WASHINGTON — Senior Bush administration officials signed off on the CIA's use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation measures in July 2002 after a series of secret meetings that apparently excluded the State and Defense departments, according to information released Wednesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The Senate report indicated that then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and other officials gave the CIA's interrogation plan political backing even before the methods had been approved by the Justice Department.
The document also revealed the existence of a series of Justice Department memos written in 2006 and 2007 that in some cases undermined congressional efforts to rein in the CIA's interrogation authorities -- memos that were excluded from the batch released by the Obama administration last week.
The Senate document represents the most complete chronology to date of the Bush administration's embrace of simulated drowning and other interrogation methods now widely denounced as torture.
In listing the senior Bush administration officials intimately involved in the early deliberations on CIA interrogations, the report underscored how any effort to hold architects of the program accountable was likely to extend beyond Justice Department legal advisors and into the highest reaches of the government.
It also raised questions about whether the Bush administration sought to keep details of the CIA program away from high-level officials -- particularly former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- who were perceived as potential opponents of the use of harsh interrogation techniques.
The Senate report is a summary of documents that the committee obtained from the CIA. Its declassification is likely to add momentum to calls for an independent inquiry and put pressure on President Obama to release even more previously classified records.
Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the former chairman of the Intelligence Committee who had pushed for the panel's report to be declassified, said the document demonstrated how deeply involved the Bush White House was in designing the interrogation program.
"The records of the CIA demonstrate that the lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel did not operate in a vacuum," Rockefeller said in a statement. That office is the Justice Department entity that issued many of the key opinions endorsing the CIA's techniques. "The then-vice president and the national security advisor are at the center of these discussions."
