But how about former Bush CIA and National Security Agency chief Mike Hayden? Asked on the same program about Obama’s counterterrorism record, Hayden replied, “I am heartened by the fact that the president consistently says we are at war with al-Qaeda its affiliates.” Former Bush secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff echoed Hayden. Expect neither Cheney’s behavior nor Politico’s to change even slightly.

The reflexive judgments to the contrary seem hasty at best. Although the inspectors general report notes that the compartmented nature of the program hurt its utility (it should be noted that restricting access to especially sensitive data is hardly a unique phenomenon in an intelligence community that forever has to balance using information and protecting it), it also notes that users of the information rated the program “of value,” “useful” and a “key resource,” albeit one that was most often used in combination with other intelligence sources.

Wow! It’s unclear from his op-ed how and why Hayden considers a report that combined five agencies’ inspectors general and took a year to complete “reflexive,” but one option is that it came to rather different conclusions about the utility of the program to counterterrorism. Hayden offers a series of decontextualized adjectives to paint an odd picture: if, as he puts it, the report found the program to be “of value,” then why’s Hayden so agitated by the report? Well, because in context, that’s not what it says.

I also like this:

There is also one very large finding in the report that hasn’t received the attention it deserves: “No evidence of intentional misuse” of the program was discovered.

And when I kept my loaded guns around the house while my children played nearby, I didn’t fire them off willy-nilly, braying like Yosemite Sam all the while. I consider that to be evidence of responsible stewardship.

Yeah, if only. The Obama administration won’t release the document today. According to the ACLU, it’s asked for a three-day reprieve. ACLU’s consented. Game Day is now supposed to be July 1.

Helgerson’s 2004 report is a crucial one. As disclosed through references in the footnotes of the 2005 Office of Legal Counsel memos, it documents how the agency took the OLC’s legal imprimatur for certain abusive interrogation techniques and expanded those techniques in practice to, among other things, waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times, denying him sleep for a week by contorting his body into unnatural positions, and restrict his diet to between 1000 and 1500 calories a day. Marcy Wheeler has an excellent couple of posts about what torture questions the report should answer. And Helgerson, who recently retired from CIA, suffered for his work, tussling with former Director Michael Hayden, who attempted to limit his independence.

Maybe we’ll see the answers to those torture questions early next week, but it’s sure not looking good. I’ll have the government’s letter seeking the reprieve shortly.

UPDATE: Here’s the letter from the Justice Department:

He vowed to improve the broken relationship between the CIA and Congress, noting that he plans tomorrow morning to have coffee with a group of lawmakers outside the public spotlight. He said that, “as a creature of Congress” he believes Congress should try to learn the lessons of the past, but not to the point of diverting the attention of CIA officers.

Something he didn’t say but might have thought: during the Bush era, when the politicization of intelligence ran high, Democratic members of Congress embraced the CIA as a reality-based bastion against the Bush agenda. That was fairly easy to do, especially when Bush appointed Porter Goss, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, to the directorship of the agency and Goss began firing people presumed to be insufficiently loyal to Bush administration prerogatives. Congressional Democrats, led by Jane Harman (D-Calif.), made a point of distinguishing between the agency’s Bush-loyalist top management and the agency’s career personnel. And there the alignment remained, roughly, through Michael Hayden’s tenure as CIA director. Criticisms of the agency — on torture, for instance — were directed at policymakers, not implementers. Obviously, the Democrats were more comfortable with the agency’s intelligence analysts than with case officers charged with the more morally compromising work of espionage, but there weren’t many Democrats of note who issued broad indictments of the agency.

Pelosi is the first to collapse the distinction. Her accusation, in context, didn’t blame CIA case officers or line analysts for lying to her. But by not sharpening her charge, it’s understandable that agency employees — who labor in a culture that believes itself under constant siege from politicians –  would take it personally, and that’s what Panetta’s message on Friday was about. Congressional Republicans are right to see an opportunity to repair their iffy relationship with an agency that the party used as a whipping boy during the previous administration, even if they’re not going to defenestrate Pelosi.

What was actually revealed in yesterday’s memos was the nature of the Bush administration’s efforts to legalize and justify the “harsh interrogation techniques” that we mostly knew about already. And it’s not terribly difficult to imagine why some folks would want those legal efforts kept under wraps.

That’s apropos of the chorus of Bush officials — see this Politico piece, for instance; or this Michael Mukasey/Mike Hayden op-ed — who are saying that Obama irresponsibly revealed CIA torture techniques. He revealed them, in all likelihood, because he’s forsworn them, and to move on. As Greg says, we knew most of this stuff had happened. (Obama noted the same thing yesterday.) What really rankles these people is that their ability to harmonize putting someone in a “confinement box” with insects with statutes and treaties that expressly forbid torture is now entirely on display.

Let’s put it another way. One thing that the August 1, 2002 Yoo/Bybee torture memo — the one released in 2004 — focuses on is the alleged difficulty of defining what interrogation procedures would “shock the conscience” of a reasonable individual, since that standard is rather salient when it comes to the federal anti-torture statute. By taking a deliberately agnostic stance on the prospect of ever finding such a consensus around “reasonableness” — hey, it’s a wide world out there, what shocks me might not shock you, so who’s to say — you wind up with absurdities like rubber-stamping as humane our confinement box of insects. As it happens, when a conservative friend of mine read that the Justice Department had blessed putting people in a confinement box of insects, he IM’d me to say “Holy ****.” Miracle of miracles: putting someone in a confinement box of insects makes people say Holy ****. We have our reasonable-individual standard reaction.

Indeed, the only person who doesn’t mind putting someone in an enclosed space with insects is Buffalo Bill from “The Silence of the Lambs.” The memos reveal that for a long time, the government of the United States adopted his moral standards. If you had been guided by that legal reasoning, you’d do whatever was in your power to keep it from the public, since you know what they’ll say.

Music fan and CIA Director Mike Hayden released this statement to the agency in the wake of President Obama’s interrogations/detentions cataclysm:

President Obama issued an Executive Order today setting out new instructions for the detention, rendition and interrogation of captured terrorists. The legal and policy landscape under which the Agency has conducted itself in the global war on terror has changed in the past and we have consistently and scrupulously adjusted our efforts to reflect these changes. This Executive Order is no different. We will review the order carefully and issue appropriate guidance to ensure that we continue to act in consonance with the law and with policy direction. When our government changes its law or policy, we will follow that direction without exception, carve-out, or loophole.

Our Agency has many counter-terror tools in its arsenal. The rendition, detention and interrogation program has been an important one. As intelligence professionals, you, the men and women of CIA, will make the best possible use of the space the Republic has given us to act boldly and bravely in its defense. I have every confidence in your enduring ability to do so, honoring, as always, the laws and values of the democracy we faithfully serve.