Senate to release torture report

U.S. Marines are on high alert. So are the CIA and
the White House, for that matter.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle also are ready to enter
the fray.
They're all geared up over the Senate Intelligence
Committee's $50 million investigation of Bush-era CIA
interrogation tactics on detainees in the years after the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The long-delayed report on the use of torture --
"enhanced interrogation techniques" -- by the U.S.
government is expected to be released Tuesday morning.
This won't be the full report, but its 480-page executive
summary that will be released. There will also be a shorter
Republican counter-assessment and the CIA's own
assessment. The complete report totals more than 6,000
pages.
The release comes six years into Barack Obama's
presidency and in the waning days of Democratic Party
control in the Senate.
Ugly new details
Officials briefed on the report say it will provide ugly new
details of the CIA program, including specifics on detainee
deaths and a portrayal of a haphazardly assembled and
poorly managed program. The report will detail 20
findings, plus 20 case studies that the Senate Democrats say
illustrate the CIA's misrepresentations about the program.
The hunt for Osama bin Laden is one of the 20 case
studies.
Countries that cooperated with the CIA, hosting black site
prisons and assisting in transferring detainees, will be
identified only obliquely and not by name. CIA employees,
referred to by pseudonyms in the report, won't be
identified. However, the CIA pushed for the pseudonyms
to be redacted because other information in the report could
be used to determine who the employees are.
The Senate report was conceived initially as a bipartisan
review of the CIA program, though Republican senators
pulled support from the investigation soon after it began. Its
findings probably will end up being seen through the prism of
the deeply partisan divide over the Bush-era counter-
terrorism tactics and whether they actually produced
intelligence to keep the nation safe.
'These are good people'
CNN's Candy Crowley asked former President George
W. Bush about the report in a recent interview.
"I'll tell you this," Bush said after clarifying that he hadn't
read the Senate report yet. "We're fortunate to have men
and women who work hard at the CIA serving on our
behalf. These are patriots. And whatever the report says,
if it diminishes their contributions to our country, it is way
off base. I knew the directors, the deputy directors, I
knew a lot of the operators. These are good people.
Really good people. And we're lucky as a nation to have
them."
The central conclusion by the Democratic-led Senate
report, according to people briefed on the investigation, is
that CIA employees exceeded the guidelines set by Justice
Department memos that authorized the use of "enhanced
interrogation techniques" and that the agency misrepresented
to Congress and the White House what it was doing.
More than 100 detainees went through the CIA's detention
program, and about a third were subjected to those
techniques, which included waterboarding, exposure to low
temperatures, slapping and sleep deprivation. Three were
waterboarded, which is considered the harshest of the
techniques.
The agency now disavows the program as a mistake that it
won't repeat.
But it is also trying to walk a fine line, by sticking to
claims that valuable intelligence on al Qaeda and in the hunt
for bin Laden emerged from the harsh interrogations of
detainees.
For some Republicans and CIA supporters, there's still a
dispute about whether techniques such as waterboarding
constitute torture.
The Justice Department twice has investigated the conduct
of CIA employees involved in the program and decided not
to bring charges.
On alert
Anticipating a backlash across the Middle East with the
release of the report, thousands of Marines have been put
on a higher state of alert. Should a U.S. Embassy or
base come under threat, the units can be deployed within
hours.
The Marines are all part of forces positioned in key areas
to respond to a crisis.
"I've directed all of our combatant commanders to have all
their commands on alert because we want to be prepared,
just in case," Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said
Tuesday. "We've not detected anything specific anywhere,
but we want to be prepared, and we are."
A house divided
President Obama, who was an early critic of the CIA
program as a senator, has tried to be more even-handed
since becoming President. "We tortured some folks," he
said in August, adding that there was a need to recall the
context of the era, including the fear of follow-up terrorist
attacks against the United States.
"In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we did some things
that were wrong -- we did a whole lot of things that
were right, but we did some things that were contrary to
our values. ... I understand why it happened. It's
important when we look back to recall how afraid people
were."
The report has also opened a rare public rift between the
current White House and some Democrats on Capitol
Hill.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence
Committee and is usually a defender of the CIA, has
unleashed stinging criticism of the agency after what she
said was a series of cover-ups, including the destruction of
interrogation tapes.
"The interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the
CIA detention sites were far different and far more harsh
than the way the CIA had described them to us,"
Feinstein said on the Senate floor in March.
In a phone call Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry
asked Feinstein to consider the broader implications of the
timing of the report's release, said State Department
spokeswoman Jen Psaki.
"A lot is going on in the world, and he wanted to make
sure that foreign policy implications were being
appropriately factored into timing," Psaki said. "These
include our ongoing efforts against ISIL and the safety of
Americans being held hostage around the world."
During the call, Kerry made it clear "that the timing is, of
course, her choice," Psaki added.
Feinstein also said some of the report's findings challenge
the "societal and constitutional" values of America.
"We have to get this report out," she told the Los Angeles
Times in an interview Sunday. "Anybody who reads this is
going to never let this happen again."