The Senate Torture Report is the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s post–September 11 detention and interrogation program, the executive summary of which was published in December 2014. It was the first public disclosure of a number of CIA interrogation techniques — including rectal feeding with hummus, sexual assault with broomsticks, threats with power drills, and sleep deprivation of up to 180 hours — that had not previously been acknowledged by the agency or the U.S. government.[1][2]
Reinterpreting the torture prohibition
Per CIA records cited by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the agency began reinterpreting the legal prohibition on torture immediately upon Abu Zubaydah’s capture in March 2002, a process involving the National Security Council, the White House, and the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel.[3]
Techniques disclosed
The report enumerated the techniques used on detainees at CIA black sites. Among those that had been previously acknowledged: waterboarding. Among those disclosed for the first time:
- Rectal feeding / rectal hydration with pureed hummus
- Sexual abuse using broomsticks
- Threats with buzzing power drills
- Sleep deprivation of up to 180 hours, with the prisoner’s hands shackled above their head[1]
Black sites
The report identified the locations at which the interrogation program had been carried out: Afghanistan, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Thailand, and at the secret annex of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base known as Strawberry Fields.[1]
Reception within the CIA
A number of the practices disclosed had not been known to most personnel inside the Central Intelligence Agency itself prior to publication of the report. “Even inside the CIA we didn’t know anything about rectal hydration with hummus — no less — with sexual abuse or sexual assault using broomsticks. I mean, people didn’t even talk about those kinds of things in the hallway, so I was absolutely shocked hearing it.”[2]
John Kiriakou — who had refused certification in the enhanced interrogation techniques program in May 2002 and was the only person to have served a federal prison sentence in connection with the program (under the Espionage Act, for an unrelated disclosure) — has subsequently described his reaction to the report as “I feel like I live in the Twilight Zone sometimes.”[4]
Argument for selective prosecution
The unauthorized techniques disclosed by the report — those for which no Department of Justice or presidential authorization existed — are the basis of Kiriakou’s recurring argument for selective prosecution of CIA officers, distinct from any debate about prosecuting officers who applied the formally approved techniques:
What about case officers who took the law into their own hands or who flouted the law and raped prisoners with broomsticks or carried out rectal hydration with hummus? Those were not approved interrogation techniques. Why aren’t those officers being prosecuted? I think at the very least that’s where we should start the prosecutions.[5]
No CIA officer has been prosecuted for any of the techniques disclosed in the report. “Here we are twenty-two years after 9/11 — literally no one has been prosecuted for that crime. No one. Nor will anyone be prosecuted, because the CIA ensured that no prosecutions could be carried out.”[6]
Vindication and redaction
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program was released in December 2014. According to John Kiriakou, the report proved everything he had said publicly in his torture-program whistleblowing was accurate.[7] One detail remained classified: the number of prisoners who died as a result of the program, which was redacted.[8] Kiriakou notes the public document is a heavily redacted 500-page executive summary of a 5,000-page underlying report, and that the fuller truth is in its footnotes — including one stating Abu Zubaydah would never be released and would be secretly cremated at death.[9][10]
Kiriakou describes the report, as published, as a purely partisan product: written entirely by Democratic staff on the Senate Intelligence Committee, with no Republican members, staff, or involvement in its production. Republicans subsequently published a counter-report defending the program outright — arguing, in Kiriakou’s paraphrase, that it wasn’t torture, that it worked, and that it was moral.[11]
Kiriakou was in prison when the report was being finalized; roughly six weeks before his December 2014 release (he has also given the figure as two weeks), his wife called him to tell him about it, so he first learned of his own vindication over the phone while incarcerated, allowed only a 15-minute call every other day. He recounts the call the same way across many interviews: he asked how her day was, she said “great,” and when he asked why, she told him the report had just been released and “it proved that everything you said was true.”[7][12][13][14][15][16] Several of these tellings add that Senator John McCain then stood on the floor of the Senate and said the country owed Kiriakou a debt of gratitude, because without his whistleblowing the American people would never have known what their government was doing in their name — and that McCain went on to sponsor the McCain-Feinstein amendment permanently banning torture.[13][14][17][15]
Kiriakou says the fuller truth of the underlying 5,000-page (elsewhere given as roughly 6,000 or 6,500 pages) classified report is largely inaccessible: only the roughly 500-page executive summary was ever released, and even that is easily 50 percent redacted.[18][19][20][21] He says only around 14 copies of the full report exist, given to federal agencies including the Department of Justice — many of which, he says, were returned unread (“we don’t even want this thing in our safe, take it”) — and that, per reporting he cites from The Intercept, most copies have since been destroyed.[19][22] Between the 2009 CIA inspector general’s report — which gave only a partial inkling of what had happened — and the full Senate report’s release, Kiriakou estimates 99.9 percent of CIA officers had no idea the abuses documented in it were taking place.[23]
The CIA spied on its overseers
John Kiriakou states that the CIA spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee to see what its investigators were gathering for the Senate torture report — an agency turning its surveillance on the very body meant to oversee it.[24]
Kiriakou traces the episode to Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee and who he says was, for years, strongly pro-CIA — a “cheerleader” who supported deputy directors Steve Kappes and John McLaughlin, both of whom Kiriakou says were deeply involved in the torture program, and who even demanded Kappes be renamed deputy director.[25][26] Feinstein turned against the agency, in Kiriakou’s account, only after CIA Director John Brennan ordered CIA officers to hack into the Senate Intelligence Committee’s own computer system to see what her staff had gathered for the torture investigation.[27][28] He also names Avril Haines — then deputy CIA director — as complicit: Haines led the team that redacted the roughly 6,000-page report down to the heavily blacked-out 500-page executive summary, let off the hook the CIA agents who carried out the hack of Senate investigators’ computers, and overruled the CIA’s own inspector general to decline punishing any officer involved in the torture program, several of whom Kiriakou says were instead promoted and given career intelligence medals.[20][29][30] Kiriakou calls Brennan and Haines ordering the hack of Senate Intelligence Committee Democratic staff a “Watergate level” and constitutional scandal.[28]
Feinstein and Brennan each reported the other to the Department of Justice — Feinstein for the hacking, Brennan in turn accusing Senate investigators of wrongdoing — but Attorney General Eric Holder pursued no charges against either side.[27][31] Kiriakou separately recalls working on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for two and a half years under Senator John Kerry after leaving the CIA, and says he never saw staff work so hard to keep information from the American people as he did there.[26]
In a separate discussion of the same report, Kiriakou also addressed Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners held after the October 7 attack.[32]