Report: Senate Report on CIA Will Sidestep Look at Bush 'Torture Team'

According to new reporting by McClatchy, the five-year investigation led by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee into the torture program conducted by the CIA in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 will largely ignore the role played by high-level Bush administration officials, including those on the White House legal team who penned memos that ultimately paved the way for the torture's authorization.

Though President Obama has repeatedly been criticized for not conducting or allowing a full review of the torture that occured during his predecessor's tenure, the Senate report--which has been completed, but not released--has repeatedly been cited by lawmakers and the White House as the definitive examination of those policies and practices. According to those with knowledge of the report who spoke with McClatchy, however, the review has quite definite limitations.

The report, one person who was not authorized to discuss it told McClatchy, "does not look at the Bush administration's lawyers to see if they were trying to literally do an end run around justice and the law." Instead, the focus is on the actions and inations of the CIA and whether or not they fully informed Congress about those activities. "It's not about the president," the person said. "It's not about criminal liability."

Responding to comment on the reporting, legal experts and critics of the Bush torture program expressed disappointment that high-level officials in the administration were not part of the review. In addition to the president himself, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, others considered part of what it sometimes referred to as the "Torture Team," include: Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel and attorney general; David Addington, former vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff; Douglas Feith, who was under-secretary of defence; William Haynes, formerly the Pentagon's general counsel; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who wrote many of the specific legal memos authorizing specific forms of abuse.

"If it's the case that the report doesn't really delve into the White House role, then that's a pretty serious indictment of the report," Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University Law School, said to McClatchy. "Ideally it should come to some sort of conclusions on whether there were legal violations and if so, who was responsible."

And Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, indicated that limiting the report to just the actions of the CIA doesn't make much sense from a legal or investigative standpoint. "It doesn't take much creativity to include senior Bush officials in the Senate Intelligence Committee's jurisdiction. It's not hard to link an investigation into the CIA's torture to the senior officials who authorized it. That's not a stretch at all."

As Mclatchy's Jonathan S. Landay, Ali Watkins and Marisa Taylor report:

The narrow parameters of the inquiry apparently were structured to secure the support of the committee's minority Republicans. But the Republicans withdrew only months into the inquiry, and several experts said that the parameters were sufficiently flexible to have allowed an examination of the roles Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials played in a top-secret program that could only have been ordered by the president.

"It doesn't take much creativity to include senior Bush officials in the Senate Intelligence Committee's jurisdiction," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "It's not hard to link an investigation into the CIA's torture to the senior officials who authorized it. That's not a stretch at all."

It's not as if there wasn't evidence that Bush and his top national security lieutenants were directly involved in the program's creation and operation.

The Senate Armed Services Committee concluded in a 2008 report on detainee mistreatment by the Defense Department that Bush opened the way in February 2002 by denying al Qaida and Taliban detainees the protection of an international ban against torture.

White House officials also participated in discussions and reviewed specific CIA interrogation techniques in 2002 and 2003, the public version of the Senate Armed Services Committee report concluded.

Several unofficial accounts published as far back as 2008 offered greater detail.

Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld relentlessly pressured interrogators to subject detainees to harsh interrogation methods in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, McClatchy reported in April 2009. Such evidence, which was non-existent, would have substantiated one of Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003.

Other accounts described how Cheney, Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Secretary of State Colin Powell approved specific harsh interrogation techniques. George Tenet, then the CIA director, also reportedly updated them on the results.

"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly," Ashcroft said after one of dozens of meetings on the program, ABC News reported in April 2008 in a story about the White House's direct oversight of interrogations.

News reports also chronicled the involvement of top White House and Justice Department officials in fashioning a legal rationale giving Bush the authority to override U.S. and international laws prohibiting torture. They also helped craft opinions that effectively legalized the CIA's use of waterboarding, wall-slamming and sleep deprivation.

Though President Obama casually admitted earlier this, "We tortured some folks." -- what most critics and human rights experts have requested is an open and unbiased review of the full spectrum of the U.S. torture program under President Bush. And though increasingly unlikely, calls remain for those responsible for authorizing and conducting the abuse to be held accountable with indictments, trials, and if guilty, jail sentences. In addition, as a letter earlier this year signed by ten victims of the extrajudicial rendition under the Bush administration stated, the concept of full disclosure and accountability is key to restoring the credibility of the nation when it comes to human rights abuses:

Publishing the truth is not just important for the US's standing in the world. It is a necessary part of correcting America's own history. Today in America, the architects of the torture program declare on television they did the right thing. High-profile politicians tell assembled Americans that 'waterboarding' is a 'baptism' that American forces should still engage in.

These statements only breed hatred and intolerance. This is a moment when America can move away from all that, but only if her people are not sheltered from the truth.

As McClatchy notes, a redacted version of the report's summary--the only part of it expected to be released to the public--continues to be under review. Its release date remains unclear.