The Senate's Torture Report Cost at Least $40 Million

Sen. Dianne Feinstein says CIA stonewalling—and not her committee—is to blame for the $40 million it cost to investigate the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used during the George W. Bush administration.

Feinstein's office says the report—released Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee's Democrats—was "completed entirely with existing committee resources; only minor staff additions were needed at some early stages of the study."

"The overwhelming majority of the $40 million cost was incurred by the CIA and was caused by the CIA's own unprecedented demands to keep documents away from the committee," the statement added.

Feinstein's office points to the agency's insistence to only allow its internal documents to be reviewed at a "separate leased facility" that used a "stand-alone" computer network, instead of allowing the committee to use its own Senate office, which it said was standard practice. That facility was set up in 2009 pursuant to a written agreement reached between the committee and then-CIA Director Leon Panetta.

In addition, the California Democrat charged the CIA with "hiring teams of contractors to review every document, multiple times, to ensure they were relevant and not potentially subject to a claim of executive privilege. Only after those costly reviews were the documents then provided to committee staff," the statement said. 

In a statement, the CIA shot back that the Senate Intelligence Committee's "demands of CIA in this investigation were unprecedented and the accommodation by CIA was unprecedented."

Given the panel's "urgent requests for millions of pages of highly classified information held by CIA, of course the Agency had to create a special facility to ensure the secure exchange of such materials with SSCI," the statement read. "Had the Agency utilized other methods, this process would likely still be ongoing. The Agency was forced to devote thousands and thousands of man hours and extensive resources responding to Committee requests related to this investigation over more than a five-year period."

Senate staffers spent a half decade reviewing more than 6 million sensitive CIA documents to complete its study.

Feinstein's push-back comes amid continued scrutiny of the torture report from Republicans and former CIA officials, who pointed to its expensive price tag as part of a broader attempt to discredit its damning findings.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, the Senate Intelligence panel's top Republican, took to the Senate floor Tuesday to condemn the release, noting that Feinstein "spent the last five years and over $40 million" investigating the program. He added that the report's conclusions are "erroneous and inflammatory" and could put American lives at risk.

Feinstein, who spearheaded the torture report, has vigorously defended the five-year study as a necessary look back at the CIA's harsh post-9/11 tactics, to ensure such practices are never again tolerated. The report charged that the agency's brutal interrogation practices, such as waterboarding and extreme sleep deprivation, used under the Bush administration were ineffective. It additionally concluded that CIA officials misled the White House, Congress and public about the importance and brutality of the program.

Feinstein and other Democrats have repeatedly accused the CIA of trying to stall or kill the torture report's release. Earlier this year, a constitutional crisis erupted when Feinstein condemned the CIA for possibly violating the Constitution's separation of powers clause by hacking into the computers used by her panel for the investigation. The CIA initially denied the spying before later admitting to it.

This article appears in the December 11, 2014 edition of NJ Daily.