Madam President, before I start my remarks on the historic day which was yesterday--when it comes to the publication of our long-in-the-making report on the CIA's torture program--I wish to thank the chairman for his leadership, his…
Madam President, before I start my remarks on the historic day which was yesterday--when it comes to the publication of our long-in-the-making report on the CIA's torture program--I wish to thank the chairman for his leadership, his mentorship, and his friendship. I also am proud obviously to be a part of the Armed Services Committee and to have chaired the Strategic Forces Subcommittee. Again, I extend my thanks to the good men and women in uniform, as did my good friend from Oklahoma. The NDAA bill is a crucial task in front of us. I look forward to one of my last votes as a Senator from the great State of Colorado, and I look forward to casting a vote in favor of the Defense authorization bill.
Again, I wish to thank my two friends who have mentored me and who have led our committee with great elan and intelligence.
SSCI Study of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program
Yesterday was a historic day. Almost 6 years after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to conduct a study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program and nearly 2 years after approving the report, the American people will finally know the truth about a very dark chapter in our Nation's history.
My goal from the start has been twofold. First, I have been committed to correcting the public record on the CIA's multiple misrepresentations to the American people, to other agencies in the executive branch, the White House, and to Congress. Second, my goal has been to ensure that the full truth comes out about this grim time in the history of the CIA and of our Nation so that neither the CIA nor any future administration repeats the grievous mistakes this important oversight work reveals.
The process of compiling, drafting, redacting, and now releasing this report has been much harder than it needed to be. It brings no one joy to discuss the CIA's brutal and appalling use of torture or the unprecedented actions that some in the intelligence community and administration have taken in order to cover up the truth.
A number of my colleagues who have come to the floor over the past 24 hours and discussed this report have referred to 9/11. I, too, will never forget the fear, the pain, and the anger we all felt on that day and in the days that followed. Americans were demanding action from our government to keep us safe. Everyone, myself included, wanted to go to the ends of the Earth to hunt down the terrorists who attacked our Nation and to make every effort to prevent another attack. Although we all shared that goal, this report reveals how the CIA crossed a line and took our country to a place where we violated our moral and legal obligations in the name of keeping us safe. As we know now, this was a false choice. Torture didn't keep us safer after all. By releasing the Intelligence Committee's landmark report, we reaffirm we are a nation that does not hide from its past but must learn from it and that an honest examination of our shortcomings is not a sign of weakness but the strength of our great Republic.
From the heavily redacted version of the executive summary first delivered to the committee by the CIA in August, we made significant progress in clearing away the thick, obfuscating fog these redactions represented.
As Chairwoman Feinstein has said, our committee chipped away at over 400 areas of disagreement with the administration on redactions down to just a few.
We didn't make all the progress we wanted to and the redaction process itself is filled with unwarranted and completely unnecessary obstacles. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, what began as a bipartisan effort on the committee did not end as such, even after my colleagues on the other side of the aisle were repeatedly urged to participate with us as partners.
As my friends in the Senate know, I am a legislator who goes out of his way to form bipartisan consensus. However, it became clear that was not possible here and that is regrettable.
But all told, after reviewing this final version of the committee's study, I believe it accomplishes the goals I laid out and it tells the story that needs to be told.
It also represents a significant and essential step for restoring faith in the crucial role of Congress to conduct oversight. Congressional oversight is important to all of government's activities, but it is especially important for those parts of the government that operate in secret, as the Church Committee discovered decades ago. The challenge the Church Committee members discovered are still with us today: how to ensure that secret government actions are conducted within the confines of the law. The release of this executive summary is testament to the power of oversight and the determination of Chairman Feinstein and the members of this committee to doggedly beat back obstacle after obstacle in order to reveal the truth.
