WTF?

The CIA inspector general’s office — the spy agency’s internal watchdog — has acknowledged it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a mammoth Senate torture report at the same time lawyers for the Justice Department were assuring a federal judge that copies of the document were being preserved, Yahoo News has learned.

[...]

The deletion of the document has been portrayed by agency officials to Senate investigators as an “inadvertent” foul-up by the inspector general. In what one intelligence community source described as a series of errors straight “out of the Keystone Cops,” CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document.

[...]

Christopher R. Sharpley, the CIA’s acting inspector general, alerted the Senate intelligence panel that his office’s copy of the report had vanished. According to sources familiar with Sharpley’s account, he explained it this way: When it received its disk, the inspector general’s office uploaded the contents onto its internal classified computer system and destroyed the disk in what Sharpley described as “the normal course of business.” Meanwhile someone in the IG office interpreted the Justice Department’s instructions not to open the file to mean it should be deleted from the server — so that both the original and the copy were gone.

[...]

Sharpley was apologetic about the destruction and promised to ask CIA director Brennan for another copy. But as of last week, he seems not to have received it; after Yahoo News began asking about the matter, he called intelligence committee staffers to ask if he could get a new copy from them.

  Yahoo

Good God.

While another copy of the report exists elsewhere at the CIA, the erasure of the controversial document by the office charged with policing agency conduct has alarmed the U.S. senator who oversaw the torture investigation and reignited a behind-the-scenes battle over whether the full unabridged report should ever be released.

But, wait. That's not all.

The incident was privately disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department last summer, the sources said. But the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report has never been made public. Nor was it reported to the federal judge who, at the time, was overseeing a lawsuit seeking access to the still classified document.

[...]

A CIA spokesman, while not publicly commenting on the circumstances of the erasure, emphasized that another unopened computer disk with the full report has been, and still is, locked in a vault at agency headquarters. “I can assure you that the CIA has retained a copy,” wrote Dean Boyd, the agency’s chief of public affairs, in an email.

Now. What to believe? Why destroy one copy when another is on file? Just an "inadvertent error" as claimed, or because the request seeking it asked only for the copy from that one location?  It's not like we're ever going to see it, but a judge who needs it in order to decide a case?

Unless the Supreme Court chooses to get involved, it looks like we'll never get to see the full "Torture Report." We'll just have to make do with the Executive Summary, which was released at the end of 2014. The summary is just 500 pages out of ~7,000 total. The rest of these pages remain in the hands of the Senate and the CIA, and neither is willing to part with them.

FOIA enthusiast Jason Leopold's request for the full document has already been shut down. The ACLU's request was similarly denied by the DC District Court. The Appeals Court has reached its decision, and it agrees with the lower court.

The denial hinges on the court's determination that the full report is nothing more than a collection of Congressional communications and documents, rather than being in the possession of the CIA where they could (theoretically) be accessed via FOIA requests.

  TechDirt

Aha. But it does exist at the CIA.  Another copy is supposedly under lock and key.

But there seems to be a technicality...it doesn't belong to the CIA.

The court cites a 2009 letter from the Senate Committee to the CIA that spells this out explicitly.

Any . . . notes, documents, draft and final recommendations, reports or other materials generated by Committee staff or Members, are the property of the Committee . . . . These documents remain congressional records in their entirety and disposition and control over these records, even after the completion of the Committee’s review, lies exclusively with the Committee. As such, these records are not CIA records under the Freedom of Information Act or any other law.

In other words, the Senate Committee -- with a single letter -- managed to convert not only the finished Torture Report, but all of the documents it used to compile the report, into Congressional "work product," making it completely inaccessible by the general public.

Diane Feinstein, back in 2009, declared the finished report was not actually a finished report at all, but an ongoing "work in progress", thereby allowing the Senate Committee to claim authority to keep control over it and avoid FOIA requests. And yet, now that the CIA says it has "accidentally" destroyed their copy (even though they claim to have another), Feinstein has something else to say.

Feinstein, now the vice chair of the committee, wrote CIA Director John Brennan last Friday night asking him to “immediately” provide a new copy of the full report to the inspector general’s office. “Your prompt response will allay my concern that this was more than an ‘accident,’” Feinstein wrote, adding that the full report includes “extensive information directly related to the IG’s ongoing oversight of the CIA.”

  Yahoo

Why give them another copy?

To ensure the document was circulated widely within the government, and to preserve it for future declassification, Feinstein, in her closing days as chair, instructed that computer disks containing the full report be sent to the CIA and its inspector general, as well as the other U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Aides said Feinstein specifically included a separate copy for the CIA inspector general because she wanted the office to undertake a full review. Her goal, as she wrote at the time, was to ensure “that the system of detention and interrogation described in this report is never repeated.”

Right. So making sure the CIA inspector general has a copy will take care of that. Sure. Completely logical.  A better insurance would have been to release the report to the public.

[H]er successor, Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, quickly asked for all of the disks to be returned, even threatening at one point to send a committee security officer to retrieve them. He contended the volumes are congressional records that were never intended for executive branch, much less public, distribution.

[...]

In the meantime, Feinstein, joined by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, has taken a different route, petitioning David S. Ferriero, the chief of the National Archives, to formally declare the report a “federal record” that must be preserved “in the public interest” under a law known as the Federal Records Act.

But don't let the public see it.

Ferriero on April 29 wrote back to Feinstein that he would not rule on the question until the FOIA court case is concluded. And last week, Burr renewed his call to have all copies of the report sent back — presumably a way to ensure they are never publicly released. Citing the new Court of Appeals ruling, “Sen. Burr anticipates the return of these full reports to the Senate Intelligence Committee,” a spokeswoman said.

There's a big, smelly dead fish in the room.

Calling all whistleblowers.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 5/18: