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Editor’s Note: Ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern was granted space in the Washington Post’s editorial section to respond to Post columnist Richard Cohen’s defense of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s position on torture. McGovern wrote:

Richard Cohen ["What if Cheney's Right?," op- ed, May 12] started out on a high moral plane with the observation that "[t]orture is a moral abomination."

But he then seemed to slip over to what then-Vice President Dick Cheney called, in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, "the dark side."

Mr. Cohen referred disparagingly to those "who will not acknowledge that the immediate post-Sept. 11 atmosphere allowed for methods that now seem abhorrent" and focused on Mr. Cheney's insistence on the "efficacy of what can colloquially be called torture."

Let me try to help.

As a former Army intelligence officer, I may be biased, but I'll go with Lt. Gen. John F. Kimmons, head of Army intelligence from 2005 to 2008. He did a very gutsy thing on Sept. 6, 2006, just a couple of hours before he knew President Bush would publicly extol the efficacy of his "alternative set of procedures" for interrogation.

Gen. Kimmons arranged his own news conference at the Pentagon and in unmistakable language said, "No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that."

[For more on the topic of Cohen’s column, see Consortiumnews.com’s “WPost Columnist Winks at Torture.” To see, McGovern’s letter on the Post’s Web site, click here.]

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