Senate Report on CIA Torture is one Step Closer to Disappearing:
The CIA inspector general’s office — the spy agency’s internal watchdog — has acknowledged it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a mammoth Senate torture report at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the document were being preserved, Yahoo News has learned.
While another copy of the report exists elsewhere at the CIA, the erasure of the controversial document by the office charged with policing agency conduct has alarmed the U.S. senator who oversaw the torture investigation and reignited a behind-the-scenes battle over whether the full unabridged report should ever be released, according to multiple intelligence community sources familiar with the incident.
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.
[...] The 6,700-page report, the product of years of work by the Senate Intelligence Committee, contains meticulous details, including original CIA cables and memos, on the agency’s use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other aggressive interrogation methods at “black site” prisons overseas. A 500-page executive summary was released in December 2014 by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s outgoing chair. It concluded that the CIA’s interrogations were far more brutal than the agency had publicly acknowledged and produced often unreliable intelligence. The findings drew sharp dissents from Republicans on the panel and from four former CIA directors.
But the full three-volume report, which formed the basis for the executive summary, has never been released. In light of a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling last week that the document is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, there are new questions about whether it will ever be made public, or even be preserved.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Whoever on Friday November 16 2018, @03:56AM (6 children)
"mistakenly". LOL.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yes,_Minister [wikiquote.org]
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 16 2018, @04:15AM (5 children)
Now now... It's entirely possible they fucked up and lost tons of important data. They could have flubbed their background check and accidentally hired an MCSE.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by coolgopher on Friday November 16 2018, @05:19AM (3 children)
Oh I dunno. I would've thought anyone with an MCSE would be into being on the receiving end of the torture, not the administering side...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 16 2018, @11:23AM (2 children)
After losing all the director's porn, I expect he is.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday November 16 2018, @10:47PM (1 child)
True story, a MSCE buddy of mine, who is quite a character, was directed to fix a high level c-suites workstation. Got into it and the problem was a lack of disk space and Windows grinding down to low performance because of it. Checked a few folders, and 60%+ of all the data was just porn. My buddy deleted it :)
That c-suite was so fucking pissed off I could hear the yelling down the hall when I was coming to meet my buddy for lunch. Nothing happened of course, because how do you justify firing somebody because they lost your porn?
Ohhh, MSCE doesn't mean jack shit like you imply :) Even according to my buddy. During the classes they never, not once, touched a command line. Zero instruction regarding the command line tools you could use to administrate a system. Pure GUI instruction, and it left out a large number of core concepts. That was the primary reason at the time I decided to not spend $10k+ to get certification when I already knew more than what the class was going to teach me.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday November 17 2018, @09:43PM
You got the implication backwards.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @05:16PM
yeah, just like the fbi lost a truckload of documents during the oklahoma city bombing cover up/investigation.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @04:21AM
"Don't worry. We'll give you another copy of the report."
"Hey, this report seems shorter than before."
"What report? See ya."
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday November 16 2018, @05:15AM (5 children)
n/t
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday November 16 2018, @08:49AM (1 child)
Remember: It's only Evil when the other guys do it.
We're the good guys.
How about that Lakers game ?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday November 16 2018, @09:32AM
I lost interest after Jordan retired. And since the Cubs won the World Series, what else is there? Everything that can be done has been.
The CIA? We, the collective, obviously *want them on that wall*
Remember: It's only Evil® if they shut down the liquor stores
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday November 16 2018, @03:19PM
And always has been, probably since we first flopped onto land. Just sayin'.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @05:56PM
I do all sorts of cool stuff for a government agency. Some of it needs to stay secret for a few years at least, though normally it is marked to stay that way for a few decades. It can in theory be reviewed for earlier release.
I doubt that much of it will see the light of day.
We keep backups, but not many. It's a pain when every backup has to be carefully entered into a security log and then locked up in an overfilled safe. Even without the security, nobody likes doing backups, but add the security and it is a real pain.
Hardware fails. Maybe nobody notices.
It all has to be stored somewhere. There is no space for this. There is no reasonable way to index the data. An index itself would need to be places in secure storage and backed up. Nobody wants to do the work. Nobody benefits from doing the work. Nobody is paid to do the work.
It's like losing family photos (house fire, hard drive crash, virus deletes everything, bits got flipped...) but on a much larger scale and with disinterested busy employees who come and go.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday November 16 2018, @10:37PM
"Oh, no... i'm stupid enough to believe them whole heartedly! I'm sure they wouldn't lie.
...
...would they?"
This is awful that they think this will pass. 'An accident'.
But of course it will pass. And life will go on....only shittier and shittier.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @06:13AM
... or backups?
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday November 16 2018, @06:15AM
...
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @06:15AM (1 child)
Produced by US gov, it's in the public domain. This is how they roll in the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/US_Senate_Report_on_CIA_Detention_Interrogation_Program.pdf [wikimedia.org]
(Just remember that this is only the tip of the iceberg, while the CIA tortured merely dozens, the military does it to thousands.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @03:44AM
The CIA has been at the torture game since its founding. Thousands of torture victims-- at least. Millions dead (coups, fomenting civil wars, instigating wars between neighbors, simple and direct murders, genocide).
The CIA was founded with a bunch of Nazis brought over here after WWII. These were folks involved in horrific crimes in Germany, but found a welcoming new home to practice their "arts" in the USA.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @09:42AM (1 child)
If critical evidence just happens to go missing then the accused shall be automatically guilty and charged with some fraction of the full sentence. This would be for government employees / contractors to avoid entrapment.
This shit is getting tiresome. Blatant corruption and evil being perpetrated in plain sight. "Woops, don't know how that one critical item disappeared, must've been a clerical error!" fuckin pigs
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @03:55PM
But... but... wasn't Trump supposed to fix all that ? Wasn't he supposed to Make America Great Again ? Wasn't he supposed to fire all these "establishment" evil people and replace them with trustworthy, virtuous people in His image ?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @12:05PM
it's 1984 all over again.
https://archive.org/details/Orwell1984preywo [archive.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by rigrig on Friday November 16 2018, @01:36PM
An overlooked mislaid copy will turn up eventually (when it becomes politically favorable for the CIA), and failing that we still have the Russian and Chinese copies.
No one remembers the singer.