“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.”

The claims of former Vice President Cheney and other Bush administration officials that the authorization of harsh interrogation techniques was legal and effective has been repeatedly disputed and disproven by experts in interrogation, law, the military and diplomacy. Now the CIA’s own Inspector General during the Bush administration has rejected the claim. The CIA Inspector General’s 2004 report released today provides clear evidence that interrogators overstepped the already loose legal boundaries they were given by the Bush administration through flawed Office of Legal Counsel memos that excused the use of coercive interrogation techniques.

This report provides conclusive evidence of the concerns that I have long held about how this program was used, and it is why I fought for access to this and similar documents for years. I support President Obama’s decision to prohibit the use of such tactics. The conduct that is documented in this report illustrates the perils of the dark road of excusing torture down which the Bush administration took this nation. I also believe it underscores why we need to move forward with a Commission of Inquiry, a nonpartisan review of exactly what happened in these areas, so that we can find out what happened and why. Who justified these policies? What was the role of the Bush White House? How can we make sure it never happens again? Information coming out in dribs and drabs will never paint the full picture.

Leahy has been a strong advocate for a “commission of inquiry” to probe the full extent of what happened during the Bush administration and why.  Now let’s see if he’ll propose legislation to back that up, and convince his colleagues in Congress to support it.

Greg Miller and Josh Meyer of The Los Angeles Times on Sunday confirmed earlier reports that Holder has reluctantly come around to thinking that he can’t avoid the fact that torture occurred at the hands of U.S. officials, and that U.S. and international law requires an investigation. Holder is reportedly only considering cases where CIA interrogators went beyond the rules established by the Bush administration’s lawyers, rather than investigating the legality of those rules themselves. But as I’ve written before, it’s not clear where such an inquiry would logically end. Investigating CIA functionaries low on the totem pole — which would involve re-opening cases previously dismissed by the Bush administration — would ultimately require looking into the orders they received from their superiors.

Previous proposals to create commissions to undertake broader inquiries — from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) — have so far failed to win majority support in Congress.

According to The LA Times, CIA officials are already nervous about Holder’s impending probe, with some even putting off their retirement or plans to leave the agency so they can maintain access to classified information they might need for their defense, or argue that as government officials they’re immune from suit.

“Once you’re out, it gets a lot harder,” a retired CIA official told The Times.

Sanchez, you’ll recall, received a wink-and-nod mixed message from Gen. Geoffrey Miller, then the commander of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, to “Gitmo-ize” interrogations in Iraq. (The mixture in that message is that Guantanamo was supposed to be exempt from the Geneva Conventions while Iraq was supposed to apply them, so “Gitmo-izing” meant violating international law that on paper Sanchez was supposed to follow.) Shortly thereafter, Sanchez issued a September 2003 memorandum authorizing SERE-derived interrogation techniques like “military working dogs, stress positions, sleep deprivation, loud music, and light control.” Although a scandalized U.S. Central Command withdrew Sanchez’s memo the following month, the damage was done, according to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s recent torture report (pdf), as Abu Ghraib guards and interrogators that fall acted in line with Sanchez’s instructions. His career basically ended as a result — well, that and the disastrous war he presided over — and Sanchez has expressed bitterness that his future should have to be blighted by something as trivial as an international disgrace and possible war crime.

Maybe this is Sanchez’s attempt at accepting responsibility for his failings. He should be commended if so. On the other hand, Sanchez has never really demonstrated an aptitude for strategy, so it could be he’s blundering into his latest mistake out of an expectation that he’ll be vindicated.

Specifically, he said: “I believe existing institutions are strong enough” such as Congress, which can conduct hearings, and “the Department of Justice and our courts can work through any violations of our laws and miscarriages of justice.”

Though he went on to decry the tendency in Washington “to point fingers at one another,” a prosecution — and particularly the appointment of an independent prosecutor — would remove from the political process the question of whether previous administration officials broke the law, and put it right back where it belongs: in the realm of a criminal investigation.

