To the Editor of the New York Times:
February 25, 20015; page A22
The headline of David Cole’s essay asks, “Did the Torture Report Give the C.I.A. a Bum Rap?” We should recall that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “torture report,” which rebutted C.I.A. claims that torture worked, was based on original C.I.A. documents.
Mirabile dictu, Mr. Cole gives the C.I.A.’s rebuttal equal weight: “When one places the C.I.A.’s accounts of the 20 cases side by side with the committee’s accounts, however, the truth is far from clear.”
As a former Army intelligence officer, I was proud when the Army’s chief of intelligence, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, said at a 2006 Pentagon news conference: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”
General Kimmons’s gutsy words were meant as a pre-emptive rebuttal of claims by President Bush just hours later that his “alternative set of procedures” yielded good intelligence.
RAY McGOVERN
Arlington, Va.
The writer served as an Army intelligence officer from 1962 to 1964 and as a C.I.A. analyst for the next 27 years. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.