Good cop, bad cop

As more details about and reactions to the CIA memos are reported, the most convincing is the scenario in which Obama -- the institutionalist -- remains above the fray while Congress goes after the Bush/Cheney administration with hammer and tongs.  The day-after-day revelations of CIA malfeasance along with the administration's firm decision to protect individual operatives seems a little like a clever set-up.

Some members of Congress and human rights lawyers are likely to press for new disclosures about the period of several months in 2002 when C.I.A. interrogators began interrogating Abu Zubaydah, a Qaeda operative captured in March of that year, before the Justice Department had officially endorsed the interrogation program.

Representative John Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat who is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, on Friday raised the prospect of prosecuting senior Bush administration officials and Justice Department lawyers who authorized the harsh interrogations.

“If our leaders are found to have violated the strict laws against torture, either by ordering these techniques without proper legal authority or by knowingly crafting legal fictions to justify torture, they should be criminally prosecuted,” Mr. Conyers said in a written statement.

Chugging along behind the House are the secretive sessions of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating and evaluating specific instances of torture.

White House officials have generally supported this inquiry for several reasons. Unlike the idea of an independent commission proposed by Mr. Conyers, which would be a very public affair, the intelligence committee’s review is being carried out behind closed doors. The committee’s final report, if it is to be made public, could be as much as a year away.

Details of the torture of Abu Zubaydah are already known.  Now it's clear that the CIA officials directly involved in the interrogations tried to have them stopped.  What's increasingly obvious is that "high administration officials" used Abu Zubaydah as a political pawn.  The torture was in large part used to justify the administration's actions in its own politically-driven concoction -- "the war on terror."

The first use of waterboarding and other rough treatment against a prisoner from Al Qaeda was ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew, according to former intelligence officials and a footnote in a newly released legal memorandum.

The escalation to especially brutal interrogation tactics against the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, including confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall, was ordered by officials at C.I.A. headquarters based on a highly inflated assessment of his importance, interviews and a review of newly released documents show.

As both the broad picture of political motivations and personal bestiality becomes clear along with the (awful) specifics of the use of torture, we-the-people need to exchange rage and frustration for more effective patience and unrelenting insistence on prosecution.