GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba _ President Barack Obama is archiving his copy of the entire Senate report on torture by the CIA, it was disclosed Monday, suggesting the study of CIA interrogations used in secret overseas prisons would be made public in 2028.
Obama provided notice of his plan to make the report part of the presidential record to some in Congress in a letter from his counsel W. Neil Eggleston dated Friday _ two days after lawyers for the alleged 9/11 plotters urged the case's military judge to order that a copy be preserved.
At issue is an effort bid by Senate Republicans to recover all existing copies of the graphic Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's 2002-2006 Rendition, Detention and Interrogation Program, and fears by lawyers in the 9/11 case that lurid descriptions of what agents did to the men accused conspiring in the attack might vanish.
A declassified summary of the report suggests there are entire chapters on the waterboarding, rectal and other abuse of the men who were brought to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay and charged as the alleged plotters of the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., was chairman of the committee that created the report. She disclosed Eggleston's letter Monday, revealing that Obama had ordered a copy of the top-secret report be kept in his presidential papers.
"There are those who would like to see this report destroyed, but in the two years since its release, none of the facts in the 450-page summary has been refuted," Feinstein said in a statement.
She said the report "represents six years of hard work by dedicated staff, and I firmly believe its 6,700 pages and 38,000 footnotes will stand the test of time. I also strongly believe that this must be a lesson learned _ that torture doesn't work."
Feinstein also urged that the full report be declassified "one day," something Obama has so refused to do so.
Last week at the war court, the defense attorney for alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, David Nevin, said undisclosed chapters of the report "show medical experimentation. They show torture. They show extremely important facts that can be offered in mitigation on behalf of Mr. Mohammed."
Attorney Jay Connell for Mohammed's nephew, Ammar al Baluchi, one of the five men charged in the 9/11 death-penalty case, said there was a copy of the report at the Defense Department, and that the military judge should order its preservation with other classified information in the case. "You don't have to read it," Connell told the judge, Army Col. James L. Pohl.
The concern, he said, is that Feinstein's successor as head of the intelligence committee, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., recalled all existing copies from the executive agencies now run under the Democratic administration to include the FBI, CIA, Department of Justice and National Intelligence Directorate, among others.
Obama's lawyer said the president's "determination that the study will be preserved under the PRA (Presidential Records Act) has no bearing on copies of the study currently stored at various agencies."
"Consistent with the authority afforded to him by the PRA, the president has informed the archivist that access to classified material, among other categories of information, should be restricted for the full 12 years allowed under the Act. At this time, we are not pursuing declassification of the full study."
