Senate presses CIA over secret report

The Senate Intelligence Committee is pressing the CIA to share an internal secret report on the agency’s controversial detention and interrogation program.

The existence of the CIA’s report, which has been withheld from congressional oversight committees, was disclosed by Senator Mark Udall, a Democrat of Colorado, during an Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday.

The committee’s request comes in the midst of a yearlong battle with the CIA over the release of the panel’s own report about the agency’s interrogation program.

Udall said he believed the agency’s report was begun several years ago and “is consistent with the Intelligence’s Committee’s report” although it “conflicts with the official CIA response to the committee’s report,” according to The New York Times.

“This raises fundamental questions about why a review the CIA conducted internally years ago — and never provided to the committee — is so different from the CIA’s formal response to the committee study,” Sen. Udall said.

During the hearing on the nomination of Caroline D. Krass to be the CIA’s top lawyer, Udall said he would not support Krass’s nomination until the CIA provided more information to the committee about the controversial program.

The Intelligence Committee has prepared its own report on the CIA interrogation program. The report, which cost more than $40 million to produce, began as an attempt to document what was perhaps the most divisive of the Bush administration’s responses to the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Senate has not yet released a public version of the report that multiple members of the panel say documents both the brutality of CIA torture and “lies” told by the agency to the oversight committees in Congress.

The report, totaling more than 6,000 pages, was completed last December but CIA director John Brennan has been resisting its release, according to The Guardian.

The CIA has told reporters that the report contains numerous factual errors, which Udall said on Tuesday was a “misleading” and self-serving description of differences of “interpretation” between the agency and the committee, according to the British newspaper. “I’m more confident than ever in the factual accuracy” of the torture report, Udall said.