CIA Director John Brennan is trapped — caught between the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is accusing his agency of lying about the effectiveness of its terrorist interrogation program, and his boss, President Obama, who has told Brennan directly that he does not want him to defend the program.

Brennan knows that the Senate Intelligence Committee report is a partisan sham. As head of the National Counterterrorism Center from 2004 to 2005, Brennan was one of the top consumers of the intelligence obtained from CIA detainees. If their interrogations had produced nothing of value, as committee chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) claims, Brennan would know it.

Asked the purpose of her report, Feinstein declared it was to “ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted.” Well, that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the objectivity she brought to the effort. Feinstein started with her conclusion, and then spent six years and more than $40 million cherry-picking evidence to back up her claims.

It is clear that Feinstein and the Democrats on the Intelligence Committee don’t understand the value of interrogation, because they failed to question one single CIA official involved with the program as part of their investigation. How you do issue a 6,300-page report on a CIA program without even speaking to the people who actually ran the program? It would be as if the 9/11 Commission (which, by the way, relied on CIA interrogations for one-quarter of all its footnotes) had failed to question one single senior government official in determining what went wrong on Sept. 11, 2001. Why on Earth would Feinstein fail to interview the CIA officials she presumes to sit in judgment of and fail to hear their side of the story — unless, of course, she was not interested in their side of the story?