WASHINGTON (Sputnik), Leandra Bernstein — Reports that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Inspector General’s office mistakenly destroyed its copy of the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report indicates the strong opposition to revealing past CIA practices, US Senator Diane Feinstein told Sputnik on Tuesday.
"There are very powerful interests that don’t want this to ever have the chance of daylight," Feinstein said of the reported CIA destruction of the report.
On Monday, US media reported that the CIA Inspector General’s office, the spy agency's internal watchdog, acknowledged it mistakenly destroyed its only copy of the Senate torture report. The admission coincided with CIA assurances to the Department of Justice that it was taking efforts to preserve the document.
Feinstein, who led the Senate Intelligence Committee when the torture report was drafted, explained that "it is hard for me to understand how you can accidentally destroy the disc as well as the 7,000 page volume."
The senator emphasized that if the report was in fact destroyed, "it ought to be replaced."
The report exposed the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" used on suspected terrorists while in CIA custody, including near drowning, non-stop interrogation, force-feeding and rectal feeding, and other methods of coercion.
Feinstein noted that none of the facts exposed in the publicized executive summary have been disproven.
"And the big report is all of the evidence sustaining what we say in the summary," she stated.
Despite her efforts to have the summary of the report released in 2014, Feinstein explained that "the time is yet for declassification" of the entire 7,000 page report. Any further decision to declassify the material is in the hands of the Obama administration.
Following reports of the destruction of the torture file, the CIA assured the public that the agency still has a copy.
The torture report covers CIA interrogation practices from 2001 through 2006 as part of the War on Terror. According to the published summary, the intelligence community and previous US administration misled the American people in claiming the enhanced interrogation practices produced useful intelligence.
