Will the Senate report on torture hurt us abroad?

Even before the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its report on torture last week, there were warnings that it would embolden U.S. enemies. Secretary of State John Kerry didn’t quite go that far, but he apparently asked committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein to delay issuing the report because, according to one story, it “could complicate relationships with foreign countries at a sensitive time and posed an unacceptable risk to U.S. personnel and facilities abroad.”

The report — which is actually a much-redacted, 500-page executive summary of a longer, unreleased document — may be found here.

The controversy over the report is predictably intense. Congressional Republicans have criticized it for being politically motivated and unfair to the CIA (John McCain is one noticeable exception). Bush administration officials — with former Vice President Dick Cheney leading the way — have taken issue with the report. So have past and present CIA officials, including current agency director John Brennan. For its part, the White House is taking a low profile, torn between its opposition to torture and its deference to the CIA. The Obama administration would clearly prefer for the issue simply to go away.

At a broad level, the report’s findings will not come as huge surprise to anyone who has followed the torture issue over the years. We have long known that the CIA did in fact engage in torture (can we now ban “enhanced interrogation techniques”?); that the agency routinely exaggerated its effectiveness; that CIA spokespersons — let us be delicate here — stretched the truth in their statements to Congress; and that other countries cooperated with us in providing facilities in which we could torture suspected terrorists.

What the Senate report does provide is a) a formal — if still partially contested — confirmation of these facts and b) a wealth of detail, much of it harrowing, about the actual treatment of suspects.

Will this lead to blowback in the Middle East and elsewhere? The report may serve as an occasion for protest. It may even provide an excuse for an attack. But let us be realistic. It is not as though anything in the report — and much, much worse — is not already believed by millions in the Middle East. Jihadist terrorists in the region already have an abundance of reasons, in their feverish minds, for attacking the United States.

The report may cause some embarrassment to the countries that helped us torture suspects. Their names are redacted from the report but have been known for years. At the worst, though, the report will merely make them and other countries think twice before acceding to a U.S. request on a possibly illegal and morally dubious program. This is, on balance, a good thing, not just for them but for us.

What of broader damage to our reputation as an international advocate of human rights? Much of that reputation, I suspect, exists only in our own minds. Our support for human rights, after all, is routinely subordinated to other U.S. foreign policy interests. We continue to soft-peddle our criticism of autocratic allies even as we use human rights violations as a cudgel against our opponents. For decades, U.S. hypocrisy on the issue has been a staple of criticism of our foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. The Senate report will not change this.

Still, one could argue that the report itself represents a recommitment to our ideals, however selectively we pursue them. After all, President Obama banned torture upon assuming office. The Senate report, however delayed and incomplete, still embodies an effort to come honestly to terms with our government’s involvement in torture. Much depends on whether an anti-torture consensus emerges from the current debate. Such a consensus simply doesn’t exist at present. Indeed, in a Pew poll released in the wake of the Senate report, a majority of Americans say that CIA interrogation techniques were justified, while less than one-third say those techniques were not.