1. Aram Rostam’s report for The Huffington Post that the CIA used fire ants on a detainee’s head to “break him”; or

2. The fact that Rostam ran a report based on a second-hand account of a years-old outburst by a CIA “supervisor” (whatever that means) around a bar concerning an extremely sensitive intelligence program.

Your call. Rostam has a good reputation as a reporter, and finding out anything about torture takes a lot of work. We’ve also learned over the years that no one ever went broke overestimating the Bush-era CIA’s capacity for inventive torture techniques. But I’d really want a lot more than drunken boasting before I ran an inflammatory story.

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