From Harvey Milk’s Side to the Senate: 9 Key Moments in Dianne Feinstein’s Career

In late 2007, The New York Times reported that the Central Intelligence Agency had secretly destroyed tapes of interrogations conducted in 2002 of two Al Qaeda operatives that the agency had in its custody.

The tapes reportedly showed agency operatives subjecting the terror suspects to severe interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding. Agency officials said the tapes had been destroyed because they might endanger undercover officers, their intelligence value had ended and they might expose the agency to legal jeopardy.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, of which Senator Feinstein was a member, began an investigation. The report that emerged a little more than a year later described the extensive torture of Abu Zubaydah, whom the C.I.A. suspected was a high-ranking Al Qaeda member, and of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, another detainee.

By the time the report was released in early 2009, Senator Feinstein, then 75, was the committee chairwoman, and she called for a full investigation of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program. The project — and the senator’s fight with the Obama administration to release what the committee’s staff had uncovered about the program’s brutality, inefficiency and needless secrecy to the public — consumed more than five years.

Drawing on millions of C.I.A. documents, the full, 6,700-page “torture report,” as it came to be known, remains classified. But the 500-page executive summary, issued in 2014 despite a relentless campaign by the C.I.A. to undermine it, delivered a sweeping indictment of the agency and its treatment of terrorism suspects in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. So epic was the fight to inform Americans that a movie was made about it in 2019, with Annette Bening playing Senator Feinstein.

Over the decades, Senator Feinstein’s accomplishments have ranged from the federal coordination of Amber Alerts, the national child abduction warning system, to the California Desert Protection Act, which preserved more than 7 million acres of desert. But she has called the torture report the most important work of her career.