The OTHER Torture Report: The Secret CIA Document That COULD UNRAVEL The Case For Torture

[Segami]

~snip~

WASHINGTON -- As the public grapples with the gruesome realities put forth in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s damning report on the CIA’s torture program, the agency has dug in to defend itself. The CIA claims the torture tactics it used in the years following 9/11 were legal and saved American lives. And despite what the Senate study alleges, the agency insists it never lied about the torture program. One internal CIA document, though, could be key to discrediting this defense. And at this very moment, it’s tucked away in a Senate safe. Over the past five years, this document, known colloquially as the Panetta Review, has made its way to the center of an unprecedented feud between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA. Committee members, who have spent those years investigating the torture program the CIA ran between roughly 2002 and 2006, believe the Panetta Review reveals that there was doubt within the agency itself about the morality and effectiveness of torture. While the CIA’s official response to the Senate committee’s allegations has been to deny many charges of wrongdoing, senators on the intelligence panel say that the still-classified Panetta Review contradicts that official line. In fact, lawmakers believe the document actually confirms some of the incriminating charges that the committee made in its report.


A meticulous condemnation of the agency’s failings, the executive summary of the Senate document, released Dec. 9, accuses the CIA of using gruesome techniques like waterboarding, rectal feeding and sleep deprivation, all the while lying to authorities around Washington about the efficacy of these tactics. Some senators say the Panetta Review concedes that the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” -- the spy agency’s often-used euphemism for what is widely considered to be torture -- did not make detainees any more willing to talk, despite the CIA's public insistence that the program was successful. Similarly, the document apparently admits that the agency lied about the program to Congress, the White House and the public -- another conclusion that aligns with the findings of the Senate report, and one that the CIA’s official response vehemently denies. As the debate over torture intensifies, the Panetta Review could dent the spies' credibility just as they’re trying to salvage it. The content of the document, though, is only one part of a sensational story, which involves a feud so explosive that months later, some lawmakers are still calling for CIA Director John Brennan’s head. It's unclear whether the Panetta Review will ever be made public, and much remains unknown about it. But new details are emerging that paint the clearest picture yet of the document, its significance and the timeline of events that led Senate staffers to pilfer it from right under the CIA’s nose. Outgoing Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who lost a tough re-election bid after a year of fighting fiercely with the agency over the Panetta Review, revealed previously unknown information this month in a farewell address on the Senate floor. Combined with other public statements, court documents and news reports, these details are helping to better shape the story, showing just how complicated the feud between the CIA and lawmakers has become.

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Beginning in late 2009, millions of documents, cables and records were shoveled from the agency to the committee. In the process of sifting through these documents, two committee staffers who led the torture investigation -- Daniel Jones, 39, and Alissa Starzak, 41, who left the panel in 2011 and is currently nominated to serve as the Army’s general counsel -- discovered a certain set of documents whose markings were unique. The unique notations on these documents were recently revealed in a new court document that the CIA filed in response to a separate FOIA request to turn over the Panetta Review. (The agency denied the request). The top of the documents read:

This classified document was prepared by the CIA Director’s Review Group for Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (DRG-RDI) for DRG-RDI’s internal discussion purposes and should not be used for any other purpose, nor may it be distributed without express permission from DRG-RDI or CIA’s Office of General Counsel. This document contains [certain classified information]. This document also contains material protected by the attorney-client and attorney work-product privileges. Furthermore, this document constitutes deliberative work product, protected by the deliberative-process privilege, and is not a final, conclusive, complete, or comprehensive analysis of DRG-RDI or CIA. Rather, it was created to suit the needs of DRG-RDI, in support of informing senior Agency officials about broad policy issues. While every effort was made to ensure this document’s accuracy, it may contain inadvertent errors. For this reason, and because this document selectively summarizes, draws inferences from, or omits information from the sources it cites, it should not be relied upon by persons outside DRG-RDI.

http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/LutzDeclarationFOIA.pdf

“One possibility is that the CIA placed those documents in the database accessible to the Committee, intentionally or unintentionally,” said the Senate source familiar with the matter. “Another possibility is that an individual CIA officer placed them in that database without authorization. A third possibility is that CIA built a system in which it appeared to them that the Panetta Review documents were unaccessible to the Committee, but were in fact accessible because either the database or the search tool did not work as intended. We don’t know.” The precise timing of this discovery is also unclear. Feinstein has said that some of the Review Group’s summaries became available to Senate investigators at some point in 2010. But Udall, another member of the intelligence committee, said in his farewell speech that it’s not clear when exactly the panel found the Panetta document. It’s not known what became of the document between the Senate investigators’ initial discovery and 2013. Panetta’s review group stopped compiling the summaries in mid-2010, apparently due to a parallel Justice Department inquiry into the torture program. With millions of documents already being cataloged and turned over, the extra paper trail was deemed unnecessary.





cont'

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/22/panetta-review-cia_n_6334728.html

[Scuba]

1. If the torture apologists claim that it's legal and effective they must want the Panetta Review ...

... and the other 6,000+ pages of the Senate's report immediately released.

Give Cheney his due and release it all!!!

[WillyT]

2. Huge K & R !!!

[jakeXT]

3. Reminds me of Northwoods in 2001

According to an accidentally declassified, 1962 Operation NORTHWOODS Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff document, which is discussed in a book by James Bamford, a former Washington DC Investigative Producer for ABC Television's "World News Tonight" programme, "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" (Doubleday, New York, 2001), the Joint Chiefs of Staff planned to begin "Cuban Communist" plane hijackings and terrorist bombings in the US in the early 1960's, to create public support for a war on Cuba. Bamford describes NORTHWOODS as the most corrupt plan ever conceived by the US Government.

The document was accidentally declassified because the Pentagon was told to allow the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board, a US Government agency which is a division of the US National Archives and Records Administration, to look through its files, as the ARRB was charged with declassifying US Government documents which related to the John F. Kennedy assassination.

NORTHWOODS was among approximately 1500 pages of 1962-1964 US Government documents relating to Kennedy and Johnson Administrations policy towards Fidel Castro's Communist dictatorship, which the ARRB decided to declassify. The NORTHWOODS plan has nothing to do with the President Kennedy assassination, but it was presented to the Kennedy Administration, who did not agree with the Pentagon's proposed "Cuban Communist" terrorist attacks against Americans, which led to the document being filed away until it was stumbled upon by the ARRB 3 decades later.

See the US Government (National Archives) online press release, "Media Advisory: National Archives Releases Additional Materials Reviewed by the Assassination Records Review Board" (November 17, 1997), for the announcement that roughly 1500 pages of documents were being released to the public.

On April 30, 2001, the National Security Archive, a non-profit research and archival institution at the George Washington University in Washington DC, posted a photocopy of the entire 15 page original Joint Chiefs of Staff NORTHWOODS document here on its website:

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2012/06/497033.html