Senator: White House Simply Doesn't "Want Public to Know" Scope of CIA Torture

"The public has to know about it. They don't want the public to know about it."

That's what Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) told the Huffington Post on Thursday night regarding continued White House stalling over release of a report that catalogs the internal investigation of CIA torture during the Bush years. The comments followed a close-door meeting between Senate Democrats and Obama administration officials that took place just hours before the president gave a much-anticipated speech on another subject, immigration reform.

Rockefeller said the torture report is "being slow-walked to death" by the administration and told the HuffPost, "They're doing everything they can not to release it."

"[The report] makes a lot of people who did really bad things look really bad," Rockefeller continued, "which is the only way not to repeat those mistakes in the future."

Though the report has been completed for many months, the members of the Senate Intelligence committee have been fighting with the White House, which allowed CIA officials to review its findings, over the scope of redactions to the report's summary before it's made public. Though the full report is not expected to be released to publicly, human rights and transparency advocates have urged members to simply enter the report into the public record, something they have legal authority to do, as a way to inform the American people, and the world, of the full scope of the tactics used by U.S. government agents during the earlier years of the so-called 'war on terror.'

The New York Timesreports:

During a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill with Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, the senators said that the White House was siding with the C.I.A. and trying to thwart negotiations over the report's release. The negotiations have dragged on for months because of a dispute over the C.I.A.'s demand that pseudonyms of agency officers be deleted from the report.

The C.I.A., supported by the White House, has argued that even without using the real names of the officers, their identities could still be revealed.

According to several people in attendance, the meeting was civil, but neither side gave ground, and it ended without resolution. The Senate Intelligence Committee spent five years working on the 6,000-page report, which is said to provide grim details about the torture of detainees in C.I.A. prisons during the Bush administration, and describe a persistent effort by C.I.A. officials to mislead the White House and Congress about the efficacy of its interrogation techniques. The committee voted this year to declassify the report's executive summary, numbering several hundred pages, but the fight over redactions has delayed the release.

Earlier this week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), also member of the committee, characterized the CIA's arguments for leaving the report heavily redacted "ludicrous." Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said the version under discussion would leave all but 15 percent of the report blacked-out. "Try reading a novel with 15 percent of the words blacked out--" Heinrich said. "It can't be done properly."

Chair of the Intelligence Comittee Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) has let her frustrations be known but has not made clear what she intends to do in order to move the White House towards greater transparency on the report.

As the HuffPostreports:

Feinstein declined to discuss the meeting with reporters Thursday. "I ain't talkin'," she said.

Rockefeller said the administration's unwillingness to use aliases reflects a broader contempt for congressional oversight.

"The White House doesn't want to release this. They don't have to. And all we do is oversight, and they've never taken our oversight seriously," he said. (He then added that he did allow for one exception, the Church Committee.) "Under Bush there was no oversight at all. Remember the phrase, 'Congress has been briefed'? What that meant was that I and our chairman [...] and two comparable people in the House had met with [former Vice President Dick] Cheney in his office for 45 minutes and given a little whirley birdie and a couple charts."

"They had a specialty for being unforthcoming in our efforts at oversight," he added, "and therefore there is no incentive for them to change their behavior."

Meanwhile, a coalition of advocacy groups--including RootsAction, Demand Progress, Win Without War, CodePink, USAction, and others--argue the senators on the Intelligence Committe have another path if they truly want to give the public a look at the scope of the abuses perpetrated by the CIA. And, according to the groups, the senators have no obligation to wait for permission from the White House to act. As the coalition points out in a statement, "Members of Congress have an absolute right to free speech, and a member could enter the report into the Congressional Record in its entirety--just as the Pentagon Papers were by Senator Mike Gravel in 1971--without fear of prosecution."

A online petition sponsored by the coalition, which they intend to deliver to members of the committee, reads in part:

The Senate Intelligence Committee's "torture report" is expected to detail shocking abuse of prisoners at the hands of the CIA during the Bush administration, and even possible CIA lying to Congress.

But seven months after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted overwhelmingly to release the report to the American people, the White House is stonewalling Congress and demanding "redactions"--blacked-out sections and information--before making its contents public.

The group has put particular focus on outgoing Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) to step forward and release the report. Udall lost his re-election bid earlier this month and will be leaving the Senate in January. Signers of the petition say that if Udall, or other members in a position to do so, take the "heroic and courageous act" of releasing the full report, "we and countless others will support you."