The Rev. Rich Kilmer, executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, said, “We need to understand fully what happened so that we can effectively develop those safeguards. Investigating the past will help produce a future where the U.S. no longer engages in torture.”
“Such a commission would not preclude a simultaneous investigation by the Department of Justice or by a special prosecutor,” he said. “Where sufficient evidence exists that laws may have been broken, justice dictates that no one is above the law and prosecutions should be launched.”
He added that the commission of inquiry could be appointed by the president or by Congress.

Details of the leaked report were first published on the web site of the New York Review of Books in an extensive article by Mark Danner, a journalism professor. The report, compiled from interviews with numerous U.S. detainees, describes acts of brutalization and sensory deprivation employed by U.S. agents.

The report concluded: “The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
Mr. Danner writes that all the torture techniques “had to have the approval of the CIA's deputy director for operations.” He wrote that CIA officers “briefed high-level officials” in the National Security Council's Principals Committee, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, “who then signed off on the interrogation plan.” The briefings about these techniques were so “detailed and frequent that some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed.”