On the recordApril 23, 2013
I rise to recognize an important anniversary--the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Convention Against Torture--and would like to do so in the context of the recent publication of an important report on the U.S. policies and programs put in place following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. After 9/11, Americans came together and set aside their differences. Those terrible events unified this country in a common desire to bring to justice those responsible and to do whatever was necessary to prevent future attacks. We have spent over a decade successfully reducing al Qaida's ranks, and--until last week--doing so without another major attack on U.S. soil. Yet there have been countless mistakes and costs incurred in the pursuit of these goals. One of these key mistakes is the program that the Central Intelligence Agency initiated after 9/11 to detain and interrogate terrorist subjects. The details of how this program came to be and how it was conducted are outlined in the Senate Intelligence Committee's 6,000-page report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program-- based on a documentary review of over 6 million pages of CIA and other records and including 35,000 footnotes. In December I voted with a majority of my colleagues on the committee to report out the study and to send it to the CIA for its review and comments. I believe that the CIA's detention and interrogation program was severely flawed. It was mismanaged.…
