A Tortured Report

For most of last week, the report on enhanced interrogations produced by Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence dominated headlines. To the extent that there was a debate at all, it was one-sided. News coverage routinely described the findings as the “Senate torture report,” often failing even to note that it was written exclusively by Democratic staff or account for the differences between techniques used as part of the CIA program and abuses committed outside of that program.

We have no doubts that there were abuses. And some of those abuses, if they happened as the report describes, are horrifying and inexcusable. There is no justification, ever, for pureeing the meal of a detainee and inserting the liquefied results in his anus. This isn’t interrogation, it’s torture.

But approved techniques, including some that test the limits of what ought to be morally permissible, were effective. The report’s attempt to demonstrate otherwise is entirely unpersuasive, and its case is marked by the kind of breathtaking intellectual dishonesty that should make us all wary of trusting its conclusions.

Consider the case of Abu Zubaydah. The Feinstein report claims that Zubaydah’s identification of Jose Padilla, the “dirty bomb” plotter: (1) was of little value, (2) came before he was subjected to enhanced interrogation, and (3) helps prove that EITs were ineffective. Only one of those claims is true, and even that’s true only on a technicality.

The Feinstein report says “there was significant intelligence in CIA databases acquired prior to—and independ-ently of—the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program to fully identify Jose Padilla as a terrorist threat and to disrupt any terrorist plotting associated with him.”

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