Twelve Nobel Peace Prize winners last night joined their voices to growing calls for US President Barack Obama to release the nearly 500-page summary of a report detailing the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of torture and other abuse as part of its post 9/11 detention and interrogation program. Prompt release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is “necessary,” the laureates wrote in an open letter to Obama, if the US is ever “to emerge from this dark period of its history.”
The letter is part of a broader online campaign to generate support not only for the report’s release but also for several reforms – such as closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention center – to bring US counterterrorism practices in line with international standards.
Initiated in March 2009 and completed in December 2012, the classified 6,700 page bi-partisan report is said to show that CIA abuse of detainees in the program was far more brutal than previously thought and ineffective at producing valuable intelligence. It also apparently shows that the CIA lied to the White House, the US Congress, and the American people about what went on in the program and the useful intelligence produced.
Release of the report, which the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify in April, would be the first official and public accounting of CIA misdeeds during the “war on terror." So far, the CIA has largely succeeded in keeping damning details about the program secret while putting forward its rosy version of events.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has control over the release of the report but the CIA and the White House have control over redactions. Committee Chair Senator Dianne Feinstein asserts the CIA is insisting on unnecessary redactions that will obscure key factual findings of the report and make it unreadable, while the CIA says such redactions are necessary to protect US personnel and national security. The Obama administration should step in and draw the line at redactions that are not absolutely necessary: continued delay and obfuscation only serve to protect the CIA and further false narratives about the efficacy and necessity of the use of torture.
Nobel Peace Prize winners are more accustomed to taking on the Burmas and Irans of the world, but they are right to be raising their concerns with Obama. The US use of torture after 9/11 undermined the country’s global standing on human rights that continues to the present. The government needs to come clean about what it did to detainees in its custody, and hold those responsible to account. The administration’s response to the Nobel Laureates’ demands for prompt release of the report will be a test of Obama’s claims, since his first days in office, to end the use of torture by the US forever.
