Politics
White House and Republicans Clash Over C.I.A. Torture Report
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, left, and Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., center, take an elevator to the Senate on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2014, as Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., was scheduled to release a report on the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques at secret overseas facilities after the 9/11 terror attacks. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
WASHINGTON (New York Times) — With the long-awaited Senate report on the use of torture by the United States government — a detailed account that will shed an unsparing light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s darkest practices after the September 2001 terrorist attacks — set to be released Tuesday, the Obama administration and its Republican critics clashed over the wisdom of making it public, and the risk that it will set off a backlash overseas.
While the United States has put diplomatic facilities and military bases on alert for heightened security risks, administration officials said they do not expect the report — or rather the declassified executive summary of it that will be released Tuesday morning — to ignite the kind of violence that killed four Americans at a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. Such violent reprisals, they said, tend to be fueled more by perceived attacks against Islam as a religion than by violence against individual Muslims.
But some leading Republican lawmakers have warned against releasing the report, saying that domestic and foreign intelligence reports indicate that a detailed account of the brutal interrogation methods used by the C.I.A. during the George W. Bush administration could incite unrest and violence, even resulting in the deaths of Americans.
