“They’ve made it really clear that the president right now is not supportive of a public commission of inquiry,” Killmer said in a phone conversation this morning.

Killmer has had better luck in Congress, where at least some Representatives support creating a House Select Committee to investigate torture. Although that would be more political than an independent commission, he said, at least it’s something. “There are a significant number of members of the House who know this isn’t done,” says Killmer, whose group has had more than 60 meetings with House members on the issue since June.

The religious campaign has made some headway on related issues, working with Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), chair of the House Select Intelligence Oversight panel, to convince Congress to pass a bill that would require the taping of all interrogations of detainees in U.S. military custody. The House passed the bill last week as part of the 2010 Defense Authorization Act. It could be voted on by the full Congress next week.”Our constituents understand the need for videotaping interrogations,” says Kilmer, “and the videotapes have to be protected so they’re an ongoing part of our history. It’s one way of making sure it doesn’t happen again.”

The religious groups also hope to achieve a codification of the terms of President Obama’s executive order mandating that all interrogations follow the rules of the Army Field Manual, and that the U.S. basically follows the “Golden Rule” when it comes to interrogations: we don’t do to others what we wouldn’t want them to do to our soldiers.

Still, Killmer said, codifying this for the future isn’t enough. After all, we had a Convention Against Torture and that still didn’t stop the U.S. government from torturing people.

In addition to a commission that would expose everything that happened and why, Killmer and other religious leaders are exploring the possibility of asking the government for an apology.”I think it’s extremely important,” says Killmer. Other countries have taken that step, such as Canada, which apologized — and paid $10 million – to Canadian citizen Maher Arar who, with the help of bad intelligence from Canada, was sent by U.S. authorities to Syria for interrogation under torture.

“This was wrong behavior,” says Killmer of the entire U.S. “enhanced interrogation” practice. And an apology “would help grow the moral consensus that torture is wrong,” he says, something he assumed existed before 2001, but now isn’t sure.

“Dick Cheney gets more credence than I would have imagined,” says Killmer. “The American people are still wrestling with this stuff.”

Killmer and his colleagues were dismayed when a Pew Research Center poll last spring found that a majority of Catholics and even evangelicals believe that torture is sometimes necessary. “That says we have a lot to do,” says Killmer. His group has put together this short interfaith video on U.S.-sponsored torture which they plan to show at churches, synagogues and mosques across the country, in part to explain that yes, torture really is a violation of all the dominant religions in the United States, and to encourage believers to join the anti-torture campaign.

Whether religious support is ever going to be strong enough to get that official apology is another matter. Although the U.S. has apologized for some things in the past — the Japanese internment during WWII, and slavery — in both cases, it came many decades after the deed. Killmer is cautiously hopeful: “It would be terrific if this could happen much more quickly.”

From a release:

“Law enforcement organizations across the nation understand that we collect the best intelligence and protect both the interrogator and the person being interrogated by requiring recordings,” Holt said. “This bill continues the process of putting our detainee policies back on a sound legal footing while maintaining our ability to get actionable intelligence,” Holt said.

In addition to requiring videorecording of detainee interrogations, Holt’s provision would require the Secretary of Defense to develop guidelines for ensuring that the required videorecording is expansive enough to prevent abuses of detainees’ fundamental human rights under U.S. and international law. To ensure the safety of U.S. troops, the provision would not require troops in combat to record interrogations.

The Senate is expected to take up the measure soon.

The op-ed itself is a jumble of different points, from the idea that Congress and the intelligence community need to come to a “balance” over the role of each to a plea not to investigate or prosecute “public servants who did their duty pursuant to the legal guidance provided” on — he doesn’t specify, but — torture or warrantless surveillance or other stuff. Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) may have Panetta shook. So what to make of this?

All of Panetta’s mishmash of points go in one direction. It’s all stuff CIA wants to hear in an era of tumult and possible criminal investigation. Just count all the chest-puffing references to how rad the agency is. “Our present tools are effective, we use them aggressively to go after our enemies, and Congress has been briefed on them. … The men and women of the CIA truly are America’s first line of defense. … The time has come for both Democrats and Republicans to take a deep breath and recognize the reality of what happened after Sept. 11, 2001.” If there remains doubt that Panetta could be a forceful advocate for an agency that he didn’t really have much experience with, the op-ed ought to remove it. It reads like an attempt to stick up for his troops against a particularly annoying Democratic Congress.