There are a number of thank-yous that are in order. I start by thanking the chairman for her courage and persistence. I also thank the committee staff director, David Grannis; the staff lead for the study, Dan Jones; and his core study team, Evan Gottesman and Chad Tanner. They toiled for nearly 6 years to complete this report. They then shepherded it through the redaction process, all the while giving up their nights, weekends, vacations, and precious time with family and friends in an effort to get to the truth of this secret program for the members of the committee, the Senate, and now the American people.
They have been assisted by other dedicated staff, including my designee on the committee, Jennifer Barrett. We would not be where we are today without them. I am grateful, beyond words, for their service and dedication. I want them to know our country is grateful too.
Let me turn to the study itself. Much has been written about the significance of the study. This is the study. It is a summary of the CIA's detention and interrogation program. I want to start by saying I believe the vast majority of CIA officers welcome oversight and believe in the checks and balances that form the very core of our Constitution.
I believe many rank-and-file CIA officers have fought internally for and supported the release of this report. Unfortunately, again and again, these hard-working public servants have been poorly served by the CIA's leadership. Too many CIA leaders and senior officials have fought to bury the truth while using a redaction pen to further hide this dark chapter of the Agency's history.
The document we released yesterday is the definitive, official history of what happened in the CIA's detention and interrogation program. It is based on more than 6 million pages of CIA and other documents, emails, cables, and interviews. This 500-page study, this document, encapsulates the facts drawn from the 6,700-page report, which is backed up by 38,000 footnotes.
This is a documentary that tells of the program's history based on the CIA's own internal records. Its prose is dry and spare, as you will soon see for yourself. It was put together methodically, without exaggeration or embellishment. This study by itself--using the CIA's own words--brings the truth to light, and that is what it was intended to do.
The study looked carefully at the CIA's own claims--most notably that the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques used on detainees elicited unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that disrupted terrorist plots and saved lives. It debunks those claims conclusively.
The CIA repeatedly claimed that using these enhanced interrogation techniques against detainees was the only way to yield critical information about terrorist plotting. But when asked to describe this critical information and detail which plots were thwarted, the CIA provided exaggerated versions of plots and misattributed information that was obtained from traditional intelligence collection, claiming it came from the use of interrogation techniques that are clearly torture.
This study shows that torture was not effective, that it led to fabricated information, and its use--even in secret--undermined our security and our country more broadly. Our use of torture and I believe the failure to truly acknowledge it continues to impair America's moral leadership and influence around the world, creates distrust among our partners, puts Americans abroad in danger, and helps our enemies' recruitment efforts.
Senior CIA leaders would have you believe their version of the truth--promoted in CIA-cleared memoirs by former CIA Directors and other CIA and White House officials--that while there was some excesses in its detention and interrogation program, the CIA did not torture. Their version would have you believe that the CIA's program was professionally conducted, employing trained interrogators to use so- called enhanced interrogation techniques on only the most hardened and dangerous terrorists.
But as Professor Darius Rejali writes in his book ``Torture and Democracy,'' ``To think professionalism is a guard against causing excessive pain is an illusion. Instead, torture breaks down professionalism'' and corrupts the organizations that use it.
This is exactly what happened with the CIA's detention and interrogation program. Without proper acknowledgement of these truths by the CIA and the White House, it could well happen again.
In light of the President's early Executive order disavowing torture, his own recent acknowledgement that ``we tortured some folks'' and the Assistant Secretary of State Malinowski's statements last month to the U.N. Committee Against Torture that ``we hope to lead by example'' in correcting our mistakes, one would think this administration is leading the efforts to right the wrongs of the past and ensure the American people learn the truth about the CIA's torture program. Not so.
In fact, it has been nearly a 6-year struggle--in a Democratic administration no less--to get this study out. Why has it been so hard for this document to finally see the light of day? Why have we had to fight tooth and nail every step of the way? The answer is simple: Because the study says things that former and current CIA and other government officials don't want the American public to know. For a while I worried that this administration would succeed in keeping this study entirely under wraps.
