Offering memories of 9/11 and waving a massive, 500-page report seven years in the making, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Tuesday accused the CIA of damaging America’s standing in the years after the terror attacks.
In an hourlong Senate floor speech, Feinstein accused the spy agency of misleading the American public, carrying out torture and trying to block her committee’s analysis.
{mosads}“The CIA’s actions a decade ago are a stain on our values and on our history,” she claimed.
Her committee’s 500-page public accounting of the controversial “enhanced interrogation” techniques released on Tuesday show that the Bush-era programs “were morally, legally and administratively misguided,” she asserted, “and this nation should never again engage in these tactics.”
In her floor remarks, Feinstein accused the CIA of repeatedly stonewalling the White House, Justice Department and overseers of Congress throughout the course of the programs.
She cited one incident, quoting a CIA official who fretted that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell “would blow his stack if he were briefed” on the program.
The program “was not … managed as a significant CIA program,” Feinstein added. “Instead, it had limited oversight and lacked formal direction and management.”
The Senate committee’s attempt to put together its “torture report” exposed a deep chasm in trust between the CIA and lawmakers on Capitol Hill. At one point earlier this year, agency officials broke into Senate staffers’ computers through a portal used to pass documents back and forth.
Former CIA officials have also launched an effort to discredit the report in the weeks ahead of its release, which Feinstein chided as “a campaign of mistaken statements and press articles launched against the report before anyone has had the chance to read it.”