The US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday approved the findings of an investigation into CIA “enhanced interrogation” – techniques the panel’s leader decried as “terrible mistakes.”
The committee voted nine to six to approve the 6,000-page report on the former use of the tactics, which have been deemed torture by President Barack Obama and Republican Senator John McCain among others.
But they made no immediate plans to de-classify the report for the public.
Investigators pored over six million pages in a 3.5-year review of Central Intelligence Agency practice, including the sending of detainees to so-called “black sites” around the world where they endured harsh interrogation.
“I strongly believe that the creation of long-term, clandestine ‘black sites’ and the use of so-called ‘enhanced-interrogation techniques’ were terrible mistakes,” Senate Intelligence Committee chair Senator Dianne Feinstein said, in a statement after the vote.
“The majority of the committee agrees.”
Republicans on the panel had boycotted participation in the investigation from the start, in part because it was based on documents and not interviews conducted with intelligence agents.
The senators also probed the effects of “water boarding”, the simulated drowning technique sometimes used by US interrogators under former president George W Bush but that Obama has deemed to amount to torture.
The committee’s ranking Republican, Senator Saxby Chambliss, would not say whether he voted to approve the findings. “I’ve already said that there are a lot of inaccuracies in it,” he told reporters.
The “comprehensive review” will now get sent to the president, Feinstein said. The executive branch has until February 15 to send to the panel its comments and recommendations on declassification.
