“They said that they had produced valuable intelligence,” Smith said. “We took them at their word.” But the group’s consensus was that “whatever utility it had at the outset . . . the secret prisons and enhanced techniques were no longer playing a useful role — the costs outweighed the gains.” He said those costs included obvious damage to the nation’s values and identity, and problems with U.S. allies that strongly opposed the use of such methods.

Boren, who chaired the Senate intelligence committee from 1987 to 1993 and is now president of the University of Oklahoma, said that attending the briefings was “one of the most deeply disturbing experiences I have had” and that “I wanted to take a bath when I heard it. I was ashamed of it.” He said he concluded that “fear was used to justify the use of techniques that violate our values and weaken our intelligence” and that the agency did not prove those methods “are particularly effective at getting the truth.”

What the piece might have added is that David Boren is George Tenet’s mentor. To call Boren protective of the CIA is a severe understatement — he might not have ever called it “my CIA” the way Carl Vinson used to call the Navy “my Navy,” but in my conversations with Boren, he’s expressed a similar sentiment. And here he is publicly saying that the CIA was using “fear” to get experienced legislators and representatives of the next administration to endorse a program with an uncompelling justification.

The public version of this is what you hear from Dick and Liz Cheney. One wonders if they ever asked how the CIA, which did not have a corps of experienced interrogators before 9/11, knows these methods to be, as Boren says, “particularly effective at getting to the truth.”

Mark Hosenball of Newsweek, one of the best intelligence reporters there is, has more in this week’s issue about an additional twist in that emerging drama, one that gets at something Daphne blogged yesterday. Progressives in Congress see Panetta as an ally for congressional inquiries into torture:

Officials familiar with the views of Obama’s team insist there’s no massive probe coming. But a senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Oregon’s Ron Wyden, told NEWSWEEK he will push to declassify top-secret CIA interrogation files outlining how the agency came to use methods such as waterboarding; what its legal authorizations were for doing so; and what (if any) evidence exists to demonstrate that such techniques actually worked.

Former acting CIA general counsel John Rizzo, you may want to lawyer up.

Wyden’s proposal is something short of a full-fledged congressional probe into torture. But here’s another thing worth considering. Clearly Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the incoming chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, is close with Kappes. Kappes is highly esteemed by the National Clandestine Service — the CIA operatives who’d prefer not to spend the next however-many years under investigation for torture. (Not that this makes Kappes a torturer; this is just the lay of the land as best as I can perceive it.) Will Kappes reach out to Feinstein to block or slow-walk a probe? What does Feinstein seek to do with her committee when it comes to investigating the torture regime of the past seven years? I’ve put the question to her staff.

I’m pleased to announce that John Brennan – a close advisor, CIA veteran and former leader of the National Counter-Terrorism Center  – will be my Homeland Security Advisor and Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism, serving with the rank of Assistant to the President.  John has the experience, vision and integrity to advance America’s security.

The point isn’t just that Obama hugged Brennan. (”A close advisor… experience, vision and integrity.”) Assistant to the President” is the highest rank that any White House staffer can hold. Anyone with that rank has the right to walk into the Oval Office and get a sit-down with the president. At the beginning of the Bush administration, Dick Cheney fought to ensure that Scooter Libby held that rank.

Now, what’ll that mean? At a minimum, it’ll mean that when Obama is unsure of something he’s hearing from CIA, or from Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence, he’ll turn to Brennan for a second or third opinion. It’s way too early to know — but that won’t stop me from wondering — if Brennan at the White House and Deputy CIA Director Steve Kappes might be the actual centers of power for the intelligence community.

Now it’s up to Panetta and Blair to explain what exactly they intend to do in their jobs. For a primer on the endless number of Maalox moments that await the intelligence community’s leadership, check out this piece of mine from last year. To the points I listed, you can add the possibility of a congressionally-mandated inquiry into rendition, detention and torture. Why anyone would want these jobs, I simply do not know.

But anyway. Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times is hearing that the order of the day is to roll back the torture programs of the Bush administration:

Aides to Mr. Obama say they have no intention of directing Mr. Panetta to oust C.I.A. officials who played a role in the agency’s secret interrogation and detention program. Instead, they say, the new administration will focus on reversing the rules that authorized the C.I.A. to carry out aggressive interrogations.

Mazzetti’s piece reports that there’s concern within CIA — rather naturally — that Panetta might throw the agency to the congressional dogs. But isn’t it really the other way around? The leakers are setting up a media narrative whereby Panetta has to be dependent on agency veterans to be effective. Hence the retention of Steve Kappes as CIA deputy director, which raises some questions for Jeff Stein of CQ:

But will Kappes be Panetta’s loyal consigliore, or double-dealing protector of the way things are?

Can he be said to be the new leader’s agent of “change,” implementing a break from the agency’s record as obedient servant on water-boarding, secret extraditions to foreign dungeons and warrantless wiretapping?