While the study clearly shows that the CIA's detention and interrogation program itself was deeply flawed, the deeper, more endemic problem lies in the CIA, assisted by a White House that continues to try to cover up the truth. It is this deeper problem that illustrates the challenge we face today: reforming an agency that refuses to even acknowledge what it has done. This is a continuing challenge that the CIA's oversight committees need to take on in a bipartisan way. Those who criticize the committee's study for overly focusing on the past should understand that its findings directly relate to how the CIA operates today.
For an example of how the CIA has repeated its same past mistakes in more recent years, look at the section of the executive summary released yesterday that deals with the intelligence on the courier that led to Osama bin Laden. That operation took place under this administration in May of 2011. After it was over, the CIA coordinated to provide misinformation to the White House and its oversight committees suggesting the CIA torture program was the tipoff information for the courier. That is 100 percent wrong and signifies the Agency leadership's persistent and entrenched culture of misrepresenting the truth to Congress and the American people. This example also illustrates again the dangers of not reckoning with the past. So while I agree with my colleagues on the committee who argue that doing oversight in real time is critical, I believe we cannot turn a blind eye to the past when the same problems are staring us in the face in the present. Oversight by willful ignorance is not oversight at all.
In Chairman Feinstein's landmark floor speech earlier this year, she laid out how the CIA pushed back on our committee's oversight efforts. Thanks to her speech, we know about the history of the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes and about what motivated her and her colleagues to begin the broader committee study in 2009. We know about the CIA's insistence on providing documents to the committee in a CIA-leased facility and the millions of dollars the CIA spent on contractors hired to read, multiple times, each of the 6 million pages of documents produced before providing them to the committee staff. We know about the nearly 1,000 documents that the CIA electronically removed from the committee's dedicated database on two occasions in 2010, which the CIA claimed its personnel did at the direction of the White House. Of course we know about the Panetta review.
I turn to the Panetta review. I have provided more information on the events that led up to the revelation included in the Panetta review in a set of additional views that I submitted for the committee's executive summary, but I will summarize them.
From the beginning of his term as CIA Director, John Brennan was openly hostile toward and dismissive of the committee's oversight and its efforts to review the detention and interrogation program. During his confirmation hearing, I obtained a promise from John Brennan that he would meet with committee staff on the study once confirmed. After his confirmation, he changed his mind.
In December 2012, when the classified study was approved in a bipartisan vote, the committee asked the White House to coordinate any executive branch comments prior to declassification. The White House provided no comment. Instead, the CIA responded for the executive branch nearly 7 months later, on June 27, 2013.
The CIA's formal response to the study under Director Brennan clings to false narratives about the CIA's effectiveness when it comes to the CIA's detention and interrogation program. It includes many factual inaccuracies, defends the use of torture, and attacks the committee's oversight and findings. I believe its flippant and dismissive tone represents the CIA's approach to oversight--and the White House's willingness to let the CIA do whatever it likes--even if its efforts are armed at actively undermining the President's stated policies.
It would be a significant disservice to let the Brennan response speak for the CIA. Thankfully, it does not have to. There are some CIA officials and officers willing to tell it straight. In late 2013, then- CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston answered a series of questions that I asked about his thoughts on the Brennan response as part of his Armed Services Committee nomination hearing to be General Counsel of the Defense Department.
His answers to the questions about the program contrasted sharply with the Brennan response. For instance, he stated matter of factly that from his review of the facts, the CIA provided the committee with inaccurate information regarding the detention and interrogation program. I have posted on line my questions to Mr. Preston, along with his answers.
Stephen Preston was not alone in having the moral courage to speak frankly and truthfully about the CIA's
torture program. There were also other CIA officers willing to document the truth. In March 2009, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta announced the formation of a Director's review group to look at the agency's detention and interrogation program. As he stated at the time, ``The safety of the American people depends on our ability to learn lessons from the past while staying focused on the threats of today and tomorrow.''