Referring to the abusive interrogation techniques used on detainees, Leahy wrote:

The techniques are wrong and their supposed legal rationale is just as bad. The idea that the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel would be used to contort our laws on subjects as serious as torture is appalling. The rationalization of these memos showed a willingness to ignore legal requirements as long as there is no clear mechanism of enforcement. These memoranda seem calculated to provide legal cover – a legal free pass – for these unlawful policies. The Justice Department was apparently being used to immunize government officials to conduct torture by defining it down and building in legal loopholes.

The apparent predetermined outcome of these legal memos raises the question of where the demand for this outcome and for approving these policies arose. Press accounts indicate that these were not the results of requests from CIA officers on the ground and in the field, but arose through pressure from senior administration officials in Washington.

Leahy’s truth commission could certainly get at those questions. But, as civil rights advocates and even some congressional staff privately acknowledge, so could a serious, focused investigation by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Leahy chairs. It could reveal exactly the evidence he’s seeking, which in turn would reveal whether the conduct was criminal, as some allege, or merely shoddy lawyering and bad public policy.

When he held a hearing on his truth commission idea, Leahy faced an assortment of objections from Republicans and their witnesses about how Congress shouldn’t delegate its oversight power to an unaccountable commission that’s not authorized to sit in judgment of public officials or to bring prosecutions. (As I wrote before, Republicans at the hearing — including the newly-minted Pennsylvania Democrat, Sen. Arlen Specter — made a powerful case that if laws were broken, the perpetrators should be prosecuted, not just analyzed by some toothless commission.)

Presumably, Leahy and his colleagues — and Attorney General Eric Holder, for that matter — don’t think there’s sufficient evidence yet that the acts involves were criminal. But a focused Senate Judiciary Committee investigation — along the lines of the one conducted by the Senat Armed Services Committee and now being undertaken by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — could reveal both “what happened and why” and what more, if anything, should be done about it.

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In a letter sent to Bybee on Wednesday, Leahy notes the recent contradictory reports in The Washington Post and The New York Times — one which recounted Bybee saying he regrets signing off on the torture memos while at OLC, the other saying he stands by them. And he offers Bybee “the opportunity to come forward and clarify what you meant in your public discussion of these matters, and so that we can establish the facts and get to the truth.”

Leahy, of course, has been calling on Congress to create a “Truth Commission” or “Commission of Inquiry” that would look broadly at Bush administration policies that authorized the abuse of detainees, but wouldn’t lead to prosecutions. Many Republicans have claimed such a commission is unconstitutional and unnecessary, while President Obama has said it would be too politically divisive and that he prefers to look forward rather than backward. Others have criticized the idea because it could offer immunity to witnesses who some believe should be prosecuted.

In short, it hasn’t had much support.

Meanwhile, Leahy has avoided having the Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, hold hearings on the questions of how the OLC memos came to be drafted; what directions the lawyers were given; and exactly how and why they ignored so much of the relevant law that they were able to conclude that brutal interrogation tactics don’t violate the United States’ legal commitments against torture and “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” Yet he’s also said repeatedly that those questions need to be answered.

Asked whether he would hold hearings on these questions Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Leahy said he preferred the commission approach, but carefully avoided saying what he’d do if he couldn’t win support for the idea.

Maybe calling Bybee to account for his actions before the Senate Judiciary committee is the beginning of an answer.

The Senate Armed Services Committee Report, as I wrote yesterday, is chock full of evidence that standard legal doctrine, as well as contradictory legal opinions from military lawyers who are experts on international humanitarian law, was deliberately ignored or dismissed.

And the Office of Legal Counsel memos that sanctioned the brutal interrogation policies so blatantly twisted the relevant law, as even Republican legal scholars such as Jack Goldsmith have acknowledged, that they raise serious questions about whether the memos were written in the “good faith” required.  Sure, “the political officials would say they believed what they were doing was lawful,” as Professor Posner told the Times, but if the evidence shows that they instructed their lawyers to reach specific conclusions and to ignore law that dictated otherwise, then a jury may well not believe them.

And what to make of the recent revelation that the former aide to Condoleeza Rice, Philip Zelikow, submitted a memo to the State Department insisting that the abusive interrogation policies under consideration and approved by the OLC lawyers were clearly illegal?  The issue here isn’t that someone disagreed with their policies; it’s that, according to Zelikow: “The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo.”

