Well, of course they're going to say that! You don't expect high-ranking members of the Bush/Cheney torture regime to fall on their swords now, do you? They are going to remain loyal to the bitter end.
But in reality, Bush had an at-best tenuous relationship with the CIA. In fact there were a lot of anti-Bush leaks coming out of the CIA ahead of the 2004 presidential campaign. No, the intelligence community were frequently frustrated by the Bush Administration's efforts to bend intelligence to support their twisted reality rather than objective, material reality.
The intelligence community may indeed rebel against Obama for releasing these memos. But perhaps they won't so long as Obama and CIA chief Panetta assure them that they will continue to stand behind them as long as they observe the new rules.
Obama's release of these documents points to a sea change in the approach to foreign policy that rights our listing American ship and sails us into calmer waters. We cannot say publicly that we oppose torture and do not practice it, and then secretly do it to create some kind of cognitive dissonance between the expectations terrorists have of how they'd be treated while in custody and what they'd actually experience. Our decision to go "to the dark side" that Cheney alluded to in 2001 is a capitulation to fear; basically, an admission that the terrorists have us by the balls.
It cannot be logically concluded that real, useful intelligence can come from the repeated abuse and torture of someone in custody; such people would resist for as long as possible, then give false information just to stop the pain. The Republican candidate for president in 2008 did that very thing while in custody in Vietnam. Our military's own Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training probably works on that very notion. But no, those devils in Afghanistan and Iraq are too stupid to train that way. As soon as we put the screws to their thumbs, they'll give us just what we need.
I read just one of the memos so far, an 18 page report from Jay Bybee. Jonathan Zasloff of Same Facts has some very interesting points to make about Mr. Bybee:
Amidst the uproar over the torture memos, it's important not to lose sight of a crucial fact: its responsible author, Jay S. Bybee, is now a federal appeals court judge.
Thus, apart from any issue of criminal prosecution, he can be impeached by the House and removed by the Senate.
This would be appropriate. Having judges declare that torture is legal does not serve as a good precedent. Perhaps more significantly, the memo's legal analysis was so shockingly incompetent that Bybee's successor, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew it, noting subsequently that he was appalled by its incompetence.
[...]
Regardless of the Obama Administration's decision on prosecution, then, impeachment hearings and a Senate trial for Bybee would signal a necessary reassertion of Congresional authority and would ensure at least some minimal accountability.
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