“I think this is a terrible idea,” said Mike Rogers, the Republican chair of the House intelligence committee. “Our foreign partners are telling us this will cause violence and deaths... Our own intelligence community has assessed that this will cause violence and deaths.”
The White House said it “strongly supports” the decision to release the report, in order to be clear about “what American values are” and to be sure that “something like this should never happen again”.
However, human rights groups and anti-torture advocates have accused the Obama administration of dragging its feet over publication in order to shield the CIA and the US government from further embarrassment.
The report emerges from a bitter four-year running battle between the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Democrat chair Dianne Feinstein and the CIA, who earlier this year were forced to admit they had spied on her committee, causing outrage in Congress.
Its publication was then further delayed for another four months as Mrs Feinstein wrangled with the CIA over how much of the summary should be scratched out by the censor’s pen. She accused the agency of trying to “obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions”.
Last weekend it emerged that John Kerry, the US secretary of state, had directly asked Mrs Feinstein to reconsider the decision to publish the report, in what activists said was yet another attempt by the administration to avoid a reckoning on the issue.
Early leaks of the report suggest it will conclude that torture did not yield useful intelligence, that the CIA used torture in excess of its remit and repeatedly lied to Congress to cover its tracks and exaggerate the value of any intelligence it extracted under duress.
At a press conference earlier this year Mrs Feinstein promised that the report would reveal “the horrible details of the CIA program that never, never, never should have existed.” That conclusion will be formally contested in a dissenting minority report that will be published alongside Mrs Feinstein’s review and will argue that the report is politically motivated and does not even include interviews of those responsible for the programme.
Already the Bush administration, beginning with Mr Bush himself, have launched a media counter-offensive against the findings of the report which now threatens to deeply discredit both the CIA and the former administration.
“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 contribution to our country it is way off base,” said Mr Bush in an interview over the weekend.
“I knew the directors, the deputy directors, a lot of the operators. These are good people, really good people and we’re lucky as a nation to have them.” Jose Rodriguez, a 31-year veteran of the CIA who ran the programme, said in an editorial page article in the Washington Post that it was an “egregious falsehood” to say the interrogations did not yield intelligence. “It’s a dishonest attempt to rewrite history,” he said.
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