Dianne Feinstein's travesty

But the thrust of the report is devoted to the proposition that torture, or harsh interrogation, never works. This is important to critics of the CIA program because they are almost never willing to say that torture is wrong and that we should never do it — even if it sometimes works and potentially saves lives. They lack the moral conviction to make their case solely on principle…

The standard for judging the CIA program shouldn’t be if it produced 100 percent truthfulness but whether it produced intelligence that wouldn’t have been available as quickly or at all, otherwise. The Feinstein report strains to declare all the thousands of intelligence reports that resulted from the interrogations as useless with mincing distinctions and counterfactuals that make little sense.

It insists that the harsh interrogation of Abu Zubaydah didn’t help lead to the capture of KSM. The Republican counter to the Feinstein report notes, “There is considerable evidence that the information Abu Zubaydah provided identifying KSM as ‘Mukhtar’ and the mastermind of 9/11 was significant to CIA analysts, operators, and FBI interrogators.”