More than four months after publication of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s summary report on the secret detention program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the US administration has done nothing to end impunity for the torture and enforced disappearances committed in the program. Indeed, it has failed to meaningfully respond to the report in any way whatsoever.
Major US agencies implicated in the Senate summary, including the Departments of Justice and State, have even kept the full report in sealed envelopes, and locked away.
The Obama administration is attempting to sweep the report – and the crimes committed in the program – under the carpet. Instead of scrutinizing the report, examining the failures that led to the systematic abuse of detainees, and holding perpetrators accountable, the Obama administration is continuing on a course charted by its predecessors in the Bush administration and engaging in a de facto amnesty for the crimes under international law of torture and enforced disappearance.
In a new report revisiting the Senate committee’s summary and the administration’s failure to act on it in the four months since it was issued, Amnesty International pieces together information provided in the declassified version of the summary with some of what was already known about the detention program. While the full Senate intelligence committee report, running to some 6,700 pages, remains classified Top Secret, the cumulative evidence now in the public domain is already damning. The summary has reminded the world again that this was not some rogue operation, but one involving many administration officials up to and including the President.
