Could Sen. Udall Cap His Career by Telling Us the Contents of Senate’s Secret Torture Report?

Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) lost his seat to
Rep. Cory Gardner, one of the new class of Republicans who helped
take control of the Senate. Though Udall perhaps
didn’t run a very good campaign, he was a very
strong voice on the Senate Intelligence Committee for trying to
restrain the National Security Agency’s surveillance tactics and
pushing for greater transparency and protections of Americans’
civil liberties from the security state.

As he prepares to leave office, there is one last powerful act
many civil liberties activists are hoping he’ll take. The Senate
Intelligence Committee is currently locked in a struggle with both
the CIA and the Obama administration about the release of the
Senate’s report on torture committed by the CIA during the war on
terror under the Bush administration.  The release of the
report has been delayed for ages. The current fight is over how
much content from the report (or rather, the small party of the
report that will be released) should be
redacted.

What some folks want is for Udall, as essentially his last act
as a senator, to read the contents of the torture report into the
Senate record. Dan Froomkin at The Intercept contacted
former Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska for moral support. Gravel entered
the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record back in 1971
before the Supreme Court lifted an injunction against press
publication. Froomkin spoke to Gravel
over the phone:

Gravel’s recommendation: “What he’d have to do is call a
subcommittee meeting like I did, late at night.”

Back in 1971, Gravel first tried to read the Papers from the
Senate floor. He even got himself rigged up with a colostomy bag so
he wouldn’t need to take breaks. But he was stymied by an
unexpected procedural move.

So he moved to Plan B: He called a late-night subcommittee
meeting with almost no notice to the other members.

Gravel read some of the Pentagon Papers out loud, but challenged
by dyslexia and overcome with emotion, he finally opted for another
way: “I asked for unanimous consent to put it in the record of the
subcommittee. And there was no one there to object.”

But things have changed a lot since then. Froomkin explored the
current Senate rules and thinks that Udall could still pull the
same trick even in this day and age. Read more
here.