The CIA report is too tainted to matter

Editor’s note: The following is Danielle Pletka’s response to the New York Times Room for Debate question: What can be done to assure that the US no longer tortures detainees, or that those who approved it are held to account?

The outgoing Democratic leadership of the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on CIA rendition, detention and interrogation of terrorists in the years following the 9/11 attacks. But here’s a red flag: Not one person who managed or ran the interrogation program was interviewed.

Why does it matter? Because the way this “report” was generated colors the notional facts it professes to share. Many of the “revelations” of CIA techniques and black sites are old hat to most. Some approve; others don’t. Fair enough, and in a democracy, such a debate is worthy. The larger challenge comes in determining the efficacy of these techniques. Opponents insist (fueled less by fact and more by their sense of righteousness) that enhanced interrogation doesn’t work. So claims the outgoing chairman, of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein.

Here is the problem: Her claim is false. And taken in conjunction with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s unwillingness to interview the targets of their critique, one can only assume that much of the rest of the document is also tainted.

Three former CIA directors — George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — and three former deputy directors — John E. McLaughlin, Albert M. Calland and Stephen R. Kappes — take down the report’s claims in a short rebuttal that eviscerates Feinstein’s central accusations that interrogation revealed no actionable intelligence and provided no assistance in the capture of Bin Laden, and that CIA officers engaged in excesses of torture beyond limits allowed by the Department of Justice.

So, what to do? It has become the norm to act based on false reports; to close fraternities because of rapes that may or may not have happened; to release terrorists because it is inconvenient to keep them. Rather, the next step should be to consign Feinstein’s partisan screed to the ashbin of history, to reread the Obama Justice Department’s 2012 decision not to prosecute CIA officials for alleged interrogation transgressions, to double down on our own commitment to the rule of law, and to remember that America has real enemies from Yemen to Mali, from Iraq to Syria, from Sinai to Gaza and beyond. Perhaps the Senate Intelligence Committee could now focus on them.