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One of the reasons that this public release is necessary is that the current CIA
leadership has been alarmingly resistant to acknowledging the full scope of the
mistakes and misrepresentations that surrounded this program for so many years.
Some of this resistance is made clear in the CIAs official response to the
committees report, and I expect that some of it will be echoed by former officials
who were involved in the program.
So I think it is important to briefly remind people about a set of documents known
as the Panetta Review. When former CIA Director Panetta came in to the Agency
in 2009, he made it clear from the outset that he wanted to work to put the
Agencys history of torture behind it, and that he wanted to cooperate with the
Intelligence Committees investigation. He also quite sensibly asked some CIA
personnel to review internal CIA records and get a sense of what this investigation
could be expected to find. This review got off to a decent start, and it began to
identify some of the same mistakes and misrepresentations that are identified in
our committees report. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this review ever
made it to Director Panettas desk. Instead, publicly available documents make it
clear that this review was quietly terminated by CIA attorneys who thought that it
was moving too fast.

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Earlier this year the CIA secretly conducted an unprecedented search of Senate
files in an effort to find out whether the committee had obtained any copies of
the Panetta Review. After they found that committee investigators had in fact
obtained the Panetta Review, the CIA actually attempted to file unsupported
criminal allegations against these Senate staff members. After this search was
publicly revealed by the press, the CIAs own spokesman acknowledged in USA
Today that this search had taken place, and that it had been done because the CIA
was looking to see if our investigators had found a document that the CIA did not
want Congress to have. That same week, CIA Director John Brennan told reporter
Andrea Mitchell that the CIA had not spied on Senate files, and that nothing
could be further from the truth.
I think this incident and the CIAs overall response to this report clearly
demonstrate an alarming culture of misinformation. Instead of acknowledging
the serious organizational problems that are laid out in this report, the CIAs
leadership seems inclined to try to sweep them under the rug. That means that
these organizational problems arent going to be fixed unless they are laid out
publicly. And there is also a danger that other countries or even future
administrations might be tempted to use torture if they dont have all the facts
about the CIAs experience. Thats why todays release is so important.

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Id like to join my colleagues in thanking all of the staff who have poured so many
hours into this investigation over the past five years. Id also like to thank
Chairman Feinstein leading this effort, and our former Chairman, Senator
Rockefeller, who has fought hard for congressional oversight of Americas
intelligence agencies for many, many years.
And Id like to conclude by thanking my friend and colleague, Senator Mark Udall
of Colorado. Ive had the privilege of serving with Senator Udall on the
Intelligence Committee for the past several years, and Im genuinely impressed by
his commitment to protecting both American security and core American values.
Mark Udall is a man whos not afraid to stand alone and fight for what he believes
is right, and Ive seen that across a wide spectrum of issues, from mass
surveillance to war and peace to interrogation and torture. When the fight to
declassify this report got bumpy, there were some who suggested that it might
end up getting buried forever. Mark Udall made it clear that under no
circumstances would he allow that to happen. Over the years we lost our share
of 13 to 2 votes, but Mark never got deterred by setbacks, and as time went on a
lot of those debates eventually ended up swinging our way. But win or lose
Senator Udall has been an incredible partner, and Im grateful to have had the
opportunity to serve with him.

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