A Senate committee is close to putting the final stamp on a massive report on the CIA’s detention, interrogation and rendition of terror suspects. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who heads the Select Committee on Intelligence, called the roughly 6,000-page report “the most definitive review of this CIA program to be conducted.”

But it’s unclear how much, if any, of the review you might get to read.

The committee first needs to vote to endorse the report. There will be a vote next week.

Republicans, who are a minority on the committee, have been boycotting the investigation since the summer of 2009. They pulled back their cooperation after the Justice Department began a separate investigation into the CIA interrogations. Republicans have criticized that inquiry, arguing that the interrogations had been authorized by President George W. Bush’s Justice Department. (In August, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the investigation was being closed without bringing any criminal charges.)

Even if the report is approved next week, it won’t be made public then, if at all. Decisions on declassification will come at “a later time,” Feinstein said.

According to Reuters, the Senate report focuses on whether so-called “enhanced interrogation” tactics – including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other techniques – actually led to critical intelligence breakthroughs. Reuters reported earlier this year that the investigation “was expected to find little evidence” that the torture was in fact crucial.

Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and others have repeatedly said that such tactics produced important information. They’ve also said waterboarding was used on only a handful of high-level detainees, a claim which recently came into question. Feinstein has previously disputed claims that such interrogations led to Osama Bin Laden. (It is also still unclear what key members of Congress knew about the program, and when they knew it.)

Much about the CIA’s program to detain and interrogate terror suspects has remained officially secret, despite widespread reporting and acknowledgement by Bush. Obama banned torture upon taking office and released documents related to program, including a critical report from the CIA’s Inspector General.

But the Obama administration has argued in courts that details about the CIA program are still classified. (As we have reported, this has led the administration to claim in some cases that Guantanamo detainees’ own accounts of their imprisonment are classified.)

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The European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favour of a German citizen, after finding he was an innocent victim of extraordinary rendition by the CIA.

Macedonia was ordered to pay Khaled el-Masri $78,000 on Thursday for arresting him and handing him over to the US in December 2003.

Macedonia was ordered to pay Khaled el-Masri $78,000 on Thursday for arresting him and handing him over to the US in December 2003.

El-Masri spent five months in secret CIA jails for suspected links to armed Islamist groups.

The decision is a victory for El-Masri who has been trying in the US and Europe to get authorities to recognize him as a victim.

El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese origin, was arrested, held in isolation, questioned and ill-treated in a hotel in the Macedonian capital Skopje for 23 days, the court's press service said.

He was then transferred to CIA agents who brought him to a detention facility in Afghanistan, where he was further badly treated for over four months.

The European court, based in Strasbourg, France, ruled that El-Masri's account was "established beyond reasonable doubt" and that Macedonia "had been responsible for his torture and ill-treatment both in the country itself and after his transfer to the US authorities in the context of an extra-judicial rendition".

Macedonian authorities said they would not comment until they are formally notified of the ruling. The Macedonian government has denied involvement in kidnapping.

'Milestone'

El-Masri claimed during the flight to Afghanistan, he was stripped, beaten and drugged.

His ordeal ended when he was eventually dumped on a road in Albania after the US realized they had got the wrong man.

Though the case focused on Macedonia, it drew broader attention because of how sensitive the CIA extraordinary renditions were for Europe.

The operations involved abducting and interrogating "terrorist" suspects without court sanction in the years following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, under former President George W Bush.

A 2007 Council of Europe investigation accused 14 European governments of permitting the CIA to run detention centres, or carry out rendition flights, between 2002 and 2005.

Amnesty International said the verdict was historic because "for the first time it holds a European state accountable for its involvement in the secret US-led programmes and is a milestone in the fight against impunity".

"Macedonia is not alone," it said, in a joint statement with the International Committee of Jurists.