News - Middle East: A lengthy report by the United States Senate on the CIA’s brutal “enhanced interrogation” methods will remain classified for the sake of “national security.”

The compilation of the report, whose full title is The Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, was conducted by the bipartisan US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) on the CIA’s so-called Detention and Interrogation Program and the spy agency’s use of torture during interrogation in US government communiqués on detainees in CIA custody.

The over-6,700-page report, which covers CIA activities before, during, and after the US-led “War on Terror” in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, was approved in late 2012 and took more than five years to complete.

Although portions of the report, which includes 38,000 footnotes, were leaked to the public by Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein in 2014, the full unredacted report remains classified.

On Thursday, District of Columbia Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the US Senate does not have to release the full content of its report. It “does not qualify as a public record subject to the common law right of public access,” Howell said.