Can there be any better evidence of “bad faith” than seeking to destroy evidence of contradictory legal opinions?

President Obama may have all sorts of good reasons for not supporting a broad-ranging “truth commission” that inquires into the breadth of Bush administration policies in its war on terror, as he’s claiming now.  But he has said that he’s not opposed to a criminal investigation of the lawyers who approved those clearly illegal policies and how they reached their conclusions.

Given the wealth of evidence that’s come out that those conclusions were not reached objectively or in the “good faith” that’s required, that’s one investigation that’s clearly warranted.

Panetta, of course, has to win the support of his agency’s staff, many of whom weren’t so happy that President Obama picked a man with no intelligence agency background. Saying they shouldn’t be punished for following orders is one way to start doing that. And given that most people are more interested in going after the architects of the Bush administration’s torture policies than in prosecuting those who carried it out, Panetta might have thought his statement wouldn’t be all that controversial.

But I’m not sure it’s a good idea to start handing out blanket immunity to the people who carried out “extreme” interrogations that included torture and that they might well have known were illegal. Setting aside the fact that we didn’t buy that “just following orders” defense at Nuremberg, as a practical matter, excusing all those people from the start could doom the prosecution of higher-ups. (But maybe that’s the point.)

From a prosecutor’s perspective, the people carrying out the orders are precisely the ones who can provide the key evidence against the officials that gave them. But if you declare from the beginning that they’re all free to go, you’ve just thrown out any incentive you can offer them to cooperate. How smart is that?

What’s more, as John Sifton wrote in The Daily Beast, Panetta’s message also looks pretty self-serving, given that lots of the CIA officials who could be implicated in the torture policy, such as Stephen Kappes, are still at high levels in the agency, and are now Panetta’s advisers.

The other odd thing about Panetta’s message is what it says — or doesn’t say, rather — about current CIA policy and operations.

Panetta said he’s closing down the controversial CIA “black sites” where people were tortured during the Bush administration. But from his letter, it’s not clear if they’re closed or not, or if he just plans to close them in the future, and what exactly is taking so long?

Here’s his statement:

CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites and has proposed a plan to decommission the remaining sites. I have directed our Agency personnel to take charge of the decommissioning process and have further directed that the contracts for site security be promptly terminated. It is estimated that our taking over site security will result in savings of up to $4 million.

Is he closing the sites down or taking over site security? Is the CIA still operating secret black sites or not? And why does it take so long to “decommission” a bunch of secret prisons anyway?

Panetta’s going to have to be more clear about his intentions if he’s going to have any credibility — with his own staff, as well as with the public.

When it comes to prosecutions, though, as Sifton pointed out, it’s not really Panetta’s call anyway. Those decisions will be left up to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.  So far, both have been doing everything possible to avoid the politically contentious issue by hemming and hawing about not wanting to look backward, while still believing in the rule of law.

Given the recent publication of the ICRC report by Mark Danner, which revealed wrenching accounts of torture of prisoners by U.S. authorities; the Senate Armed Services Committee Report that revealed the orders came from the top; the ongoing Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation; and the Office of Professional Responsibility Report that’s still floating around the Department of Justice and reportedly details how the legal memos justifying the Bush torture policies were essentially dictated from the White House, Obama and Holder may eventually have to take a stand.

As Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Arlen Specter said at a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, if there’s reason to believe that government officials “have given approval for things that they know not to be lawful and sound, go after them.”

Well, maybe the truth commission idea still has some life in it after all. At least, Leahy wants you to think it does. His office put out a statement this afternoon:

In contrast to reports circulating on the Internet, Leahy said he is continuing to explore the proposal.

“I am not interested in a panel comprised of partisans intent on advancing partisan conclusions,” Leahy said. “I regret that Senate Republicans have approached this matter to date as partisans. That was not my intent or focus. Indeed, it will take bipartisan support in order to move this forward. I continue to talk about this prospect with others in Congress, and with outside groups and experts. I continue to call on Republicans to recognize that this is not about partisan politics. It is about being honest with ourselves as a country. We need to move forward together.”

So there you have it. Not dead! Just on life support. And the plug is slowly slipping out of the wall …