Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC)
When Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (D-CA) Intelligence Committee tried to do its job in investigating the Bush administration's torture regime and the CIA's place in it, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta ordered an internal review to determine just what the agency was going to be turning over to the committee. That review found that agency officials had repeatedly overstated the value of information they got through torture. The review found, according to people who are familiar with it (it is still classified) that agency officials repeatedly claimed that the source of most of the information they got to thwart terrorist actions and track Al Qaeda came from one detainee—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—when they had actually gained the intelligence through a number of sources. This Panetta Review was provided to the Intelligence Committee, and Feinstein in turn provided it to departments and agencies within the executive branch and to other committee members.
The new committee chair, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) wants to take a big eraser to all that.
Mr. Burr sent a letter last week to the White House saying that his Democratic predecessor, Senator Dianne Feinstein, should never have transmitted the entire 6,700-page report to numerous departments and agencies within the executive branch—and requested that all copies of the report be “returned immediately,” according to people who have seen the letter. […]
According to a briefing that the C.I.A. inspector general, David B. Buckley, gave to the congressional staff members in December, a C.I.A. employee who had worked on the Panetta Review complained in 2010 that the agency had never corrected public statements about what was or was not obtained from torture sessions. […]
Mr. Burr’s unusual letter to Mr. Obama might have been written with an eye toward future Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. Congress is not subject to such requests, and any success he has in getting the Obama administration to return all copies of the Senate report to the Intelligence Committee could hinder attempts to someday have the report declassified and released publicly.
The CIA emphatically does not want the nation to know precisely what and how much it was lied to about torture, and now, under torture apologist John Brennan, has distanced itself from the report and has refused to release it publicly. Burr is trying to assist in that by taking the copies of the report away from anyone who might have seen it, and after-the-fact coverup that at best makes Burr look foolish and at worst absolutely craven. But as one commenter, Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists project on government secrecy, says "if Senator Burr thinks he can erase the report from the historical record, he is likely to be mistaken." This stain is permanent, and no amount of backtracking will alter that.