CIA Inspector General’s Office: Only Copy of Torture Report Was ‘Mistakenly’ Destroyed
Take a minute to just let that headline sink in.
The office of the CIA inspector general––the CIA’s watchdog, if you will––has acknowledged, Yahoo News reports, that it “mistakenly” destroyed the only copy it had of the Senate’s big torture report.
A summary of the full torture report dropped in December 2014, leading to a Washington frenzy and calls for the complete report to be released. One senator literally declared on the Senate floor, “The CIA is lying.”
Now, the “mistaken” destruction of this report is certainly suspect, given how the CIA had concerns about the report and admitted to hacking into Senate staffers’ computers in order to keep close eye on their progress on the report. (The head of the CIA denied that allegation months prior.)
Oh, and the CIA reportedly had agents impersonate Senate staffers to gain access to their computers.
Now with that all in mind, read how Yahoo’s report describes what happened:
The deletion of the document has been portrayed by agency officials to Senate investigators as an “inadvertent” foul-up by the inspector general. In what one intelligence community source described as a series of errors straight “out of the Keystone Cops,” CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation methods.
Now, other copies of the report exist, and a CIA spokesperson assured they still have “retained a copy.” But it is concerning that the CIA watchdog looking into this somehow ended up without its copy.
And Senator Dianne Feinstein, who sits on the Senate committee that came out with the report, is requesting that the CIA give the IG’s office a new copy, writing, “Your prompt response will allay my concern that this was more than an ‘accident.'”
[h/t The Hill]
[image via screengrab]
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