Three former CIA directors contend that enhanced interrogation techniques, approved under President George W. Bush and prohibited by President Obama, yielded key information that saved lives and led to Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. These claims go against Democratic rhetoric about what Obama calls "the false choice between our security and our ideals." Democrats need to believe that what Feinstein calls "torture" doesn't actually yield information. So in 2009, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to study CIA interrogations.

Feinstein has urged critics to read the report. I read the 500-page executive summary, and finished with more questions than answers. It was like reading a bureaucratic version of Mad magazine's onetime cartoon "Spy vs. Spy." Clearly there are rifts in the intelligence community. There was the FBI versus the CIA — part turf war, part mission divide. Within the CIA, there were officers who believed in rapport-building and officers who believed that shows of force deliver the goods. My guess is that both methods work, although one can be faster. Each side of that divide thinks its approach teased out the information that led to bin Laden.