By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on December 11, 2014

As a final act while the Democrats hold their majorities in Congress, the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released a report on December 9, the “Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program”, known to the Twitterverse as the “Torture Report”. This has reignited the debate about America’s use of harsh interrogation methods, the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs), against al-Qaeda operatives in the shadow of the 9/11 massacre. The politics surrounding this matter—even on basic questions, such as whether discomfort works to induce cooperation in detainees—are poisonous, and the publication of this partisan Committee Study has done nothing to assist this environment. One means of trying to get at the truth is to examine a counterpoint, the 2012 book, Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, a memoir by Jose Rodriguez, the man who oversaw the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Centre from 2001 to 2004. Continue reading →