Seven years and millions of documents behind CIA report
Two congressional staffers had monumental task of shifting through millions of documents relating to the CIA detention programme
In late 2007, not long after the US Senate Intelligence Committee learned that the CIA had destroyed videotapes showing detainees being waterboarded, the spy agency for the first time allowed congressional staffers to review sensitive cables about the detention programme.
The committee chose two staffers - a former FBI analyst named Daniel Jones and Alissa Starzak, who once worked as a CIA lawyer - to read thousands of cables from the agency. Soon the pair were sorting through a blizzard of documents numbering in the millions.
The fog of secrecy made a mockery of oversight
Seven years later, the Senate committee on Tuesday finally released a declassified summary of a 6,000-plus-page report on the CIA's rendition, detention and interrogation programme that offers a harsh assessment of one of the agency's most controversial chapters.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committee chairwoman, has said the report - initially expected to take one year to complete - constitutes the most important work the oversight committee has done and one of the most significant in Senate history.
While the report involved a handful of committee aides, according to congressional sources and others, it owes its existence largely to Jones and Starzak, two staffers who worked quietly on the project while plunging into an environment plagued by mistrust between the Senate and the CIA.
The effort, by all accounts, snowballed into a project that consumed them for years and was complicated by political obstacles.