The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. Melville House. 549 pages. $16.95.

On December 9, 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its torture report — or, more accurately, a redaction-studded version of the report’s executive summary, which nonetheless delivered far more than might be expected from such a document. This was no bureaucratic whitewash. It avoided the tepid style of most congressional prose, opting instead for a clinical, precise, and engaging narrative that patiently unfolds one of the most dysfunctional and embarrassing episodes in the…