Image
The CIA's use of torture failed to gain any intelligence on imminent terrorist threats, didn't lead to any high-level terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, produced fabricated information and was far more brutal than the agency portrayed to policymakers and the public, according to a long-awaited Senate report released Tuesday.

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee also found:

- The agency assigned unqualified personnel to run secret overseas "black site" prisons where it held in often inhuman conditions at least 119 detainees, some of whom were beaten and subjected to unauthorized interrogation techniques, and at least two died;

- At least 26 detainees were wrongfully imprisoned;

- The CIA may have subjected more detainees to waterboarding than just the three who it has publicly admitted underwent the simulated drowning procedures;

- Former President George W. Bush, who signed a secret order authorizing the detention program a week after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, wasn't filled in on the interrogation techniques until 2006, although someone in the White House cancelled a CIA briefing that was planned for Bush in 2002,

- The CIA paid more than $80 million to a firm founded by two unqualified psychologists who were contracted to design the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" and interrogated some of the agency's most valuable detainees.

Taken together, the findings by the Democrat-led Senate committee painted a portrait of the nation's premier espionage agency pursuing a cruel, ineffective and money-wasting interrogation operation that produced intelligence that could have been found elsewhere and whose results it misrepresented to its political masters and the American public.

"This document the CIA's secret overseas detention of at least 119 individuals and the use of coercive interrogation techniques - in some cases amounting to torture," said the committee chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., in a statement.

Feinstein took to the Senate floor to announce the findings of the $40 million, four-year investigation based on a review of some 6.3 million pages of top-secret CIA cables, emails, records and other documents.

At the same time, she released a roughly 500-page declassified executive summary, findings and conclusions of the more detailed, 6,300-page top-secret report.

In an emailed statement summarizing a response it provided to the committee last year, the CIA acknowledged that the value of some of the intelligence collected during the program was overstated, including in a 2006 speech in which Bush for the first time acknowledged its existence.

"We mischaracterized the impact of the reporting we acquired from detainees," said the CIA said.

However, the agency dismissed the report's sweeping conclusions that characterized the spy agency as rogue.

"There are too many flaws for it to stand as the official record of the program," the agency said.

"We cannot vouch for every individual statement that was made over the years of the program, and we acknowledge the some of those statements were wrong. But the image portrayed in the study of an organization that - on an institutional scale - intentionally misled and routinely resisted oversight from the White House, the Congress, the Department of Justice and its own (inspector general) imply does not comport with the record."

The spy agency also maintained the information collected during interrogations was crucial in detecting terrorist plots.

"The sum total of information provided from detainees in CIA custody substantially advanced the Agency's strategic and tactical understanding of the enemy in ways that continue to inform counter-terrorism efforts to this day," the agency said.