Except for one thing. Read this paragraph:

The time has come for both Democrats and Republicans to take a deep breath and recognize the reality of what happened after Sept. 11, 2001. The question is not the sincerity or the patriotism of those who were dealing with the aftermath of Sept. 11. The country was frightened, and political leaders were trying to respond as best they could. Judgments were made. Some of them were wrong. But that should not taint those public servants who did their duty pursuant to the legal guidance provided. The last election made clear that the public wanted to move in a new direction.

That’s not sticking up for the frontline interrogators who carried out the abusive treatment of, say, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. That’s Panetta sticking up for the CIA senior leadership under George Tenet who helped design, implement and protect it. And that’s much different from what Panetta’s said in the past.

Hart added that it would be instructional for any successor investigation to examine the structural focus the Church committee took, not its caricature as persecutors of the CIA. “If there were to be something like that comprehensive review, it ought to adopt the principle policy we adopted in the Church committee, which was less about fixing blame than about systemic failure,” Hart said. If the review finds there widespread abuses of civil liberties, “How did that happen? Who gives the order? Why are some people complicit, why do some people object, what’s going on in minds of participants.” That was how the panel secured the support of Barry Goldwater, John Tower, Howard Baker — all “very influential and partisan Republicans,” Hart added.

“For 30 years I’ve listened to people say [the Church committee] ruined intelligence for a generation,” Hart said. “It’s not true. There were dissenting views, there were recommendations for reform.”

After years of congressional acquiescence to the executive in many matters, we’re starting to see some awakening and hard questioning.  However, there is a paucity of publicly-revealed oversight of intelligence agencies and whether or not their activities have violated or chilled the rights of Americans.  Many have turned to the courts as a last resort. But even when they have the stomach to do so the courts on their own are not equipped to undertake large-scale investigations of public policy significance—that’s the province of Congress and one reason why it exists in the first place.

Holt said he believes the investigation, which he also called a review, should be as intense and comprehensive as the probe conducted more than 30 years ago — in the wake of the Watergate scandal — by a special committee headed by U.S. Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat.

Holt is basically thinking out loud here. He said similar things to me on Tuesday, referencing the Church and Pike commissions of the 1970s. He’s got no proposal — yet — for launching an “intense and comprehensive” probe of secret CIA activities like the assassination thing. (Oh yeah, and that was apparently getting revived inside the agency when Director Leon Panetta shut it down.) And who knows whether other members of Congress would be interested in reviving such a probe.

But this would cause the CIA to hyperventilate. The scandal-revealing Church and Pike commissions divided the history of the CIA into before and after epochs, with the post-Church/Pike period being one of much greater congressional scrutiny. (There weren’t any intelligence committees, for instance, before the investigations.) The biggest thing the CIA fears is another 9/11. The second biggest thing the CIA fears is another Church/Pike.

There’s an irony that needs to be pointed out. People like Dick Cheney watched Church/Pike with horror, considering the increased congressional scrutiny to be disastrous for CIA morale and efficacy. Cheney set to work in the Bush administration pushing the CIA out from the strictures of the post-Church/Pike era. But the results of actions could very well be a second Church/Pike.

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“The content of the briefing was serious,” said Holt, speaking about the June 23 briefing when Panetta told the House Intelligence Committee about a still-secret program begun after 9/11. “I don’t think he would’ve launched into this if it were just a trivial matter. It was serious.” (Holt would not discuss the content of the classified activities Panetta recently canceled, but reporting has linked them to an inchoate effort to bolster the CIA’s assassinations capabilities. See this Newsweek story for some of the latest.)

That said, Holt, one of the seven signatories of the congressional letter that announced the program to the public, expressed deep concerns about the fact that the CIA withheld the program from Congress, and put that secrecy on par with the substance of the program itself. “The issue here, as much as anything, is just how far can we let the intelligence [community] go in unexamined activities, dangerous activities. It’s been going on for years and years, and not just under the Bush administration.” He added that since it’s been three and a half decades since the comprehensive congressional reviews of the intelligence community known as the Church and Pike commissions, “I think the public would find some other jawdropping revelations” about what the CIA has committed with minimal oversight.

