WASHINGTON -- For several months before the Senate Intelligence Committee
released a summary of its controversial report on the
CIA's torture program on Tuesday, Senate Democrats were locked in a well-publicized battle with the executive
branch over whether to redact the aliases used for CIA officials used in the
document.
But even as the White House and the CIA engaged in
this dispute with the Senate, a separate, and potentially more serious, set of
revelations was at stake.
According to several U.S. officials involved with
the negotiations, the intelligence community has long been concerned that the
Senate document would enable readers to identify the many countries that aided
the CIA's controversial torture program between 2002 and roughly 2006.
These countries made the CIA program possible in two ways: by enabling rendition, which involved transferring U.S. detainees abroad without due legal process, and by providing facilities far beyond the reach of U.S. law where those detainees were subjected to torture.
These countries made the CIA program possible in two ways: by enabling rendition, which involved transferring U.S. detainees abroad without due legal process, and by providing facilities far beyond the reach of U.S. law where those detainees were subjected to torture.
The officials all told The Huffington Post in recent
weeks that they were nervous the names of those countries might be included in
the declassified summary of the Senate report.
The names of the countries ultimately did not appear
in the summary. This represents a last-minute victory for the White House and
the CIA, since Senate staff was pushing to redact as little as possible from
its document.
The various sites in foreign countries are now only
identified in the report by a color code, with each detention facility
corresponding to a color, such as "Detention Site Black."
But immediately after the document was released, journalists began to crack the codeby cross-referencing
details in the Senate study with previous reports about the CIA's activities in
different countries.
Readers of the report can also learn how the agency
managed its relationship with foreign governments, offering monetary payments
for their silence and undermining more public U.S. diplomatic efforts by
explicitly telling their foreign contacts not to talk to U.S. ambassadors about
the torture program.
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