Max Boot, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
You can have debates about whether they were effective or not. All that kind of stuff, you can debate it ad nauseum. But you don’t have to release this report with all these gruesome details, which serves to simply sensationalize the whole debate. And again, as I stressed earlier, and I think this is the big damage being done here, this is really providing fodder for the propaganda mills of our enemies, just as the revelations of Edward Snowden have done, and just as the revelations of Bradley Manning, and just as, you know, the revelation of Abu Ghraib did in 2004. Those also became prime recruiting tools for al Qaeda. That’s not to say that the underlying conduct can certainly be wrong, and there’s no question in the case of Abu Ghraib, conduct was wrong. It was not one of these approved interrogation programs. But you can still object to the conduct, you can still hold people accountable if you need to without releasing these kinds of sensational details, which harm American national security interests, and harm our ability to fight terrorism here and now......snip~