One of the objections to launching another such comprehensive congressional inquiry — or even to the outrage on the Hill over withholding this current program — is the damage that it’ll do to CIA morale. Retired CIA operative Bob Baer just told ABC, “It’s going to hurt our national security.” Holt says that not only has he not heard any such concerns from inside the agency he oversees, but that expanded oversight would be a remedy for the any operative’s feelings of besiegement. “The CIA should not want to take such risks of various covert action programs over the years without [congressional] oversight,” he said. “You just do a better job when you have to justify your actions to an independent evaluator.”

President Obama, however, is threatening to veto this year’s intelligence funding bill if it doesn’t strip out a provision to expand briefings on the most sensitive CIA activities to the full committee.

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On June 26, six seven Democrats on the committee — Anna Eshoo (Calif.), John Tierney (Mass.), Rush Holt (N.J.), Mike Thompson (Calif.), Alcee Hastings (Fla.) and Jan Schakowsky (Ill.) [Update: I received an early version of the letter. Rep. Adam Smith (Wash.) also signed it] — wrote to Panetta, “Recently you testified that you have determined that top CIA officials have concealed significant actions from all Members of Congress, and misled Members for a number of years from 2001 to this week.” The letter — which doesn’t explain what those “significant actions” concerned* — asks that Panetta “publicly correct” his May 15 statement that it isn’t CIA “policy or practice to mislead Congress.” TWI acquired a copy of the letter, which comes after CQ reported that committee chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) also nebulously stated that CIA “affirmatively lied” to the committee.

But CIA spokesman George Little says it’s “completely wrong” to say Panetta determined CIA misled Congress, as the six legislators charge. “Director Panetta stands by his May 15 statement,” Little said. “It is not the policy or practice of the CIA to mislead Congress. This Agency and this Director believe it is vital to keep the Congress fully and currently informed. Director Panetta’s actions back that up. As the letter from these six representatives notes, it was the CIA itself that took the initiative to notify the oversight committees.”

Little continued: “As for the Congress, as the Speaker has said, ‘We all share great respect for the dedicated men and women of the Intelligence Community who are deeply committed to the safety and security of the American people.’”

Here’s the full letter:

*
Late Update: HuffPost’s Sam Stein nails down that these, uh, “significant actions” are indeed torture-related.
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Second, and more important from a human-rights perspective, was what he said about torture and interrogations: “We must adhere to our values diligently and with no exceptions.” No exceptions. None of this ticking-bomb crap that doesn’t exist in the real world, none of these Jack Bauer distortions. Sullivan up, Krauthammer down.

Blair and Panetta reflected both of those statements in their own remarks. Blair said he had been charged by Obama to give policymakers “timely accurate, relevant intelligence” and reflective of “different perspectives.” He pledged, like current DNI Adm. Mike McConnell before him, to tell Obama “how well we now what we know, and what we don’t know.” Some at CIA might be upset by Blair’s remark that CIA is “one of the key agencies in the intelligence community,” instead of the key agency, but, you know, c’mon.

Panetta, predictably, publicly buttered up the two constituencies he needed to sweet-talk: the intelligence professionals who might think he’s a lightweight, and Congress. He lauded CIA’s “rich and proud history” and the bravery of its operatives, particularly those who serve “often undercover, and sometimes under fire.” Hear that, National Clandestine Service? If not, he even called out John Brennan, whom several at CIA wanted to have the job that Panetta’s getting. And even if the Feinstein beef is squashed, Panetta looked forward to “consulting closely with my former partners in Congress.”

Yeah, he’s got this job. Reps. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) and Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), who agree on practically nothing, just put out a joint statement backing Panetta:

“We support President-Elect Barack Obama’s choice of Leon Panetta to serve as Director of the CIA. Mr. Panetta has a 40-year record in public service – notably as a member of Congress, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Chief of Staff under President Clinton, and recently as a member of the Iraq Study Group. A consumer of intelligence for years, he consistently has demonstrated an ability to lead in a bipartisan fashion and always see the big picture – attributes that would benefit the CIA and our nation.”

“Having served in Congress in the wake of Watergate and the domestic surveillance abuses that surfaced during the 1970s, Mr. Panetta understands how a democratic government should operate. He also demonstrated skill in running the Office of Management and Budget and as Chief of Staff under President Clinton. We need the CIA to collect reliable, actionable intelligence in ways that respect American values and honor the Constitution. Mr. Panetta’s background and reputation indicate he would serve the intelligence community, the President, and the country well.”