I wondered when the news broke if Steve Kappes had basically saved Panetta’s nomination. Phil LaVelle, Feinstein’s spokesman, said simply that Panetta gave Feinstein “the very clear impression that if confirmed, he would surround himself with intelligence professionals.” Unclear on Kappes. Unclear on whether that means Panetta will keep current CIA Director Michael Hayden’s CIA basically in place, or if he’ll bring different professionals into the job. My guess is that Panetta hasn’t really sorted that out yet — his nomination hasn’t even been officially announced yet, after all — but all directors want their people in place. LaVelle stressed that the conversation was “warm [and] friendly,” indicating strongly that Feinstein wants to turn the page on this episode. As reported, pending the committee’s due diligence, her intention is to support Panetta now.

Last thing for now, and my apologies in advance for musing on a headache-worthy issue, but I wonder what this means for investigating the CIA on torture and rendition and detentions now that Panetta has had to basically swear he’ll surround himself with career CIA people. It’s hardly the case that the CIA is a den of torturers and lawbreakers, as I keep writing. But it’s worth considering whether torture-opponent Panetta’s prospective arrival at CIA is supposed to be all the closure we get on this rather dark episode in American history.

Writing in his CQ column, Jeff talks to veterans of the CIA’s operations directorate — the people who recruit spies, gather information, try to infiltrate governments and extremist organizations and, yes, interrogate detainees these days — and finds that they don’t see how Panetta has the skills necessary to lead the agency in wartime. Here’s Sam Faddis, a 20-year operative who retired earlier this year who calls himself “a big supporter of President-Elect Obama.” He says the central problem facing CIA is that it’s doing a poor job of intelligence collection:

“To fix that you need to get down in the weeds and really address the nuts and bolts of how CIA is performing its mission.  You cannot do that unless you understand the business, and, frankly, you probably can’t do it unless you have been out on the street doing the work yourself.”

No outsiders need apply, in other words.

Clearly, there’s something to the idea that experience matters, familiarity with the profession matters and the details matter. And the “steep learning curve” that a few intelligence veterans told me independently of each other that Panetta faces is particularly steep in his case. But, to quote the fictional words of Commissioner Ervin Burrell, “that’s what the Deputy Ops is for.” In this case, the CIA’s deputy director for operations. You’d never want someone in that job without that experience and that skill set. The director’s job is much broader. It’s easy to imagine someone in the analysis directorate — the people who interpret the collected information — making Faddis’ exact same argument for why a CIA analyst ought to get the job.

Mr. Obama said Tuesday that Mr. Panetta and other members of the new administration would be “committed to breaking with some of the past practices” that had “tarnished the image” of the United States’ intelligence agencies.

But transition officials said Mr. Obama also intended to keep the C.I.A’s No. 2 official, Stephen R. Kappes, a highly regarded former Marine officer and agency veteran. The transition officials spoke on condition of anonymity about the personnel move, a plan that could help defuse criticism inside the C.I.A. about Mr. Panetta’s own thin background in intelligence.

Yes, that Steve Kappes. As deputy director, Kappes won’t go through any confirmation hearings, so the Abu Omar affair and his role in it — in whatever capacity — will remain incomplete, as will his successes in Libya and elsewhere. Of course, the CIA didn’t tell Mazzetti what Kappes’ own plans for the future are, so this may all be a moot point, but still.

So it’s surprising when Daily Kos diarist EmperorHadrian hinges off a blithe line in the First Read story — “some critics says [sic] he had line authority over controversial decisions involving interrogation and detention” — and says “as far as we know, Kappes has not objected to the torture policies he enabled.”

Let’s have an uncomfortable conversation.

The most serious charge against Kappes, as best I can tell, comes from his role in the abduction and rendition of Abu Omar, the Egyptian cleric taken by the CIA off the streets of Milan and tortured in Egypt. A 2007 article from The Chicago Tribune about the rendition reports briefly that Kappes was “one of those who signed off on the Abu Omar abduction.” (h/t TalkLeft.) No doubt that’s troubling. Extraordinary rendition is legally and morally problematic. Italy is prosecuting in absentia the CIA agents involved in the Abu Omar rendition.

But we really don’t know from what’s publicly available the context of Kappes’ decision. Was this something that his bosses demanded? Did he have decision-making authority on the rendition? (The Chicago Tribune piece is extremely complex, as much of this is murky.) What were the alternatives to handling Abu Omar? What did or didn’t Kappes know? I’m not saying this is exculpatory, necessarily. I’m saying that we should investigate before we reach a conclusion.

More broadly, though, there’s a tendency in the blogosphere to presume that the Google-able corpus of knowledge on torture is a definitive account of our government’s dalliance with it over the last decade or so. That’s just not the case.

The frustrating thing about intelligence reporting is just how dense and murky and opaque it is, and very few people who do it are able to create comprehensive accounts of what goes on. That’s why it’s necessary to hedge conclusions. A piece I’ve chased for years concerns internal CIA resistance to torture. I’ve confirmed very little of it, which is why I’ve not yet published anything. But if it pans out, I think it’s fair to say that it would complicate much of the picture of what people inside the agency did and didn’t resist, and how and why they did it.

This is partially why I keep calling for an independent congressionally-mandated investigation. There’s just too much that’s unknown to label individual CIA people torturers as a general proposition, so take it easy on that front. Reality-based community and all that.