An exhibit on torture includes a section on waterboarding in the new International Spy Museum, Tuesday April 30, 2019, in Washington.

Jacquelyn Martin / AP

The International Spy Museum’s glitzy new location at L’Enfant Plaza boasts interactive exhibits on espionage, and artifacts like the ice axe used in the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

But not all of its exhibits have impressed visitors. According to a report from Buzzfeed News, the museum has faced increased criticism of its exhibit on torture and enhanced interrogation tactics. According to the outlet, the Spy Museum is now grappling with how it will revise this installation to represent a more complete picture.

The museum includes a section dedicated to George W. Bush-era interrogation techniques, including a recreation of a waterboard. According to Buzzfeed, there’s also a poll asking visitors, “Would you be willing to have the US government torture suspected terrorists if they may know details about future attacks?” When Buzzfeed reporters first visited the museum in June, they witnessed a child visitor lying on the mock waterboard.

The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a 2014 report that the Bush-era interrogation methods, which included brutal tactics like waterboarding, were ineffective and that the CIA falsified information in reporting its results to Congress and the White House. That report does not appear in the Spy Museum’s exhibit.

“We recognized it was a sensitive issue,” the Spy Museum’s executive director, Col. Chris Costa, said  of the exhibit on the Intelligence Matters podcast in May, when the new facility opened. “So what we wanted to do is offer two viewpoints: a pro and an against. And we lay that out from experts from the intelligence community that were there when the decisions were made for enhanced interrogation. I feel as an intelligence professional, had we not told those stories, then we weren’t being true to our ethos.”

Still, he didn’t seem to think the exhibit was that disturbing. “First, we have a warning, so parents are going to have to help us make a determination whether their kids should see what’s within the exhibit, in the gallery,” he said on Intelligence Matters. “And I will say that I don’t think it’s terribly troubling, but again, eyes in the beholder. In fact, I think it’s done very thoughtfully.”

In the months that followed, the museum has faced backlash from human rights experts, former intelligence professionals, and politicians alike. Three Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote to the museum’s president Tamara Christian last month encouraging the museum to reexamine its exhibit.

In the letter obtained by Buzzfeed, Senators Martin Heinrich, Ron Wyden, and Dianne Feinstein—all members of the Senate Intelligence Committee—said that they were “deeply dismayed to learn about how the museum’s exhibit misrepresents the CIA’s torture program, sanitizing depictions of how techniques were applied, and suggesting that torture is effective in stopping terrorist attacks.”

In a response to the senators, Christian writes that the new exhibit will feature a more comprehensive timeline of the history of interrogation, lay out coercive and non-coercive methods (including “rapport building”), and explore the advances in lie detection technology. The new material will also include the legal definitions of torture, as well as the committee’s study on the CIA’s interrogation program, Christian says in the letter. The changes are expected to be finished by March 2020.

While the committee members said in a statement that they were “pleased” that the museum is reevaluating its exhibit, some critics remain skeptical of the museum’s intentions. Daniel Jones, the chief investigator on the committee’s 6,700-page classified report (played by Adam Driver in the recent movie The Report), told Buzzfeed on Wednesday that the museum’s current promotion of the torture program is unfit for schoolchildren.

“The Spy Museum has been so careless with the facts here that it should cast doubt on the integrity of their entire enterprise,” Jones told the outlet. “Absent a major reversal, our nation’s school leaders should think twice before adding the Spy Museum to their students’ class trip agendas.”

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