The US Senate has released the executive summary of a long-withheld report on harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA in the post-9/11 era. Previously undisclosed techniques have been revealed and the report found the techniques were ineffective. The CIA management of the operation has been described as inadequate and flawed. Here, academics look at the report and what the decision to release the findings will mean.

Public opinion and transparency

Eric Heinze, Queen Mary, University of London

President Obama can scarcely be faulted for pushing for the release of CIA information about torture, particularly given the methods authorised under his predecessor George W Bush. This limited disclosure is, perhaps, better than none. Ultimately, however, such information will only feed the ongoing terrorism sideshow.

The heavily-redacted report will do little for transparency, since it will mostly confirm what has already been widely known. Nor will the information do much to resolve the truly important questions about legitimate national security policy.

Neither among politicians, nor among the public at large is there any serious consensus about what counts as a genuine threat to democracy, how long governments ought to wait for such threats to be deemed actionable, and – when the time for action does come – what actions governments may, or must, legitimately take.

Trouble on the right

Tom Packer, University of Oxford

On the domestic political front, the key lens for this issue is partisanship. The natural belief of the Republican partisan is that the report and its release just represent the Bush administration being unfairly singled out by Democrats for taking difficult, tough and necessary steps.

Bush himself has strongly denied the CIA deceived him.

Meanwhile, the Tea Party, and the libertarian circle associated with Rand Paul in particular, has expanded the small group in the GOP who are extremely wary of giving the government power to go to the lengths the CIA apparently thought acceptable.

At the same time, many Republicans are still very focused on security policy, and very worried about any long-term restrictions on “enhanced interrogation” techniques. This tendency is well represented on the House and Senate intelligence committees – and their news organ of choice, the Weekly Standard, has already published an attack on the report written by a former interrogator.

The view from Europe

Claudia Hillebrand, Aberystwyth University, Wales

One of the interesting questions is to what extent the extraordinary rendition campaign has affected intelligence co-operation. At least 54 countries are said to have been collaborating with the CIA on this, nearly half of them European ones.

This has led some national parliaments and courts as well as the Council of Europe and the European Parliament to investigate European involvement since 2005. The inquiries have not only revealed a spider’s web of renditions, but raise difficult question about the nature and limits of intelligence liaison.

The released summary of the Senate report provides further (anonymised and redacted) information about the extent of cooperation, but there are many outstanding issues. We still don’t know to what extent the US’s European partners were aware of the details of the CIA operation, especially with respect to its human rights violations, from rendition to unlawful detention to the use of torture.

It’s not clear if these were individual incidences of collaboration, or whether there was a globalised “state of exception” during the War on Terror. And it’s still undecided who, if any, should be held to account for facilitating, or contributing to these human rights violations.

So far, European governments have been reluctant to take responsibility for their actions. But this was not a rogue CIA operation, and nor did the extraordinary renditions take place without the knowledge of at least some European intelligence services and governments. The court trials concerning the case of Abu Omar in Italy, and the ongoing controversies surrounding the roles of Poland and Lithuania, are testament to that.

So while the report will probably lead to a public outcry in Europe and elsewhere, the Europeans still have questions of their own to answer.

These techniques have a history

Samantha Newbery, University of Salford, England

Past revelations have already told us that the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” included waterboarding, putting detainees into painful positions, sleep deprivation, and much more.

But we must remember these techniques are not unique to the US or to the War on Terror. Similar methods were developed by the British military in the wake of the Second World War during conflicts connected with the end of empire. The Malayan Emergency (1948-60), the Kenyan Emergency (1952-60) and the conflict in Cyprus (1955-9), to name but a few, all saw British forces expose detainees to sleep deprivation, stress positions, white noise, and more, all in an effort to gain intelligence.

The most well-known British uses of these kinds of interrogation techniques hail from Northern Ireland in 1971 and from Basra, Iraq, in September 2003. In the latter, the use of these techniques contributed to the death of a detainee. These examples are particularly well-known because of their hugely damaging exposure and repercussions – again, something not unique to post-9/11 America.

A failure of leadership?

Clodagh Harrington, DeMontfort University, England

In 2004, when the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke, President Bush responded by saying that such misconduct was “not the American way” – but it was hard to swallow his statement given US history.

Now, the Senate committee’s report has only demonstrated how dishonest Bush’s appraisal really was – and just how far the response to the September 11 attacks radically tipped the balance away from civil liberties and towards national security.

A majority of the American public initially shared unconditional approval of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy agenda – but by 2008, there was a desire for meaningful change. Enter Barack Obama – a man who personifies the notion that a candidate has to “campaign in poetry, but govern in prose.”

He may have agreed to ban the use of torture early in his first term, but he’s lost a great deal of credibility since Guantanamo Bay, a monument to injustice, has remained operational throughout his presidency.

Obama is clearly a man of integrity, and to date he’s avoided the scandals that usually bedevil a president in his second term. He could have allowed the CIA report to come out at a sensitive foreign policy moment for the nation, or delayed it, or prevented it, or promoted it. Whatever the strategy, an avalanche of criticism was inevitable. But still, if there are reprisals against American personnel or property in response to the report, he will get the blame.

Samantha Newbery receives funding from the British Academy.

Claudia Hillebrand, Clodagh Harrington, Eric Heinze, and Tom Packer do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.