What you need to know about the CIA torture report -- VOX

http://www.vox.com/2014/12/9/7339753/senate-torture-report

The huge new Senate report on CIA torture, explained


(snip)

How investigators judged American torture programs

The report is based on investigators' review of over six million pages of CIA documents, from contemporary notes by lower-level officials to higher-level memos.

Only the report's executive summary is being released

Initially, the bipartisan investigators planned to interview CIA employees as well. But in August 2009, the Justice Department launched its own investigation of the CIA over torture. Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans argued that CIA employees would now be put at legal risk by answering investigators' questions, so the committee's GOP members dropped out of the effort entirely. The remaining (Democratic) investigators responded by deciding to limit their report solely to the documents rather than conducting new interviews. (The Justice Department's investigation concluded in 2012 without any charges being brought.)

The CIA agreed that Senate Intelligence Committee staffers could examine the agency's internal cables — but only at a special, secure facility, using special computers, after the CIA's own outside contractors had already reviewed the documents. As a result, the review reportedly cost $40 million before its first draft was completed in December 2012.

Since then, the Intelligence Committee has been battling with the administration over how much information in the report's 600-page executive summary can be released to the public. The thousands of pages of the report beyond that summary will remain classified, and many details of the executive summary will be redacted.

What the report found: torture wasn't effective and the CIA misled the public

According to several reports by journalists clued into the report's findings early, the Senate investigators concluded that torture wasn't effective and that CIA officials had misled the government and the public into believing that torture produced valuable information.


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