CIA torture report to remain secret for ‘national security’
A US Senate report outlining the CIA’s brutal ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods will not see the light of day – for now | A US federal judge has ruled that a sprawling congressional report on the CIA’s Terror War torture program will remain classified, claiming citizens have no right to access the controversial document, portions of which were already leaked to the public by a Democratic senator in 2014. In a decision on Thursday, District of Columbia Judge Beryl Howell said the report...
...💬 “does not qualify as a public record subject to the common law right of public access,” as a previous case concluded it was a “congressional record” and therefore could not be obtained through standard Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. ● “The Report contains highly classified information about the CIA’s detention and interrogation policies and procedures that would compromise national security if released, far outweighing the public’s interest in disclosure,” the judge wrote in her opinion.
The 6,700-page Senate report details the CIA’s clandestine detention and torture programs launched after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, during which countless foreign suspects were swept up into secretive ‘black site’ prisons overseas and subjected to extreme, and often barbaric, interrogation measures. Few of those cases ever resulted in formal charges for the accused, many of whom were apparently held at the agency’s own discretion, well beyond the reach of the American criminal justice system or the international laws of war.