The CIA Inspector General deleted its only copy of the Senate Torture Report
The CIA's Inspector General's office admitted it accidentally erased its copy of the Senate Intelligence Committee's long-delayed and highly controversial 2015 torture report, Yahoo News reported.
According to Yahoo, the nearly 7,000-page report was deleted in 2015. First, a document was "mistakenly" deleted, then the disk itself.
"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,'" Yahoo reported.
While there are more copies of the Senate's torture report, the incident sounded the alarm for Senate intel committee staffers who had worked for several years preparing the report and fighting with the CIA over its contents and its release. At one point, it was revealed that the CIA had spied on the Senate computers where staffers had been working.
The fact that it was the inspector general's office – which is supposed to be an impartial check on the CIA– that deleted the report only added to frustration within the Senate's intel committee when they were first alerted of the breach last summer, Yahoo reported.