The Director's review group looked at the same CIA documents that were being provided to our committee. They produced a series of documents that became the Panetta review. As I discussed in late 2013, the Panetta review corroborates many of the significant findings of the committee's study. Moreover, the Panetta review frankly acknowledges significant problems and errors made in the CIA's detention and interrogation program. Many of these same errors are denied or minimized in the Brennan response.
As Chairman Feinstein so eloquently outlined in her floor speech on March 11 of this year, drafts of the Panetta review have been provided by the CIA unknowingly to our committee staff years before within the 6 million pages of documents it had provided.
So when the committee received the Brennan response, I expected a recognition of errors and a clear plan to ensure that the mistakes identified would not be repeated again. Instead--this is a crucial point--instead, the CIA continued not only to defend the program and deny any wrongdoing but also to deny its own conclusions to the contrary found in the Panetta review.
In light of those clear factual disparities between the Brennan response and the Panetta review, committee staff grew concerned that the CIA was knowingly providing inaccurate information to the committee in the present day, which is a serious offense, and a deeply troubling matter for the committee, the Congress, the White House, and our country.
The Panetta review was evidence of that potential offense. So to preserve that evidence, committee staff securely transported a printed portion of the Panetta review from the CIA-leased facility to the committee's secure offices in the Senate. This was the proper and right thing to do, not only because of the seriousness of the potential crime, but also in light of the fact that the CIA had previously destroyed interrogation videotapes without authorization and over objections of officials in the Bush White House.
In my view, the Panetta review is a smoking gun. It raises fundamental questions about why a review the CIA conducted internally years ago and never provided to the committee is so different from the official Brennan response and so different from the public statements of former CIA officials. That is why I asked for a complete copy of the Panetta review at a December 2013 Intelligence Committee hearing.
Although the committee now has a portion of the review already in its possession, I believed then, as I do now, that it is important to make public its existence and to obtain a full copy of the report. That is why I am here today, to disclose some of its key findings and conclusions on the Senate floor for the public record, which fly directly in the face of claims made by senior CIA officials past and present.
For example, as I mentioned earlier, on a number of key matters, the Panetta review directly refutes information in the Brennan response. In the few instances in which the Brennan response acknowledges imprecision or mischaracterization relative to the detention interrogation program, the Panetta review is refreshingly free of excuses, qualifications, or caveats.
The Panetta review found that the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Congress, the President, and the public on the efficacy of its coercive techniques. The Brennan response, in contrast, continues to insist the CIA's interrogations produced unique intelligence that saved lives. Yet the Panetta review identified dozens of documents that include inaccurate information used to justify the use of torture and indicates that the inaccuracies it identifies do not represent an exhaustive list. The Panetta review further describes how detainees provided intelligence prior to the use of torture against them.
It describes how the CIA, contrary to its own representations, often tortured detainees before trying any other approach. It describes how the CIA tortured detainees, even when less coercive methods were yielding intelligence. The Panetta review further identifies cases in which the CIA used coercive techniques when it had no basis for determining whether a detainee had critical intelligence at all.
In other words, CIA personnel tortured detainees to confirm they did not have intelligence, not because they thought they did. Again, while a small portion of this review is preserved in our committee spaces, I have requested the full document. Our request has been denied by Director Brennan. I will tell you, the Panetta review is much more than a ``summary'' and ``incomplete drafts,'' which is the way Mr. Brennan and former CIA officials have characterized it, in order to minimize its significance. I have reviewed this document. It is as significant and relevant as it gets.
The refusal to provide the full Panetta review and the refusal to acknowledge facts detailed in both the committee study and the Panetta review lead to one disturbing finding: Director Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of torture. In other words, the CIA is lying. This is not a problem of the past but a problem that needs to be dealt with today.
Let me turn to the search of the Intelligence Committee's computers. Clearly the present leadership of the CIA agrees with me that the Panetta review is a smoking gun. That is the only explanation for the CIA's unauthorized search of the committee's dedicated computers in January. The CIA 's illegal search was conducted out of concern that the committee staff was provided with the Panetta review. It demonstrates how far the CIA will go to keep its secrets safe. Instead of asking the committee if it had access to the Panetta review, the CIA searched, without authorization or notification, the committee computers that the agency had agreed were off limits.
