The CIA broke the law. They literally killed detainees. Killed them. People who might've been very bad people, but we'll never know, because they were never charged with any crimes, they were not treated as prisoners of war, they were just assumed to be terrorists, and the CIA actually literally killed them.

Here is the story about the war between the CIA and Justice. And, you know, if you've read any of the CIA's heavily-redacted (but not redacted heavily enough for Leon Panetta!) I.G. report on how they tortured and killed people, how sympathetic is Leon Panetta's position here?

The strains became evident inside the administration in the past several weeks. In July, Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, tried to head off the investigation, administration officials said. He sent the C.I.A.'s top lawyer, Stephen W. Preston, to Justice to persuade aides to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to abandon any plans for an inquiry.

Mr. Preston presented what was, in effect, a closing argument in defense of the C.I.A., contending that many potential cases against intelligence operatives were legally flawed and noting that they had already been investigated, some more than once. In none, he said, had prosecutors found grounds for charges.

The Bush Justice Department instructed its lawyers to come up with legal justifications for illegal acts, the CIA lied about the scope and the efficacy of those acts, and then exceeded the authority granted them by the already flawed legal guidelines. But, you know, the CIA totally investigated it themselves and decided shit was cool so no need to enforce the law or anything!

CIA director Panetta already reportedly exploded in a "profanity-laced" "tirade" over Holder's plans to open a criminal investigation (a CIA spokesman told ABC news that "Panetta is known to use 'salty language,'" which is a really amusing confirmation). And Panetta is also planning on quitting pretty soon, apparently! He is not happy that Obama wants him to report to the Director of National Intelligence, and he is not happy with Democrats in the House, and he is also not happy to learn the various incredibly illegal things the CIA was up to during the Bush years. He is just not happy. He wrote a letter about how the CIA was only doing what Justice told them to do, back then.

Also today the CIA Inspector General's report on how illegal and stupid and ineffective all the torturing was will be released to the public, presumably in a heavily redacted form! But the Justice Department's own internal review into what they did wrong is still not being released any time soon.

And some civil liberties folks are upset that it sounds like Holder will limit his investigation into low-level CIA interrogators who were, after all, acting out policies created and justified by the Bush administration. But others of them say an investigation that starts out narrow could broaden to include administration officials and legal advisers, as long as Holder doesn't explicitly rule out investigating them beforehand, which he still might.

And Republicans don't want anyone to investigate anything ever because that would have a "chilling effect" and it might lead to future interrogators being reluctant to torture and kill people.

Update: If you're bored you can read the CIA IG's report at The Washington Independent. Soooo many black bars everywhere!

Reports the New York Times:

Since 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency has developed plans to dispatch small teams overseas to kill senior Qaeda terrorists, according to current and former government officials.

(CIA Director Leon) Panetta scuttled the program, which would have relied on paramilitary teams, shortly after the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center recently informed him of its existence. The next day, June 24, he told the two Congressional Intelligence Committees that the plan had been hidden from lawmakers, initially at the instruction of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Current and former officials said that the program was designed as a more "surgical" solution to eliminating terrorists than missile strikes with armed Predator drones, which cannot be used in cities and have occasionally resulted in dozens of civilian casualties.

Today's Times piece confirms what's been widely rumored of late—That Leon Panetta's June 24th disclosure to members of the Senate Intelligence committee had everything to do with Dick Cheney's rumored covert ops squads that Seymour Hersh had spoken of. Whether or not any of this was legal appears to be open for debate at this point.

CIA Had Plans To Assassinate Qaeda Leaders [New York Times]

Panetta appears to be the first Obama adminsitration official to publicly voice what some in the media have been occasionally speculating, and what many have speculated in private conversation—That the recent Dick Cheney "Obama is going to get us all killed" media tour leads one to believe that Cheney may be secretly hoping for terrorists to strike again on American soil so that he can run around saying "I told you so."

A few miles from the agency's headquarters, which are in Langley, Virginia, former Vice-President Dick Cheney delivered an extraordinary attack on the Obama Administration's emerging national-security policies. Cheney, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, accused the new Administration of making "the American people less safe" by banning brutal C.I.A. interrogations of terrorism suspects that had been sanctioned by the Bush Administration. Ruling out such interrogations "is unwise in the extreme," Cheney charged. "It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness."

In January, the Obama Administration banned the "enhanced" techniques that the Bush Administration had approved for the agency, including waterboarding and depriving prisoners of sleep for up to eleven days. Panetta, pouring a cup of coffee, responded to Cheney's speech with surprising candor. "I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue," he told me. "It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that's dangerous politics."

The other interesting takeaway from the piece was a passage on Panetta's desire to find new, less brutal interrogation techniques for use in the future.

Panetta is already forging ahead on one important reform: he plans to replace the abusive interrogation program with a legally acceptable, non-coercive alternative. A task force led by the Harvard Law School professor Philip Heymann has been advising him on a proposal to create an élite U.S. government interrogation team, staffed by some of the best C.I.A., F.B.I., and military officers in the country, and drawing on the advice of social scientists, linguists, and other scholars. "What I'm pushing for is to establish a facility where we develop a team of interrogators trained in the latest techniques," Panetta said. "That's the one thing I'm worried about, frankly. There just aren't that many people who have the interrogation abilities we're going to need." Heymann describes the effort to create "the best non-coercive interrogation team in the world" as the equivalent of "a NASA-like, man-on-the-moon effort" for human-intelligence gathering. He said that members of his task force have travelled to France, England, Japan, Australia, and Israel, in order to compile comparative information on what interrogators do. "We also went to the best people in the U.S.," he added.

Somewhere in America over the next few days, Dick Cheney's copy of this week's New Yorker will arrive and he'll read Leon Panetta's remarks. Agitated, he'll toss the magazine across the room in disgust, accidentally shattering the glass on a framed photo Mary Cheney and her spouse Heather Poe resting on the mantle. He'll then call out to Lynne to prepare his favorite beverage, and Lynn will oblige by bringing him a highball glass filled with puppy's blood, on the rocks, garnished with two Napfilion olives on a yellow plastic spear, and all will be well once again in Dick Cheney's world.

The Secret History [New Yorker]

Here's how Politico described the scene with Strohm (left):

"I felt this hand grab my right arm and push me aside," Strohm said.

By his account, Strohm told the man, "Please don't touch me" more than once. Eventually, the man let him go.

Tim Starks, a reporter for Congressional Quarterly, said he witnessed Strohm approach Panetta and ask a question, just before the man began "grabbing him by the arm and moving him away."

"I said to the guy, ‘That's not the way you do it,'" recalled Starks.

The scary thing, besides that whole First Amendment violation bit? No one seems to know who Panetta's escort is or what he does. He's been seen escorting Panetta around D.C. since his name came up as a cabinet pick.

Panetta advised Obama on various transition hiring decisions, so he probably Cheney-d his way into this plum gig. He was a Captain in the Army, and he kept enforcing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts as Nixon's Civil Rights czar even though Nixon didn't really want him to, which is neat.

But usually the CIA is run by, you know, CIA people. Spooks and spies. There was speculation just this morning that Obama would just keep current director Mike Hayden in place, but the spies don't really respect him that much. Of course Panetta is not a spy at all—as far as we know!—so who knows what the agency will do with him. They will probably poison us all with mind-control drugs.

Panetta was on the Iraq Study Group and he is a Washington Insider from way back but Obama couldn't find anyone to promote from within the CIA who wasn't implicated in the various illegal things the CIA has been doing since 9/11 so maybe he will not be so bad, for a CIA director.