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This week's U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture won't be the final word on the brutal interrogation tactics used by the Central Intelligence Agency in the years after 9/11. Not even close.

Just as history doesn't get written with a single flick of the pen, no single document can withstand the test of time as a definitive account of an entire era, especially one as morally ambiguous and panic-ridden as the post-Sept. 11, 2001, war on terrorism.

That hasn't stopped Senator Dianne Feinstein from trying. In January, the five-term California Democrat will lose her chairmanship of the intelligence committee in the new Republican-led Senate. Tuesday's release of the 525-page executive summary of her divided committee's controversial investigation into the CIA interrogation program, conducted between 2002 and 2006, is the 81-year-old senator's swan song.

Talk about going out with a bang.

Ms. Feinstein was, from Day 1, privy to the counterterrorism tactics used by former president George W. Bush's administration. She joined the intelligence committee in early 2001 and got regular classified briefings from every top national security official in the U.S. government. Yet she now says that she, her committee colleagues and the White House were systematically kept in the dark by the CIA.

They weren't kept in the dark about torture – but about its effectiveness. After all, you didn't need top-secret security clearance to know that the CIA resorted to some especially nasty tactics in those years. The existence of secret "black site" prisons where terrorism suspects were held, and of Justice Department memos authorizing enhanced interrogation tactics such as waterboarding, were common knowledge, thanks to regular security leaks.

Details about disagreements within the Bush administration about what constituted torture and about whether Geneva Convention rules even applied in the post-9/11 environment were splayed across the front pages. No reasonably informed citizen, much less a politician with privileged access to senior U.S. national security officials, could credibly claim ignorance.

As a result, the Feinstein committee's report focuses not on the existence of torture, but on whether CIA officials exaggerated its effectiveness in yielding intelligence that thwarted terrorist acts, led to the capture of al-Qaeda leaders and, most critically, provided invaluable clues in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The report concludes that the CIA misled Congress and the White House, systematically refuting almost every instance where CIA officials suggested that torture worked.

Curiously, it is only after concluding that torture doesn't work that Ms. Feinstein introduces the argument that it is morally unacceptable. "Pressure, fear and expectation of further terrorist plots do not justify, temper or excuse improper actions taken by individuals or organizations in the name of national security," Ms. Feinstein writes in the foreword to the report.

Would her assessment have been be different if, as her critics contend, torture had worked?

The CIA's enhanced interrogation program ended in 2006, when the remaining terrorism suspects in its custody were transferred to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. That allowed Mr. Bush to claim, in the present tense in 2007, that "this government does not torture people." His successor, Barack Obama, officially banned torture in one of his first acts in the Oval Office.

Never is a long time, so no one can say the United States will never use torture again. But one thing is certain: Ms. Feinstein's report – the official 6,700-page version remains classified for now – is unlikely to be seen by future historians as the final nail in the coffin of that possibility.

The CIA's enhanced interrogation program "did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives," Mr. Obama's own CIA chief, John Brennan, said this week. "The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al-Qaeda and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day."

Three ex-CIA directors, including Bush-era point man George Tenet, called the Feinstein report "a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America after the 9/11 attacks."

The truth likely lies somewhere between Ms. Feinstein's report and Mr. Tenet's riposte. It's a vast grey zone brilliantly illustrated in director Kathryn Bigelow's 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty. Torture was just one of the intelligence-gathering tools used by interrogators. Not even they knew whether other tactics would have been as useful without at least the threat of torture to back them up. It was a constant race against the clock.

Does that make them patriotic heroes or amoral villains? History, not Ms. Feinstein, will have the final say.

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