June 2, 2017, New York – In response to reports that the Trump administration has begun returning copies of the Senate Torture Report to the Senate in an effort to keep them from being made public, the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents two men held under the CIA program, issued the following statement:

Trump has made his support for torture perfectly clear despite the fact that it is illegal in all circumstances. 

The Senate report details the horrors of the CIA torture program, including the rape/sexual assault of CCR client Majid Khan, and the ways the agency misled Congress, the courts, and the public about the program.

Now Trump seeks to help bury the report and avoid accountability for torture by having agencies return their copies to Congress, where, the CIA and Senate Republicans hope, it will remain beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act and discovery requests by detainees charged before military commissions and challenging their detention through habeas corpus.  Those efforts will not succeed, however, because the courts have ordered preservation of the report, including in an order issued this week in Majid Khan's military commission case.

 The report needs to be made public so that we don’t duplicate the shocking mistakes of the past, and officials need to read it, as many committed to do in their confirmation hearings, for the same reason. The CIA torture program is one of the most abhorrent and shameful episodes in our history: we must neither bury nor repeat it.     

The Center for Constitutional Rights represents two men named as former CIA prisoners in the executive summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Study of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program released in 2014, Majid Khan and Guled Hassan Duran, both currently held at Guantanamo.