To Expose the Torture Program, the Senator Fought the C.I.A.—And the White House

For Immediate Release: June 15, 2015 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255 To Expose the Torture Program, the Senator Fought the C.I.A.—and the White House In the June 22, 2015, issue of The New Yorker, in “The Inside War” (p. 43), Connie Bruck, through a series of candid interviews with Sen- ator Dianne Feinstein, intelligence officials, and Washington insiders, tells the behind-the-scenes story of Feinstein’s fight to release the C.I.A. torture report—something that required her to take on not only the C.I.A. itself but also the President. Feinstein, the Democratic senator from California whose political career has spanned five decades, tells Bruck that the torture report—a sixty-seven-hundred-page tome exposing the C.I.A.’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques—was the most important work she has done. “But the process of getting it released, with all of the attendant conflict and compromise, was surely not the decisive victory she hoped for,” Bruck writes. Bruck chronicles the genesis of the torture report, which required Feinstein to abandon her longstanding allies in the intelligence community. What follows are select highlights from the piece. Feinstein’s soul-searching as she prepared for the release of the report The report’s release, last December, came after an eleven-month battle, in which Feinstein and several other Democrats on the Intelli- gence Committee fought strenuously against the C.I.A.—and, unexpectedly, the Obama White House. Feinstein’s personal grappling culminated on the Friday that she sent the report to the printer, to be released the following week, when she received a call from Secretary of State John Kerry, a good friend. “He talked about the dangers this would cause around the world, which I saw as right out of the White House playbook—or the C.I.A. playbook,” Jay Rockefeller, Feinstein’s predecessor as chairman of the committee, tells Bruck. Feinstein had heard this argument from Obama Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and Brennan many times. But, Rockefeller says, “when it came from Kerry it had a more human sense to it. It got to her.” Rockefeller talked with her over the weekend. “The Kerry call actually turned out to be good, because it made her take her deepest values and square them one against the other—and she came out with the right an- swer. On Monday, she walked in to her office and said, ‘I want the report out.’ ” C.I.A. Director John Brennan’s position in the aftermath of the report’s release Bruck details the tense private meeting between Brennan, Saxby Chambliss, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s vice-chairman, and Feinstein on January 15, 2014. Brennan told the two senators that, for several days, C.I.A. officials had been searching hard drives in a computer system that the committee’s staff members maintained at the C.I.A. site in Virginia. They had found copies of sensitive documents—which, he charged, the staff had acquired by hacking into the agency’s computer system. “John was very forthright in his opinion that the staff had gone into C.I.A. computers,” Chambliss tells Bruck. “John didn’t handle that right.” Brennan said that the Sen- ate staffers had printed out copies of the documents, and demanded that Feinstein return every one to the C.I.A. “Brennan has such an explosive temper,” Rockefeller tells Bruck. “His face turns really red. Dianne seems to bring that out in him—because she’s so West Coast, calm, cool, stately.” Feinstein, recalling the meeting, says, “That was terrible! It was something I never expected to see in my government.” In late January, the C.I.A. inspector general, David Buckley, learned about the search, and told Brennan that he was going to investigate the C.I.A.’s actions. According to three Senate aides who spoke to Bruck on the condition of anonymity, Brennan immediately told Buckley that he wanted him to conduct the investigation. “Publicly, Brennan appeared to be grabbing the situ- ation by the horns, but he was actually pushed into it,” one aide says. (The agency maintains that Brennan requested the inquiry unprompted.) The White House response to the report and the C.I.A.’s hacking allegations Bruck’s reporting illustrates President Obama’s reluctance to take sides against the C.I.A. Ac- cording to a memo included in the inspector general’s report, Brennan had notified McDonough while his agents were searching the Senate computers; he also informed the White House coun- sel before the crimes report was filed with the Department of Justice. Obama halted neither ac- tion. “I was astonished that the White House let it go that far,” a former White House official tells Bruck. “It was such a loss of control.” CHRIS WARE Feinstein tells Bruck, “We