Do You Agree With the Decision to Release the Senate’s Report on the C.I.A.’s Use of Torture? [POLL]

There was much debate over torture on Tuesday and the use of torture during the Bush administration. As you know, a long-delayed report on the use of torture was released yesterday by Senate Democrats. According to the New York Times, the CIA mislead the Bush White House.

Mr. Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, said repeatedly that the detention and interrogation program was humane and legal. The intelligence gleaned during interrogations, he said, was instrumental both in thwarting terrorism plots and in capturing senior figures of Al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and a number of former C.I.A. officials have said more recently that the program was essential for ultimately finding Osama bin Laden, who was killed by members of the Navy SEALs in May 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The Intelligence Committee’s report tries to refute each of these claims, using the C.I.A.'s internal records to present 20 case studies that bolster its conclusion that the most extreme interrogation methods played no role in disrupting terrorism plots, capturing terrorist leaders, or even finding Bin Laden.

The report said that senior officials — including former C.I.A. directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — repeatedly inflated the value of the program in secret briefings both at the White House and on Capitol Hill, and in public speeches.

In a speech in the Senate, moments after the report was released Tuesday morning, Ms. Feinstein described the tumultuous history of her investigation and called the C.I.A. interrogation program “a stain on our values and our history.”

She said, “History will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again.’ ”

As she was preparing to speak, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, issued a response that both acknowledged mistakes and angrily challenged some of the findings of the Senate report as an “incomplete and selective picture of what occurred.”

Officials now worry that because of the release of the report, terrorists could attack American interest overseas. Do you think the report should have been released?