This senator is waging a scorched-earth campaign to protect CIA torturers

Somebody's finally getting punished for torture: the people who uncovered it

Richard Burr
(Image credit: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)

Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.) is chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the CIA. He is also that agency's most devoted lapdog in Congress. Since he failed to prevent the 2014 release of the Senate report on the CIA's torture program, he's been looking for some way to punish the people responsible for embarrassing his beloved cabal of incompetent torturers. And he seems to have found his victim.

That would be a lawyer named Alissa Starzak, a former SSCI staffer. For several years, she served as one of the lead investigators on the torture report. She left the committee back in 2011, but did critical work during the investigative phase of the report, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, who thanked her by name in a speech hailing the release of the report.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.