THERE are few things more sickening than to observe the mass media in one of its periodic fits of moral outrage. The US Senate intelligence committee report on the treatment of terror suspects has been described in lurid vocabulary: “Shame of the West…America’s disgrace…intolerable cruelty…”

But, as ever, there is another side to the tale. We might glance at comments by Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA who is actually qualified to speak, for he was there when the events in question were taking place.

He begins by saying: “I’m not here to defend torture; I’m here to defend history.”

The CIA subjected internees to water-boarding, or simulated drowning. Hayden points out: “This technique is inflicted on thousands of American airmen in their training.”

He adds: “The few instances of detainees treated beyond what was authorised were self-identified by the Agency and appropriately dealt with.”

The Senate report claims that the CIA programme for dealing with suspects was ineffective. Whereas Hayden says the programme was successful and that the Senate’s investigators would have known just how successful if they had ever, over the whole period of five years in which the report was being prepared, interviewed a single CIA operative.

But he says: “I repeat, no one was interviewed.

“If Democrat staffers had talked to any of us – probably hundreds – they would have had to deal with our absolute assurance that this programme led to the capture of senior al Qaida operatives including helping to find Osama bin Laden; added enormously to what we knew about al Qaida and led to the disruption of terrorist plots, saving American and Allied lives.”

For example, “Dhiren Barot had planned mayhem on both sides of the Atlantic, including a scheme to detonate a bomb in a tube train under the Thames. He was arrested by the British police and is now serving a 30 year prison sentence for conspiracy to commit murder. We first heard of him, truthfully and in some detail, from Khalid Sheik Mohammed after he had undergone enhanced interrogation in 2003”.

But if that bomb plot on the tube under the Thames had succeeded, with the likely loss of hundreds if not thousands of lives, all the newspaper talk would not have been about “torture” but “the disastrous incompetence of the intelligence services".

Hayden claims: “The Senate Democrat Document reads like a shrill prosecutorial screed rather than a dispassionate historical study. The staff started with a conclusion and then cherry-picked their way through a million pages of documents, ignoring some data and highlighting others, to make their case. In the intelligence profession, this is called politicisation.”

Hayden concludes: “The Republican minority on the Senate intelligence committee and the CIA itself have issued strong, fact-based rebuttals to the Democrat report. So: do not rush to judgement based on the partisanship of the Senate Democrat report. The men and women who operated in the unprecedented circumstances after 9/11, who did what they did out of duty rather than enthusiasm, deserve at least that.”

Yes, the CIA deserves a fair hearing – but they won’t get it. So, many thousands of intelligence officers, working in volatile, unpredictable conditions in which they were asked to identify terror plots so threatening that they bordered on the apocalyptic, are now having their reputations trashed – and for what? For the Democrats to make out George W Bush was even worse than we thought. There is a good chance that the West will lose this war against the Muslim fanatics. We shall certainly lose if we insist on fighting with one hand tied behind our back.