CIA lied to the public and John Brennan must quit, says outgoing senator in fiery speech

Mark Udall, who lost his seat in Colorado last month, said the still-classified portions of the Senate report on CIA torture, represented a ‘smoking gun’

Mark Udall, who lost his Colorado seat in the midterms. Photograph: Jack Dempsey/AP

A recently defeated senator described portions of a still-classified CIA overview of torture on the Senate floor as a “smoking gun,” accusing the CIA and the White House of lying about brutal CIA interrogations and continuing to cover them up.

A day after the Senate intelligence committee released 500 pages of its voluminous 6,700-page inquiry into CIA torture, Senator Mark Udall called upon Barack Obama “to purge his administration of high-level officials” complicit in the Bush-era torture program.

That purge, he said, should include CIA director John Brennan, a confidant of Obama whom Udall said the president had declined to rein in during a long clash with the Senate intelligence committee. Udall first called on Brennan to resign in August, after Brennan conceded that agency officials had inappropriately accessed emails and work product of Senate torture investigators on a shared network.

With a tone at points mournful and angry, Udall, who lost his re-election last month, said “the CIA has lied to its overseers and the public,” and blasted the White House for not holding anyone “to account”.

“Director Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of torture. In other words, the CIA is lying,” Udall said in what may be his final major Washington address.

Udall did not follow through on his post-election threat to read the entire classified report into the Senate record, a parliamentary gambit famously used in the 1970s by Alaska senator Mike Gravel to reveal the Pentagon Papers. He called on the CIA and the Obama White House to reverse what he called a record of obstruction over torture and reveal the report in its entirety.

But Udall did publicly reveal, in outline, a secret and hotly disputed historical examination of CIA torture by ex-CIA director Leon Panetta, which has come to be known as the “Panetta review.”

The CIA contends that the review was little more than an index and “short summaries” of documents and other records the agency provided its Senate overseers, as Panetta’s former chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, told the New York Times. But like outgoing committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, Udall considered the Review to substantively support panel Democrats’ assessment that CIA torture was more brutal and less effective than the agency portrayed.

“In my view, the Panetta review is a smoking gun,” Udall said, saying it “directly refutes” information in the CIA’s formal response to the Senate torture report and is “refreshingly free of excuses, qualifications, or caveats.”

Contradicting a central point of the CIA’s response, according to Udall, the Panetta Review unequivocally said the CIA misrepresented the efficacy of torture to the Bush administration, Congress and the public.

Back in March, Feinstein said on the Senate floor, perhaps accidentally, provided the Panetta review in 2010 to the committee. It played a major role in the acrimony between the committee and Langley.

Once Senate investigators noticed about 1000 documents mysteriously disappearing from the firewalled network it shared with the CIA, they took portions of a printed copy of the Panetta review back to the Senate, prompting allegations – later scotched by the CIA Inspector General – that the Senate inappropriately accessed classified CIA information.

But the discrepancy between the Panetta Review’s apparent criticism of torture and a response offered by the CIA in 2013, and released Tuesday, prompted the committee to fear the CIA, Udall said, “knowingly provided inaccurate information to the committee in the present day, which is a serious offense and a deeply troubling matter for the committee, the Congress, the White House and our country.”

“The Panetta review corroborates many of the significant findings of the committee’s study. Moreover, the Panetta review frankly acknowledges significant problems and errors made in the CIA’s detention and interrogation program,” Udall continued.

“The CIA continued not only to defend the program and deny any wrongdoing, but also to deny its own conclusions to the contrary in the Panetta review.” Sections of the review, Udall said, remain in the committee’s hands, but not the whole document, which he called on the CIA to turn over.

The CIA declined to respond to Udall directly and referred instead to the2013-era response to the committee.

Expressing disappointment in Obama and current White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, Udall said that White House complicity in obscuring the CIA’s torture record jeopardized Obama’s anti-torture stance and refuted Obama’s pledge to run a transparent administration.

“Actions speak louder than words,” Udall said.