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JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): A classified report by the Senate Intelligence Committee alleges that the CIA misled the government and the public over aspects of its interrogation program for years.
A Washington Post story today based on interviews with those who have seen the document says that the CIA concealed details about the severity of its interrogation methods, overstated the significance of plots and prisoners, and took credit for pieces of intelligence that were already obtained from detainees before they were subjected to harsh techniques.
We examine the details now with Greg Miller of The Washington Post.
Greg Miller, welcome.
First of all, I just want to say that, we, the NewsHour, received a statement from the CIA just a short time ago, saying they are not going to respond to this report in The Washington Post until they get a final copy of the study from the Intelligence Committee.
Having said that, 6,300-page report — why was the Senate Intelligence Committee conducting this kind of study of the CIA?
GREG MILLER, The Washington Post: Well, this all started a number of years ago now, and it was launched largely because there was a debate at the outset of the Obama administration, when Obama was dismantling this program, about whether it worked.
I mean, there were always sort of different categories of debate about this program. Was it moral? Was it legal? And then this question of, was it effective? A lot of defenders of the program said, look, after 9/11, we didn’t have any choice but to take these kinds of extreme measures, and it worked, it saved lives, it prevented attacks.
And so Senator Feinstein, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, when she took over that committee, made this one of her first jobs was to zero in on that question, is it true? Did it work? What do the agency’s own records say about that?
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