I was bantering around with a colleague about why it is that so many reporters have an allergy to the sort of close-document-reading that, say, TPM and Marcy do. Could it really be laziness? We mused about status-anxiety: after all, anyone can read a document, even DFH bloggers, whereas not just anyone can call up an eighth-tier political appointee, extract anodyne spin, and call her a Senior Administration Official who’s revealing the secret truths that only ace journos and readers-of-press-releases can reveal. I really don’t know, even after being in this business for a bit. It can’t possibly be a desire to rely on primary sources, since documents like, say, the CIA inspector general’s report is a primary source.

But even so. If it’s primary sources you want, here’s Mike Rolince, a 30-year FBI veteran of counterterrorism, who retired in 2005. 

Rolince can’t believe that so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques like waterboarding still have their defenders. “I’m just not a fan of them, and never have been a fan of them,” he told me. “I’ve never believed that it works, I don’t believe its been documented that it works, and I don’t believe we as a country should stoop to that, I don’t think we ought to be doing it. I just don’t think we need to do the untested, untrained and unreliable.”

Read the whole thing, as the kids like to say.  And he wasn’t even reluctant to put his name to that comment. Also, special guest appearance by a 2008 Scott Shane piece that raises some additional doubts about that Post piece.