In so doing, the agency might have violated multiple provisions of the Constitution as well as Federal criminal statutes and Executive Order 12333.
More troubling, despite admitting behind closed doors to the committee that the CIA conducted the search, Director Brennan publicly referred to ``spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.''
He even said such allegations of computer hacking were beyond ``the scope of reason.'' The CIA then made a criminal referral to the Department of Justice against the committee staff who were working on the study. Chairman Feinstein believed these actions were an effort to intimidate the committee staff, the very staff charged with CIA oversight. I strongly agree with her point of view.
The CIA's inspector general subsequently opened an investigation into the CIA's unauthorized search and found, contrary to Director Brennan's public protestations, that a number of CIA employees did, in fact, improperly access the committee's dedicated computers. The investigation found no basis for the criminal referral on the committee staff. The IG also found that the CIA personnel involved demonstrated a ``lack of candor'' about their activities to the inspector general.
However, only a 1-page unclassified summary of the IG's report is publicly available. The longer classified version was only provided briefly to Members when it was first released. I had to push hard to get the CIA to provide a copy for the committee to keep in its own records. Even the copy in committee records is restricted to committee members and only two staff members, not including my staff member.
After having reviewed the IG report myself again recently, I believe even more strongly that the full report should be declassified and publicly released, in part because Director Brennan still refuses to answer the committee's questions about the search.
In March, the committee voted unanimously to request responses from Director Brennan about the computer search. The chairman and vice chairman wrote a letter to Director Brennan, who promised a thorough response
to their questions after the Justice Department and CIA IG reviews were complete. The Chair and Vice Chair then wrote two more letters, to no avail. The Director has refused to answer any questions on this topic and has again deferred his answers, this time until after the CIA's internal accountability board review is completed, if it ever is.
So from March until December, for almost 9 months, Director Brennan has flat out refused to answer basic questions about the computer search; whether he suggested a search or approved it; if not, who did. He has refused to explain why the search was conducted, its legal basis, or whether he was even aware of the agreement between the committee and the CIA laying out protections of the committee's dedicated computer system. He has refused to say whether the computers were searched more than once, whether the CIA monitored committee staff at the CIA-leased facility, whether the agency ever entered the committee's secure room at the facility, and who at the CIA knew about the search both before and after it occurred.
I want to turn at this point to the White House. To date, there has been no accountability for the CIA's actions or for Director Brennan's failure of leadership. Despite the facts presented, the President has expressed full confidence in Director Brennan and demonstrated that trust by making no effort at all to rein him in.
The President stated it was not appropriate for him to weigh into these issues that exist between the committee and the CIA. As I said at the time, the committee should be able to do its oversight work consistent with our constitutional principle of the separation of powers, without the CIA posing impediments or obstacles as it has and as it continues to do today. For the White House not to have recognized this principle and the gravity of the CIA's actions deeply troubles me today and continues to trouble me.
Far from being a disinterested observer in the committee-CIA battles, the White House has played a central role from the start. If former CIA Director Panetta's memoir is to be believed, the President was unhappy about Director Panetta's initial agreement in 2009 to allow staff access to operation cables and other sensitive documents about the torture program.
Assuming its accuracy, Mr. Panetta's account describes then- Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan and current Chief of Staff Denis McDonough--both of whom have been deeply involved in the study redaction process--as also deeply unhappy about this expanded oversight.
There are more questions that need answers about the role of the White House in the committee's study.
For example, there are the 9,400 documents that were withheld from the committee by the White House in the course of the review of the millions of documents, despite the fact that these documents are directly responsive to the committee's document request. The White House has never made a formal claim of executive privilege over the documents, yet it has failed to respond to the chairman's request to the documents or to compromise proposals she has offered to review a summary listing of them. When I asked CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston about the documents, he noted that ``the Agency has deferred to the White House and has not been substantially involved in subsequent discussions about the disposition of these documents.''
