Kerry to US senator: Consider timing of CIA report

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State John Kerry asked the head of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Comm8ittee on Friday to "consider" the timing of the expected release of a long-awaited report on the CIA's harsh interrogation techniques.

The official said Kerry called Sen. Dianne Feinstein to talk about the implications of publicly releasing a declassified summary of her committee's report given the combustible situations in various world hotspots. The official, however, said the administration's support for the summary's release remained unchanged. The official was not authorized to discuss the private call by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Tom Mentzer, a spokesman for the California Democrat, said he had no immediate comment.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is poised to release early next week the first public accounting of the CIA's use of torture on al-Qaida detainees held in secret facilities in Europe and Asia in the years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

It will come in the form of a 480-page executive summary of the 6,200-page report by Democrats on the committee, who spent six years reviewing millions of secret CIA documents.

According to many U.S. officials who have read it, the document includes disturbing new details about the CIA's use of such techniques as sleep deprivation, confinement in small spaces, humiliation and the simulated drowning process known as waterboarding. President Barack Obama has acknowledged, "We tortured some folks."

But the report goes much further than to simply condemn the brutal methods, which Obama banned in 2009 and were repudiated by the three most recent CIA directors. It alleges that the harsh interrogations failed to produce unique and life-saving intelligence. And it asserts that the CIA systematically lied about the covert program to officials at the White House, the Justice Department and congressional oversight committees.

That sweeping indictment is hotly disputed both by the former officials who defend the techniques as necessary pressure short of torture, and by current CIA officials who believe that the use of the harsh methods were a mistake. Both groups insist that some of the detainees subject to what were euphemistically dubbed "enhanced interrogation techniques" did provide crucial intelligence, including clues that helped the CIA find al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden hiring in Pakistan.

In an op-ed posted Friday on the Washington Post website, Jose Rodriguez, who ran the interrogation program as a top CIA operations officer, repeated longstanding assertions that Democratic lawmakers who are now criticizing it were fully briefed on it at the time.

"In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, lawmakers urged us to do everything possible to prevent another attack on our soil," he wrote. "Members of Congress and the administration were nearly unanimous in their desire that the CIA do all that it could to debilitate and destroy al-Qaeda. The CIA got the necessary approvals to do so and kept Congress briefed throughout. But as our successes grew, some lawmakers' recollections shrank in regard to the support they once offered."

However, Feinstein, in remarks on the Senate floor in March, said the CIA in briefings to Congress had fundamentally mischaracterized the nature of the interrogations, which she called "chilling," ''brutal" and "un-American."

"The interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us," Feinstein said.

The expected release of the report has raised concerns about potential backlash to Americans and U.S. interests around the world.