Feinstein says White House, not CIA, should declassify torture report

The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee appealed to President Barack Obama in a letter on Monday to reconsider his administration's decision to task the CIA with editing a torture report harshly critical of the spy agency's treatment of 9/11 suspects before it can be made public.

In a letter to the president, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said the White House should head the declassification process. Feinstein's committee voted last week to publicly release parts of the 6,600-page review, subject to the executive branch blacking out sections that could compromise national security. Obama backed the decision, but the White House said the CIA would take the lead in redacting information.

"I request that you declassify these documents, and that you do so quickly and with minimal redactions," Feinstein said in the letter. "I respectfully request that the White House take the lead in the declassification process."

Feinstein and other senators accuse the CIA of a conflict of interest.

The report concludes the agency tortured suspects and gained little in valuable intelligence, leaving in Feinstein's words a "stain on our history that must never be allowed to happen again."

The CIA disputes those findings. The committee and the agency have traded accusations of wrongdoing related to the production of the report, with each side accusing the other of illegal activity. The Justice Department is reviewing the competing criminal complaints.

Accompanying Feinstein's letter was a copy of the findings from the still-classified report and executive summary, which the committee ordered to be declassified by an 11-3 vote.

"This is the most comprehensive accounting of the CIA's detention and interrogation program, and I believe it should be viewed within the U.S. government as the authoritative report on the CIA's actions," Feinstein said in the letter.

Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday also gave his support to sharing the report.

"As much of the report as possible should be made public," he said. The release will help ensure "no administration contemplates such a program in the future."

The report was produced exclusively by Democratic staffers. It concludes, among other things, that waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" provided no key evidence in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and that the CIA misled President George W. Bush and Congress about the successes of the program.

Feinstein and the CIA are also at odds over the CIA’s use of the Senate’s private computer system.

The rift between Feinstein and the intelligence community turned personal in recent days, with former CIA Director Michael Hayden suggesting that the investigation was motivated by her "emotional feeling" and not by a desire for objectivity. Hayden was Bush's CIA chief from 2006 to 2009.

Leading Democrats pounced on Hayden's remarks.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called them condescending and disrespectful of women. Sen. Mark Udall, a Democrat who serves alongside Feinstein on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the reference to Feinstein's emotions a "baseless smear" that Hayden wouldn't make against a man.

Feinstein called the reference to her emotions "nonsense."

Wire services