If the documents are privileged, the White House should assert that claim. But if they are not, White House officials need to explain why they pulled back documents that the CIA believed were relevant to the committee's investigation and responsive to our direct request.
The White House has not led on this issue in the manner we expected when we heard the President's campaign speeches in 2008 and read the Executive order he issued in January 2009. To CIA employees in April 2009, President Obama said:
What makes the United States special, and what makes you
special, is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold
our values and ideals even when it's hard--not just when it's
easy; even when we are afraid and under threat--not just when
it's expedient to do so. That's what makes us different.
This tough, principled talk set an important tone from the beginning of his Presidency. However, let's fast forward to this year, after so much has come to light about the CIA's barbaric programs, and President Obama's response was that we ``crossed a line'' as a nation and that ``hopefully, we don't do it again in the future.''
That is not good enough. We need to be better than that. There can be no coverup. There can be no excuses. If there is no moral leadership from the White House helping the public to understand that the CIA's torture program wasn't necessary and didn't save lives or disrupt terrorist plots, then what is to stop the next White House and CIA Director from supporting torture.
Finally, the White House has not led on transparency, as then Senator Obama promised in 2007. He said then this:
We'll protect sources and methods, but we won't use sources
and methods as pretexts to hide the truth. Our history
doesn't belong to Washington, it belongs to America.
In 2009 consistent with this promise, President Obama issued Executive Order 13526, which clarified that information should be classified to protect sources and methods but not to obscure key facts or cover up embarrassing or illegal acts.
But actions speak louder than words. This administration, like so many before, has released information only when forced to by a leak or by a court order or by an oversight committee.
The redactions to the committee's executive summary on the CIA's detention and interrogation program have been a case study in its refusal to be open. Despite requests that both the chairman and I made for the White House alone to lead the declassification process, it was given by the White House to the CIA--the same Agency that is the focus of this report. Predictably, the redacted version that came back to the committee in August obscured key facts and undermined key findings and conclusions of the study.
The CIA also included unnecessary redactions to previously acknowledged and otherwise unclassified information. Why? Presumably, to make it more difficult for the public to understand the study's findings. Content that the CIA has attempted to redact includes information in the official, declassified report of the Senate Armed Services Committee, other executive branch declassified official documents, information in books and speeches delivered by former CIA officers who were approved by the CIA's Publication Review Board, news articles, and other public reports.
It is true that through negotiations between the committee, the CIA, and the White House, many of these issues were resolved. However, at the end of the day, the White House and CIA would not agree to include any pseudonyms in the study to disguise the names of CIA officers. In 2009 the CIA and the committee had agreed to use CIA-provided pseudonyms for CIA officials, but in the summary's final version, the CIA insisted that even the pseudonyms should be redacted.
For an agency concerned about morale, this is the wrong approach to take, in my view. By making it less possible to follow a narrative threat throughout the summary, this approach effectively throws many CIA personnel under the bus. It tars all of the CIA personnel by making it appear that the CIA writ large was responsible for developing, implementing, and representing the truth about the CIA's detention and interrogation program. In fact, a small number of CIA officers were largely responsible.
Further, there is no question that the identities of undercover agents must be protected, but it is unprecedented for the CIA to demand--and the White House to agree--that every CIA officer's pseudonym in the study be blacked out. U.S. Government agencies have used pseudonyms to protect officers' identities in any number of past reports, including the 9/11 Commission report, the investigation of the Abu Ghraib detention facility, and the report of the Iran-Contra affair.
We asked the CIA to identify any influences in the summary wherein a CIA official mentioned by pseudonym would result in the outing of any CIA undercover officer, and they could not provide any such examples.
Why do I focus on this? The CIA's insistence on blacking out even the fake
names of its officers is problematic because the study is less readable and has lost some of its narrative thread.
