Why Did Trump Administration Return CIA Torture Report From Bush-Era Detention Program?

The administration of President Donald Trump has started returning to the Congress a 2014 report of the Central Intelligence Agency that described its detention and interrogation programs, including torture. The CIA report was written when the Democrats controlled the Senate.

The move by the current administration is in response to requests by Sen. Richard Burr, the Senate Intelligence Committee's current chairman. Burr, a Republican senator from North Carolina, referred to the report as "shoddy" and excessively critical of the CIA and former President George W. Bush's administration, the New York Times reported Friday, citing officials.

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In a statement emailed to Reuters, Burr said: "I have directed my staff to retrieve copies of the Congressional study that remain with the Executive Branch agencies and, as the Committee does with all classified and compartmented information, will enact the necessary measures to protect the sensitive sources and methods contained within the report."

The 6,700-page Senate report was written in 2014 under then-intelligence committee chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic senator from California. The findings suggested that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than CIA had acknowledged in the past, according to a Times report.

The committee investigating into the interrogation tactics used by the CIA claimed it had obtained a photograph of a board surrounded by buckets of water, presumably used for waterboarding. This was at a prison in Afghanistan, at a facility commonly known as Salt Pit, where CIA had earlier claimed waterboarding was never used.

A covert officer described the prison as a "dungeon" and another officer referred to the prisoners there as dogs who had been kenneled.

The current administration's decision to return the copies of the report indicates its contents might be buried forever and never be made public, at least so long as Republicans control the Senate and the White House, reports said.

Since its completion, the document has been a bone of contention between committee Democrats, civil liberties advocates who were concerned that the report will never become public and congressional Republicans who argued that it was overly critical of the CIA.

Meanwhile, the intelligence panel's Democrats criticized the Trump administration and Burr for returning the copies of the report, reports said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island released a statement which said: "When I served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, my colleagues and I worked hard to ensure a full accounting of the Bush Administration’s turn down the dark road to torture... The report’s public component has been stipulated as accurate by the United States military, and CIA ‘objections’ were quietly taken down from the website. The report contains difficult facts to face, but they must be aired."

Sen. Feinstein also released a statement expressing her disappointment over Burr not consulting with the Democrats on the committee before demanding for the report to be returned.