More than a year after it approved a report critical of the CIA’s interrogation and detention policies, the Senate Intelligence Committee has voted to make a part of the document public. It’s now up to President Barack Obama to ensure that the agency doesn’t mount a rear-guard attempt to censor or sanitize the committee’s findings in the name of national security.

Thanks to news reports and a report by the CIA’s inspector general, Americans long have been aware of both the broad outlines and some abhorrent details of the Bush administration’s mistreatment of suspected terrorists after 9/11. We know that suspects were transported for questioning to “black sites” abroad, and that two suspected al-Qaida operatives, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were subjected to waterboarding. And we have read the memos in which Bush administration lawyers used contorted reasoning to justify torture.