Programing Alert: Author Ralph Peters will be a guest on Fox News Channel's "Hannity" on December 9 at 10pm ET.

Tuesday’s willful, unnecessary and gratuitously destructive release of the one-sided “torture report” at the insistence of outgoing Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. (backed by the White House) amounts to nothing less than providing aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime.

Can anyone cite one practical good accomplished by releasing this gratuitously destructive report at this time? Will revealing successful practices make us more secure? No.

The report provides a propaganda windfall for Islamist fanatics. Will it benefit our allies? No.

It exposes those who took great risks to help us in the wake of 9/11. Will it “set the record straight?” No. It distorts the record grotesquely in the interests of political correctness, blame-shifting and short-term political advantage.

[pullquote]

Over the decades, I’ve respected Senator Feinstein, even when disagreeing with her. Thus, I’m far more shocked by her self-serving release of this report than by anything the CIA did to protect us. One can only conclude that the senator and her acolytes are attempting not to reform our intelligence practices but to re-write their own role in what transpired. The senator and her colleagues (from both parties) were briefed in detail on every activity field agents took to protect us from further attacks. The senator and her colleagues (as well as the Department of Justice) approved every one of those practices.

Now, the senator’s saying, “Even if we knew, we didn’t know.” Perhaps she is, indeed, suffering a much-delayed attack of conscience, but the awareness that the incoming Republican-majority Congress would never release such a biased report surely plays a role. And is it an accident that the report’s release—the stuff of commanding headlines—has been timed for the day that Professor “Americans-are-stupid” Jonathan Gruber testifies on Capitol Hill about ObamaCare?

What a monstrous betrayal it is to compromise our agents and our allies just to shove a lackey’s testimony below the fold in tomorrow-morning’s newspapers…

As for those supposedly horrendous actions taken by CIA personnel to convince blood-encrusted terrorists that cooperation might be the wisest course, they may have been harsh, but the times and our enemies were and are immeasurably harsher. But torture? What the Islamic State and its ilk do to their captives is torture. They shrink from nothing. We shrink from the thought of a terrorist gasping for breath.

Senator Feinstein and her supporters argue that the American people have a “right to know,” but they don’t know the American people. Living too long in a bubble with fellow members of the cultural elite, they have no sense of how the average American feels about terrorists who fly passenger aircraft into skyscrapers or who gleefully behead innocent captives in video clips.

Far from being mortified by water-boarding or sleep deprivation (for working Americans sleep deprivation is a normal state of affairs from holding down two jobs and multiple shifts to feed their families during the Reign of Obama), the folks I know back home in the Pennsylvania coal towns would skin terrorists alive then get out the salt shaker. My people weren’t upset by water-boarding. They were upset—infuriated—by the collapse of the Twin Towers and the deaths of 3,000 Americans.

Of course, the release of this report just now—which may lead to the deaths of more Americans, as the senator has been warned—is another sign of the Obama administration’s desperation. Team Obama’s genius for failure in every policy field, foreign or domestic, has left the administration’s inner circle frantic to deflect attention from its parade of deceptions, derelictions and disasters. About the only thing left to them is to exhume, yet again, the mutilated-by-the-left corpse of the George W. Bush administration.

For Team Obama, with its conviction that America’s at the root of every evil, Bush is responsible for the Crucifixion, the Black Death, the Holocaust and Country music. But the average Americans so disdained by this White House (and by Professor Gruber) want to know what President Obama has done for them. And unless one belongs to an arcane interest group, the answer is “Nothing.”

By attempting at this late date to vilify the men and women who did the hard, dangerous and unpleasant work of keeping the rest of us safe, Senator Feinstein and her backers create, gratuitously, a real and present danger. They have placed a higher value on the exaggerated “suffering” of barely human monsters than on the safety of our diplomats, our troops, our citizens abroad and our closest allies. (In Obamaworld-logic, it was a crime of the highest order to waterboard mass murderers, but it’s okay to kill them with drone strikes; speaking strictly for myself, I think I’d prefer waterboarding to death.)

Even if we grant her the noblest intentions, Senator Feinstein has betrayed our country and its defenders. Will she accept responsibility for the aftermath of this report’s release? The president certainly won’t. Should things go wrong, the White House will give the senator a back-massage by a bus this holiday season.

Our enemies would gladly exterminate every man, woman and child in the United States. Senator Feinstein just handed them a gift. But the president wrapped it.