Ah, Wikipedia: an unbiased source of knowledge for people all over the world and desperate university students in the middle of an essay crisis, right? Well, anybody thinking to refer to wiki articles for the CIA should be well advised that there's a bit of a tussle going on over one page. More specifically, over its inclusion of the word "torture".  

An anonymous Wikipedia user from an IP address registered within the US Senate has tried twice to remove the term from an article for the recently released CIA Torture Report, the Senate's five-year investigation into the coercive interrogation techniques (read: torture) carried out on prisoners in camps like Guantanamo Bay.  

The unidentified individual attempted to delete a line which described the CIA's techniques as "a euphemism for torture", arguing that he or she was "removing bias" from the article. Other Wikipedia editors overruled the deletion on both times.

Mashable first reported on the edits after @congressedits noted the changes on Tuesday and Wednesday. The Twitter bot is set up to tweet automatically when Wikipedia edits are made from IP addresses in the US Congress. (A similar bot, @parliamentedits, exists for the UK Parliament.)

In the past, @congressedits has noted Wikipedia revisions made by anonymous Congress staffers to articles on Lord of the Rings, William Shatner, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the NFL League. But the nerds and sports fanboys in Congress clearly get up to far more sinister edits – and this is one of them.

The CIA Torture Report has prompted the United Nations and other human rights organisations to call for the prosecution of US officials responsible for the programme. According to the document, the CIA's use of torture in the decade-long war on terror was both brutal and inefficient. It details how the agency forced detainees with broken feet to stand shackled to the wall for sleep deprivation purposes; force-fed prisoners pureed food via enema in a process called "rectal rehydration"; and allowed one detainee to die of hypothermia after chaining him to the wall. 

"The release once again makes crystal clear that the US government used torture," Amnesty International USA’s executive director, Steven W Hawkins, said in a statement. "Torture is a crime and those responsible for crimes must be brought to justice."

“Under the UN convention against torture, no exceptional circumstances whatsoever can be invoked to justify torture, and all those responsible for authorising or carrying out torture or other ill-treatment must be fully investigated."