sent out this big report to those departments that should care. But I am disappointed, because I suspect that not very many people have looked at it.” The public response has been lackluster as well. Elisa Massimino, the chief executive of Human Rights First, faults the President for the fact that the country’s sentiment remains unchanged: “Obama hasn’t provided the leadership we would expect from somebody who set this out as a priority issue. I think his job is to lead the country to a stronger consensus that we don’t want to do this again, and he failed at that.” Asked if she was disappointed in Obama’s lack of support for the torture report, Feinstein says, “Well, let me say that there are people who don’t want to look at the whole truth.” She continues: “And I don’t know whether the Presi- dent read our report or not. I certainly haven’t heard from him since.” What Led to the Murder of Three Muslim Students in North Carolina? In “The Story of a Hate Crime” (p. 36), Margaret Talbot examines the killing of three young Muslims in a Chapel Hill, North Carolina, apartment complex, in February this year, and explores the search for answers in the aftermath of the crime. Talbot speaks to the friends and families of Deah Barakat, his wife, Yusor Abu-Salha, and her sister, Razan, who were shot execution-style by Craig Hicks—an irate forty- six-year-old who had previously brandished his gun in the presence of his neighbors. “The murders of Deah, Yusor, and Razan, like all un- provoked acts of brutality, were pointless,” Talbot writes. “But they were not meaningless. From the moment the news broke, people began the work of assigning that meaning.” The Chapel Hill police had one interpretation: after Hicks’s arrest, they issued a statement declaring that the killings had likely been “motivated by an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking.” The Barakats and the Abu-Salhas found the “parking dispute” interpretation trivializing and implausible. For many, the killings fit into a larger story of increasing hostility toward Mus- lims. According to statistics compiled by the F.B.I., anti-Muslim hate crimes multiplied after September 11th, and they have remained five times as common as they were before 2001. Barakat’s sister, Suzanne, tells Talbot, “It’s time people started talking about how real Islam- ophobia is—that it’s not just a word tossed around for political purposes but that it has literally knocked on our doorstep and killed three of our American children.” The F.B.I. and the Department of Justice have opened an inquiry into whether the killing constituted a hate crime, and the Durham County prosecutor has announced that it is pursuing the death penalty against Hicks. “To the families and friends of the victims, it was the naming of the crime, not the punishment, that mattered most,” Talbot writes. When Should People with a Non-Terminal Illness Be Helped to Die? In “The Death Treatment” (p. 56), Rachel Aviv explores Belgium’s embrace of euthanasia—even, in some cases, for people with non-terminal illnesses—and looks at one man’s fight to find out why his mother, who suffered from depression, was euthanized without her fam- ily’s knowledge. Aviv speaks to Wim Distelmans, an oncologist who has become a celebrity in Belgium for promoting a dignified death as a human right, and international experts on both sides of the issue to explore a trend that is increasing worldwide. The right-to-die movement—which has seen the decriminalization of euthanasia in several countries and four American states—has gained momentum at a time of anxiety about the graying of the population; people who are older than sixty-five represent the fastest-growing demographic in the United States, Canada, and much of Europe,” Aviv writes. “But the laws seem to be motivated less by the desires of the elderly than by the concerns of a younger generation, whose members derive comfort from the knowledge that they can control the end of their lives.” Aviv notes that in the seven months since the death of Brittany Maynard, a terminally ill cancer patient who moved to Oregon last year so that she could end her life on her own terms, lawmakers in twenty-three U.S. states have introduced bills that would legalize doctor-assisted suicide. Diane Meier, a professor of geriatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in New York, and one of the leading palliative-care physicians in the United States, tells Aviv that “the movement to legalize assisted suicide is driven by the ‘worried well,’ by people who are terrified of the un- known and want to take back control.” In the past five years, the number of euthanasia and assisted-suicide deaths in the Netherlands has doubled, and in Belgium it has increased by more than a hundred and fifty per cent.

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