Correction appended 10:26 EST, Dec. 17
Eighty religious leaders across the country have penned op-eds calling on Congress to release a Dec. 2012 report on CIA interrogations. The National Religious Campaign Against Torture says that on Tuesday it will hand out copies of the pieces to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which approved the 6,000 page report last year, but has yet to release it.
The Committee is expected to vote on releasing portions of the report, which details how CIA detentions and interrogations led to torture, later this month. “The report uncovers startling details about the CIA detention and interrogation program and raises critical questions about intelligence operations and oversight,” Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein said in a statement last year.
“It is a comprehensive review of the CIA’s detention program that includes details of each detainee in CIA custody, the conditions under which they were detained, how they were interrogated, the intelligence they actually provided and the accuracy—or inaccuracy—of CIA descriptions about the program to the White House, Department of Justice, Congress and others,” Feinstein added.
“The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report would provide important information that would help ensure that U.S.-sponsored torture never happens again,” Rev. Richard Killmer, the Executive Director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture said in a press release.
The clergy who signed the op-eds — which appeared Monday in the Washington Post, the Huffington Post and many local papers across the country — include Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, the president of the Interfaith Alliance, Christian author Brian McLaren, and Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and professor of theology at Chicago Theological Seminary.
The religious leaders join many other public figures who have advocated for the report’s release, including Sen. John McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, who was listed as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. She is also a professor of Theology at Chicago Theological Seminary.