CIA says it 'accidentally' nuked torture report hard drive

The CIA says that it accidentally deleted a report at the heart of a Senate investigation into the agency's use of torture.

A report from Yahoo! news claims that the agency's Inspector General managed to delete both the uploaded copy of the Senate's torture report and a disk that contained the office's backup of the report, along with "thousands" of other classified intelligence files related to the report.

The report cited unnamed sources in claiming that the documents were wiped last summer, but word of the incident had not been released to the public. The agency does have other copies of the report outside of the Inspector General's office.

The 2014 report, which totals 6,700 pages, has not been released in full, though the Senate has posted a summary report outlining the findings of the committee.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden was less than accepting of the explanation that the files were deleted inadvertently.

This wouldn't be the first time the CIA has been accused of misconduct in relation to the Senate's investigation of the agency's use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques when extracting intelligence from terror suspects. These techniques included waterboarding, a practice the US viewed as a war crime in World War Two when the Japanese used it.

In 2014, CIA agents were accused of hacking into computers owned by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee in order to monitor the torture investigations and extract what data the investigators had found.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who was at the center of the 2014 hacking row and subsequent release of the summary report, has written a letter to CIA director John Brennan seeking more information on this latest incident. ®