US moves to keep CIA ‘torture’ report secret

US President Donald Trump’s administration has begun returning to Congress copies of a voluminous 2014 report describing the CIA’s harsh detention and interrogation programs, US officials said on Friday.

The Trump administration’s move means it could be more difficult for the full, 6,700-page report to be made public, because documents held by Congress are exempt from laws requiring government records to eventually be made public.

The White House made the move in response to requests by Senator Richard Burr, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s current Republican chairman, officials said.

In a statement, Burr said: “I have directed my staff to retrieve copies of the Congressional study that remain with the Executive Branch agencies and, as the Committee does with all classified and compartmented information, will enact the necessary measures to protect the sensitive sources and methods contained within the report.”

A declassified executive summary of the report was made public in December 2014. It concluded that the CIA’s interrogation programs, using techniques such as waterboarding that most observers consider torture, were more brutal and less effective than the CIA had told policymakers.

The report said that not a single terrorist attack was foiled as a result of the use of harsh interrogation techniques.