But as the chairman has said, we will find ways to bridge that gap. The tougher problem to solve is how to ensure that this and future administrations follow President Obama's pledge not to use sources and methods as pretexts to hide the truth.
What needs to be done? Chairman Feinstein predicted in March--at the height of the frenzy over the CIA's spying on committee-dedicated computers--that ``our oversight will prevail,'' and generally speaking, it has. Much of the truth is out, thanks to the chairman's persistence and the dedicated staff involved in this effort. It is, indeed, a historic event.
But there is still no accountability, and despite Director Brennan's pledges to me in January 2013, there is still no correction of the public record of the inaccurate information the CIA has spread for years and continues to stand behind. The CIA has lied to its overseers and the public, destroyed and tried to hold back evidence, spied on the Senate, made false charges against our staff, and lied about torture and the results of torture. And no one has been held to account.
Torture just didn't happen, after all. Contrary to the President's recent statement, ``we'' didn't torture some folks. Real actual people engaged in torture. Some of these people are still employed by the CIA and the U.S. Government. There are, right now, people serving in high- level positions at the Agency who approved, directed or committed acts related to the CIA's detention and interrogation program. It is bad enough not to prosecute these officials, but to reward or promote them and risk the integrity of the U.S. Government to protect them is incomprehensible.
The President needs to purge his administration of high-level officials who were instrumental to the development and running of this program. He needs to force a cultural change at the CIA.
The President also should support legislation limiting interrogation to noncoercive techniques--to ensure that his own Executive order is codified and to prevent a future administration from developing its own torture program.
The President must ensure the Panetta review is declassified and publicly released.
The full 6,800-page study of the CIA's detention and interrogation program should be declassified and released.
There also needs to be accountability for the CIA spying on its oversight committee, and the CIA inspector general's report needs to be declassified and released to the public.
A key lesson I have learned from my experience with the study is the importance of the role of Congress in overseeing the intelligence community. It is always easier to accept what we are told at face value than it is to ask tough questions. If we rely on others to tell us what is behind their own curtain instead of taking a look for ourselves, we can't know for certain what is there.
This isn't at all to say that what the committee found in its study is a culture and behavior we should ascribe to all employees of the CIA or to the intelligence community. The intelligence community is made up of thousands of hard-working patriotic Americans. These women and men are consummate professionals who risk their lives every day to keep us safe and to provide the their best assessments regardless of political and policy considerations.
But it is incumbent on government leaders--it is incumbent on us--to live up to the dedication of these employees and to make them proud of the institutions they work for. It gives me no pleasure to say this, but as I have said before, for Director Brennan that means resigning. For the next CIA director that means immediately correcting the false record and instituting the necessary reforms to restore the CIA's reputation for integrity and analytical rigor.
The CIA cannot not be its best until it faces its serious and grievous mistakes of the detention and interrogation program. For President Obama, that means taking real action to live up to the pledges he made early in his Presidency.
Serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee for the past 4 years opened my eyes and gave me a much deeper appreciation of the importance of our role in the balancing of power in our great government. It also helped me understand that all Members of Congress, not only Intelligence Committee members, have an opportunity and an obligation to exercise their oversight powers.
Members who do not serve on the Intelligence Committee can ask to read classified documents, call for classified briefings, and submit classified questions.
This is my challenge today to the American people. Urge your Member of Congress to be engaged, to get classified briefings, and to help keep the intelligence community accountable. This is the only way that secret government and democracy can coexist.
We have so much to be proud of in our great Nation, and one of those matters of pride is our commitment to admit mistakes, correct past actions, and move forward knowing that we are made stronger when we refuse to be bound by the past.
We have always been a forward-looking Nation, but to be so we must be mindful of our own history. That is what this study is all about. So I have no doubt that we will emerge from a dark episode with our democracy strengthened and our future made brighter.
It has been an honor to serve on this committee, and I will miss doing its important work more than I can say.
I yield the floor.
