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There are four things about this whole story, which leave you with some odd reality.

First, for all this Senate control over the CIA...during this entire period...various meetings and information put forward, and the Senate never once stopped things for a moment and said we’ve got ethics and you can’t physically torture this guy? Either the Senators are totally asleep or incompetent...and by putting this report out there...they basically admit this. As bad as they make the CIA and Bush Administration look...the senate of that era looks just as bad.

Second, the military handbook for interrogations from the 1950s all the way up through most of this era...always allows some form of interrogation, but no torture. You can read up on the lessons from the WW II era and what the Nazis themselves said (physical torture gives you unreliable info). Oddly enough, the CIA (the intellectual guys) went the exact opposite way....saying that the Nazis were wrong, and they could improve upon physical torture. We have two groups with entirely different views of the end-result.

Third, once you put all of this onto paper...are you willing to hand the hundred to thousand guys over to a UN war-crimes episode? If you aren’t....you look awful foolish around the world. If you were handing them over...what state or federal law will you use to export these guys to Brussels? As these Senate intellectuals seem to always want the high-road...seems to me that some of them, by being connected to the oversight committees...would have to go onto Brussels as well, as part of the war-crimes tribunal.

Finally, I come to this odd deal of the past six years....drone executions in non-war-zones. Basically, it’s illegal too....by the UN standards. Who ordered these executions? The President. Will a Senate committee in 2015 open up a five-years investigation to determine what was done, who authorized what, and seek to publish a report in 2020 over new war-crimes for a Nobel Prize winner? Hmmm...it’d be the logical next step to take.

My general take? Three-thousand-odd Americans were tortured in a pretty quick way on 9-11, and given no real protection by anyone, by any rules of law, or human rights. No one....absolutely no one... will run up a UN commission or court on their rights violated. That says something pretty bold, in my humble opinion.

Here’s my biggest problem with the issue.

As I understand it, the administration went to their in-house attorneys to get a definition of “torture” that would allow them to do what they wanted to the prisoners.

The attorneys of course produced what they wanted. (You can argue separately about whether their defintions were accurate or legal.)

Then the administration produced new policies, and guys in the field implemented them.

The attorneys claim they’re not responsible because they only produced an opinion.

The policy guys aren’t responsible because they simply followed advice of counsel.

The field guys can’t be held accountable since they were only following policy set by their leaders on advice of counsel.

Which means nobody can be held accountable for the policy or actions taken under it.

That’s seriously disturbing from the rule of law perspective.

I’m not addressing at this point whether the policies were effective or “legal,” simply the diffusion of responsibility that this method of approaching things creates.

I wish all sides could address three issues separately:

1. Was this really “torture?” Obviously interrogation methods are on a spectrum from politeness to hot irons. Somewhere on that spectrum it crosses into being torture. Yet most discussion seems to take the location of that line for granted.

2. Does it work? That should be able to be determined by actual results.

3. Is it right? Are there any circumstances under which it should be done even though we agree it isn’t right?

The conflation of these three quite separate issues makes reasonable discussion impossible.

Apparently many people feel waterboarding someone is actually worse than killing them. My own feeling is that if there is no benefit from interrogating the Al-Qaeda monsters we captured, they should be disposed of as quickly as possible. By disposing of them, I mean shooting them. And we've only waterboarded three of them. And to claim we would keep on waterboarding or using other forms of enhanced interrogation if they didn't work is ridiculous.

But getting to the main point, are these people going to tell me that if we can prevent the deaths of thousands or millions of people by roughing somebody up, we shoudn't do it? Because it violates our principles? But if we shoot that person or send a drone to bomb their bodies into tiny parts, that's not as bad as waterboarding them? Ridiculous!