Human Rights Watch responds to U.S. Senate report on torture and argues CIA conduct was illegal

This morning (December 9), the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a long-anticipated and highly controversial report on the CIA’s “detention and interrogation program” that was authorized during the so-called “war on terror” mounted by former U.S. president George W. Bush.

The report is described as an executive summary and, as The Intercept notes, is only a small, redacted, and highly select excerpt of the complete report. While the summary made available today is 525 pages, the actual document is reportedly longer than 6,000 pages.

Human Rights Watch has released a video of executive director Kenneth Roth discussing the report.

“It was one of the truly sad moments of American history that the Bush administration chose to respond to the serious security threat posed by the September 11 terrorist attacks by resorting to torture,” he says. “It didn’t call it that. It called it ‘enhanced interrogation techniques'. But behind that euphemism was blatant illegality.”

Roth also criticizes President Barack Obama for failing to investigate and hold accountable senior Republican officials who authorized the use of torture.

“Torture can never be used even in a time of war, but the Bush administration used it over and over again with incredible brutality," he says.

"By choosing to move on, to forget about the past, not to prosecute the serious crime, Obama is keeping torture as a misguided, wrongful policy option for some future American president."

A PDF of the complete executive summary is available here.