WASHINGTON (TIP): The US Senate‘s intelligence panel voted 11-3 on Thursday to declassify hundreds of pages of its detailed report on the CIA‘s controversial Bush-era interrogation program.
The move allows Senator Dianne Feinstein, the powerful chair of the Intelligence Committee, to send the 400-page executive summary as well as key conclusions and recommendations to the White House for review. Senator Saxby Chambliss, the committee’s top Republican, said he opposed the exhaustive investigation in the first place, but reluctantly voted to declassify parts of it so that the American people can assess the program’s legacy for themselves.
“We need to get this behind us,” Chambliss told reporters. If President Barack Obama gives the green light, as he is expected to do, intelligence agencies would embark on a process of redacting certain details they determine should remain classified. Feinstein said she hoped the redactions would be “as few as possible,” and that she believed the process would take at least a month. She said it was important to expose the brutal interrogation program, which she described as “a stain on our history.”