Former Sen. Bob Kerrey offers a harsh, unexpected critique of last week’s Senate torture report

Right after 9/11, Bob Kerrey got calls from former colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee who urged him to get the hell out of New York City. “They seriously thought there’d be another attack,” recalls Kerrey, the former two-term Nebraska senator who had by then left to be president of the New School in Greenwich Village.

Few in New York, or anywhere, better understand than Kerrey the substance and politics of last week’s controversial Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture.

So when he says that the report left him underwhelmed because it was overtly partisan, empirically dubious due to no interviews with key players and devoid of any recommendations, we might listen.

When he rolls his eyes over the media coverage of the report, much of which has treated it as gospel, we might also take heed.

He is, after all, a liberal Democrat and Medal of Honor-winning Navy SEAL who was badly wounded in the Vietnam War before going on to serve as Nebraska governor, then senator and co-chair of that same Intelligence Committee, and then as a member of the federal 9/11 Commission.

“The most obvious thing is that it is just the Democrats,” he said.

Yes, Republicans voted to do a report and declassify it. But on the real substance, it was a Democrats-only report, he said.

Kerry served on panels that inspected a Clinton-era spy scandal and the 9/11 tragedy. Each resisted partisan impulses to simply blame Clinton or, then, President George W. Bush, and infused their handiwork with enhanced credibility.

“If the 9/1 Commission had said we didn’t have to interview anybody, and just relied on documents, including emails, the public would have gone nuts and said that is unfair.”

The majority Democrats give reasons for not doing fresh interviews with CIA officers, including citing the officers’ potential legal jeopardy. And the staff did get transcripts of earlier interviews done for an internal CIA inspector general’s probe.

But Kerrey finds “the excuses unpersuasive.” He also doubts some of the report’s claims, particularly that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were kept in the dark for four years on the progress of the interrogation program by a deceitful CIA.

“No historian would call this a definitive history when you only read documents and all the people are still alive,” said Kerrey, who left the New School after an eventful 10-year tenure and ran unsuccessfully to return to the Senate back in Nebraska in 2012.

“No credible journalists would operate like that,” said Kerrey, 71, who now works for Allen & Co., a famous boutique investment bank, and Minerva, a global higher education project.

At the same time, he knows that our security agencies face a treacherously complex 9/11 world: “We are an open society and very vulnerable and, despite that, we have not been attacked again.

“I don’t know that got done, but it got done. If they’ve tried to attack us again, it hasn’t succeeded. That’s not an accident.”

In his Senate heyday, Kerrey was smart, dogged, full of integrity and a bit of a lone wolf (and inevitably mentioned along with Debra Winger, a onetime gal pal).

He was not a partisan shill and famously sparred (using profanities) over a then-momentous deficit reduction bill with Clinton, against whom he had run for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination.

So he’s disappointed with the Senate re- port without disputing many of its sordid details or stunning parenthetical disclosures, like the two psychologists who got paid $81 million to help with interrogations.

And he thinks that the ultimate lesson involves the lack of strong congressional oversight. The Intelligence Committee should be more bipartisan and more demanding.

But when it came to what happened post-9/11, he readily concedes there was “no training manual. No right way to do this. A lot of this was being made up as it went. The fear, if not outright panic, was high.”

Before a long chat ended, I switched topics and asked about Chuck Hagel, his fellow former Nebraska senator who was unceremoniously booted as defense secretary.

“The thing that upset me was that he looked like Eliot Spitzer’s wife at that White House press conference.”

“He was hanging his head as Obama said nice things about him, while the White House was telling everybody they’d fired him.

“He was and remains a phenomenal guy.”

Former Democratic senator and war hero Bob Kerrey’s doubts about torture report