In this case, however, his support for the amendment goes beyond just honoring the public’s right to know.  The former  Vice President has pointed to these documents as supporting his point of view, that torture yields valuable information.  And while having seen the documents Senator Wyden can’t comment on their contents, he has said repeatedly that he is not sure why the former Vice President finds them so convincing.  Declassifying them, either now or as part of the Intelligence Committee’s interrogation study, would help us get beyond the he-said-she-said aspects of the debate, so that people can evaluate the facts for themselves.

So clearly two of the documents are the ones that Dick Cheney requested CIA declassify in order to bolster his pro-torture case a few months ago. Hoelzer continues:

I also believe that it is worth noting that in assessing whether torture has produced useful information, it’s important to remember that asking questions has pretty much always been an effective means of gathering intelligence.  (Reporters do it with me all the time.)  The question here is whether coupling questioning prisoners with coercive interrogation techniques made the questioning MORE effective.  Again, without divulging anything classified, Senator Wyden hasn’t seen much evidence of that.  Note that even the [Republicans'] statement does not state that coercive techniques work or even that these documents will help answer that question.  They merely state that these docs will address questions about the value of the information provided by certain detainees.  This only helps Cheney’s case if you conflate the two arguments, as Cheney frequently attempts to do.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair announced today that Ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. has requested that his selection to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council not proceed. Director Blair accepted Ambassador Freeman’s decision with regret.

Pound of flesh: extracted.

Civil liberties advocates have been trying to get much of this information for years and are pleased that the intelligence committee is planning to investigate. But they are also concerned that the final report of the committee might not be made public, which in their view would defeat an important part of its purpose. Their fears are founded.

When the Senate Armed Services Committee released a summary of its report on the development of the military’s interrogation techniques in December, which concluded that waterboarding and other abuses were authorized by top defense officials including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, it was unable to publish the committee’s complete findings because the final report was deemed classified.

Congressional sources said the intelligence committee is unlikely to conduct any open hearings on the CIA’s practices. But it remains unclear whether the complete findings and final report of the committee will be made public.

“This could become an extraordinarily important investigation because, up to this point, the CIA has faced very little scrutiny for its role in torture,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU’s Washington office, in a statement released this morning. But she emphasized that “for the investigation’s effectiveness to reach its full potential, the proceedings need to be open to the public. Transparency is necessary for our nation to pull itself out of the darkness in which these failed policies were created.”

The Senate intelligence committee is likely to be under extraordinary pressure not to make the CIA’s tactics public. Public revelations, supported by testimony and documentation, that top CIA officials authorized and encouraged the torture and abuse of detainees and maintained “black sites” to evade the law could lead to growing pressure to prosecute Bush officials. Although the Senate Intelligence Committee is reportedly not investigating for the purpose of future criminal prosecutions, if their detailed findings become public, it could be increasingly difficult to avoid them. Nevertheless, TWI’s Spencer Ackerman passes along this statement from CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield pledging the agency’s cooperation with an inquiry:

As [CIA Director Leaon] Panetta said on Wednesday in his meeting with reporters, “as far as Congress reviewing these issues and trying to gain lessons learned, we’ll obviously cooperate.”

As I’ve explained before in writing about Sen.Patrick Leahy’s proposed ‘”truth commission,” the United States is obligated under the United Nations Convention Against Torture to refer instances of torture for criminal prosecution.

Unlike John Yoo’s notoriously narrow definition, Article 1.1 of the Convention defines torture as:

Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

If an intelligence committee investigation were to reveal evidence of torture, and if the United States declined to prosecute, another country could still potentially prosecute those responsible under the theory of universal jurisdiction, which is specifically provided for in the torture convention.

The idea, the Hill source said, is to begin a review of the interrogation techniques that were used during the Bush era, how they were approved and to what degree, if any, they were successful.

If such an inquiry were to happen, it would likely be conducted by the committee itself and would not preclude a separate “truth commission” along the lines of what Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has proposed, or an investigative commission like the one proposed by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.). Both of those options would be broader investigations into potential lawbreaking by Bush administration officials, and would look not only into the CIA but into the roles of all government agencies and Congress.

Although details were not yet available, advocates who’ve been hoping for such a move were thrilled to hear it was under consideration. “It sounds terrific,” said Chris Anders, legislative counsel to the ACLU, reached this afternoon.

The intelligence committee review sounds much like the investigation of the treatment of detainees undertaken by the Senate Armed Services Committee, although the intelligence committee would likely focus on the CIA, whereas the Armed Services Committee focused on the role of the Pentagon. That report concluded that senior officials in the Bush administration had authorized the abusive tactics. A summary of the report was released in December, although the full report remains classified.

“The missing piece is what happened in the CIA,” Anders said. While the ACLU has asked the CIA to produce documents concerning the treatment of detainees in a Freedom of Information Act case that’s been pending for five years, “the CIA has not produced a single sheet of paper yet,” Anders said. “Nothing.”

A Senate intelligence committee review may ultimately provide that missing piece of the puzzle. Anders said he hopes that the committee will hold public hearings as part of its query and release the full final report.

If the intelligence committee were to find evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the process of its review, it could refer the evidence to the Department of Justice to consider prosecution.

Two things about that. First, according to her statement, Feinstein had her feathers ruffled by Panetta in part because she wasn’t informed about the pick. But of course she wasn’t informed. Hulse and Mazzetti broke news; Obama didn’t announce anything. We can’t really know whether Feinstein would have been informed if Obama had been able to keep to his own timetable, but it stands to reason. But Obama can tamp that concern by credibly saying he would have informed her ahead of an official announcement.

Still — and this is the second thing — Feinstein, like Rockefeller, thinks that the CIA director should be an intelligence professional. (I’m not criticizing them for that, as that’s my personal preference as well.) Feinstein, at least, made her preference clear. That objection is something Obama and Panetta are going to have to overcome: unlike the no-one-told-me argument, it’s a substantive point with policy implications.

Obama has someone who knows what it’s like to face Hill objections when seeking to become CIA director: his adviser Tony Lake, who withdrew his nomination in 1997 after Republicans turned it into a referendum on President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy. If there’s anyone who knows the importance of getting the Senate Intelligence Committee aligned with a nominee ahead of confirmation hearings, it’s Lake. Obama could do worse than dispatching Lake to talk to Feinstein.