Armed Forces News

The Defense Department has put installations worldwide on alert, in case violence erupts in the aftermath of newly declassified details of a Senate report that is highly critical of CIA interrogation techniques. “There is certainly the possibility that the release of this report could cause unrest,” Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said Dec. 9. The report, prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee, sharply criticized the CIA for employing ineffective torture techniques on potential suspects in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. While the full report remains classified, committee chairman Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., decided to make its executive summary, findings and conclusions public. In it, she acknowledged that the entire nation was gripped with fear that another such attack could be imminent. Feinstein said that such trepidation was no excuse for the CIA to engage in “improper actions in the name of national security.” The report cited numerous occasions between 2001 and 2009, in which the CIA did exactly that. “It is precisely at these times of national crisis that our government must be guided by the lessons of our history and subject decisions to internal and external review,” Feinstein said. “Instead, CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values.”