CIA Kept Government in Dark over Torture in Interrogations - Senate Report

The CIA kept the government in the dark over brutal torture techniques and the actual relevance of such methods in obtaining intelligence information from detainees, according to a Senate report.

The Washington Post reports that the document compiled by the Senate Intelligence Committee listed several accounts of suspected terrorists, who were cooperative and had provided requisite information, but were nevertheless tortured. The CIA then used the intelligence gathered by normal means to justify its brutal interrogation techniques.

"The CIA described (its programme) repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives," a US official briefed on the document told the daily. Was that actually true? The answer is no," the report said.

The 6,300-page document remains classified, but will be sent to President Barack Obama for possible declassification.

The report is said to have an elaborate account of treatment meted out to post-9/11 detainees and the secret detention centres, which were later closed by President Obama in 2009.

The document notes that some of the CIA employees left a secret site in Thailand because they did not appreciate the abuses the detainees had to suffer in the undercover prison.

According to the report, the CIA headquarters did not order clamping down on brutal interrogative methods after analysts testified that detainees had no additional intelligence information.

Also, the committee says that the information that was used to apprehend Osama bin Laden in 2011 was not gathered by brutal interrogative methods.

The report is expected to cause a rift between the CIA and the FBI, as many intelligence officials do not appreciate many of the techniques interpreted as torture by Obama and the FBI.

The intelligence agency and the committee reportedly accused each other of alleged criminal violations involved in accessing computer systems as a part of investigation.

Many CIA officials say there are several factual errors in the accounts and the report is biased. Many discrepancies were noted in the report between the statements of senior CIA officials and the employees who were directly in charge of interrogations.