One noteworthy response to the Senate report on the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" was penned by Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., and published in the Washington Post. Rodriguez, a former director of the National Clandestine Service of the CIA, chides the report's authors for making a scapegoat of the CIA. Political authorities, including prominent Democrats, had been aware of the agency's use of methods of torture or had been willfully ignorant. Moreover, the political climate of the first years of the war on terror created pressure for those on the front lines to do whatever was necessary to protect the United States from new terror attacks.
Rodriguez's argument opens some broad and important issues regarding the resort to violence in the protection of the political community.
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