[dennisw]

Although the timing of this report is not unimportant, I believe the threshold issue is the methodology used by this committee. To say they were partisan soft sells the issue. They were completely intellectually dishonest and to allow this committee's findings to stand or even be considered legitimate is a travesty.

In today's WSJ, former FBI director and Judge, Louis J. Freeh documents what others have already stated. The report and the committee are shams. Here are some of the highlights (http://www.wsj.com/articles/louis-j-...-14182596520):

First, let’s remember the context of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when President George W. Bush and Congress put America on a war footing. While some critics in and out of government blamed the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for failing to prevent the terrorist attack, the 9/11 Commission later concluded that part of the real reason the terrorists succeeded was Washington’s failure to put America on a war footing long before the attack. Sept. 11, 2001, was the final escalation of al Qaeda’s war-making after attacking the USS Cole in 2000 and U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998.

The Intelligence Committee’s majority report fails to acknowledge the Pearl Harbor-esque state of emergency that followed the 9/11 attack. One week after the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, President Bush signed into law a congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which granted the president authority to use “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States.”

This joint congressional resolution, which has never been amended, was not a broad declaration of a “war on terror,” but rather a specific, targeted authorization to use force against the 9/11 terrorists and to prevent their future attacks.

Similarly, the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program, which included the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, was designed and implemented as the direct result of the president and Congress putting the country on a military, law-enforcement and intelligence war footing after 9/11. The program was carefully targeted and sought to apprehend the 9/11 terrorists and prevent them from striking again.

More important, the RDI program was not some rogue operation unilaterally launched by a Langley cabal—which is the impression that the Senate Intelligence Committee report tries to convey. Rather, the program was an initiative approved by the president, the national security adviser and the U.S. attorney general, backed by a legal opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which functions as the president’s outside counsel in such matters. President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their closest advisers at the time have confirmed that they were unified behind the RDI program; they should have been interviewed by the Democratic majority in preparing the report on the CIA interrogations.

"The RDI program, including the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, was fully briefed to the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees. The Senate committee’s new report does not present any evidence that would support the notion that the CIA program was carried out for years without the concurrence of the House or Senate intelligence committees, or that any of the members were shocked to learn of the program after the fact.

Facts matter, including the fact that the Senate committee’s Democratic majority failed to interview the three CIA directors and three deputy directors, or any other CIA employee for that matter, who had briefed them about the program and carried it out.

Such a glaring investigative lapse cannot be fairly explained by the Democratic majority’s defense that it could make such crucial findings solely on the “paper record,” without interviewing the critical players. Nor does the committee’s other explanation for avoiding interviews make sense: The Democratic senators say they didn’t want to interfere with the Justice Department’s criminal inquiry into the RDI program, but that investigation ended in 2012 and found no basis for prosecutions. And no wonder: These public servants at the CIA had dutifully carried out mandates from the president and Congress.

CIA leaders and briefers who regularly updated this programto the Senate Intelligence Committee leadership took what investigators call “copious, contemporaneous notes.” Without a doubt, the Senate Intelligence Committee and congressional staffers at these multiple briefings also took a lot of their own notes. Will the committee now declassify and release all such notes so that Americans will know exactly what the senators were told and the practices they approved?

Sigaba wrote:

IRT the defense of the CIA's methods offered in some posts in this thread, I would point out that those methods included the deception of elected politicians and appointed officials during Bush the Younger's presidency. Examples of this pattern of deception can be found in the executive's footnotes as well as the principal text. Is that really the type of government you want to have?

It sounds to me that the elected officials were very aware of the CIA's tactics and practices, but you're right. I do not want the type of government which condones the practices undertaken by this committee. Allows the concocting of such a BS report while virtually ignoring all the rules of investigation and then releases said report for public consumption.