Making Sense of The Torture Report

Last week, Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, released to great fanfare, an exhaustive report, prepared solely by the Democratic members of her Committee, on the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, adopted in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. It is easy to criticize this report, as Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Saxby Chambliss have done, on procedural grounds. It is even easier, perhaps, to denounce the report on substantive grounds, as was done recently by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who on Meet the Press offered a full-throated defense of CIA practices, saying “I would do it again in a minute.”