The report by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding CIA interrogation essentially accuses the agency under George W. Bush of war criminality. Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein appears to offer some extenuation when she reminds us in the report's preamble of the shock and "pervasive fear" felt after 9/11.
It's a common theme (often echoed by President Barack Obama): Amid panic and disorientation, we lost our moral compass and made awful judgments. The results are documented in the committee report. They must never happen again.
It's a kind of temporary-insanity defense for the Bush administration. And it is not just unctuous condescension but hypocritical nonsense. In the aftermath of 9/11, there was nothing irrational about believing that a second attack was a serious possibility. Al-Qaida had mounted four major attacks on American targets in the previous three years. The country then suffered an anthrax attack of unknown origin. Al-Qaida was known to be seeking weapons of mass destruction.
We were so blindsided that we established a 9/11 commission to find out why. And we knew next to nothing about the enemy. There was nothing morally deranged about deciding as a nation to do everything necessary to find out what we needed to prevent a repetition. As Feinstein said at the time, "we have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves."
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