WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday approved a highly critical, classified report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program, the most comprehensive review of the brutal treatment of Qaeda prisoners in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
After the committee voted 9 to 6 in a closed meeting, mostly along party lines, the Democratic chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, issued a statement saying the long-awaited 6,000-page report “uncovers startling details about the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program and raises critical questions about intelligence operations and oversight.”
“I strongly believe that the creation of long-term, clandestine ‘black sites’ and the use of so-called enhanced-interrogation techniques were terrible mistakes,” Ms. Feinstein said, referring to the agency’s secret overseas prisons and coercive methods, including waterboarding, widely condemned as torture. “The majority of the committee agrees,” she said.
She said the report, with 20 official conclusions and 35,000 footnotes, “includes details of each detainee in C.I.A. custody, the conditions under which they were detained, how they were interrogated, the intelligence they actually provided and the accuracy — or inaccuracy — of C.I.A. descriptions about the program to the White House, Department of Justice, Congress and others.”
The committee’s Republican vice chairman, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, said he voted no because the C.I.A. had not yet fact-checked the report. He said it contained “significant errors, omissions, assumptions and ambiguities — as well as a lot of cherry-picking,” in part because it was based exclusively on documents and not interviews with agency officials.
“I believe the committee has made a mistake in passing judgment without hearing from those involved, and it is the committee’s reputation, the C.I.A.’s reputation and our national security that will pay the price,” he said.
The report now goes to the White House, the C.I.A. and other agencies for review and comment. After that is complete in mid-February, the committee will vote again on how much of the report should be declassified.
One Republican, Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, who is retiring, joined all the committee’s Democrats in voting for the report. In addition, Senator John McCain of Arizona, who as the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee is a nonvoting member of the Intelligence Committee, gave it a strong endorsement.
Mr. McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam and has been an outspoken critic of the C.I.A.’s former methods, wrote Intelligence Committee members urging them to “finalize and declassify this report, so that all Americans can see the record for themselves, which I believe will finally close this painful chapter for our country.”
Mr. McCain added: “What I have learned confirms for me what I have always believed and insisted to be true — that the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience, but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence.”
The committee’s inquiry began as a bipartisan effort in March 2009, but Republicans withdrew their support after the Justice Department began a criminal investigation of the interrogation program. That investigation closed earlier this year without prosecutions.
President Obama banned coercive interrogation methods when he took office in 2009, but the government still treats them as secret. Last week, Col. James L. Pohl, the military judge at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who is overseeing the prosecution of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four others accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks, granted a request by prosecutors to treat anything the detainees say about their C.I.A. interrogations as classified.
