What a laugh

The Security State has always included an ample admixture of self-parody. The CIA’s arsenal of weapons against Fidel Castro, for example, included a fungus-infected scuba suit, a poison-filled hypodermic needle hidden in a pen and, no kidding, an exploding cigar.

The United States of America is at moral crossroads

The CIA should be shut down.

The spy work, if there was any, can be carried on gamely by the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Air Force Intelligence, the FBI's National Security Branch, the Army Intelligence and Security Command, the Department of Energy's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Coast Guard Intelligence, the Treasury's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (sic), the National Reconnaissance Office, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to say nothing of all the state and local police spooks.

Military operations should have been handled by the Department of Defense all along.

But it will be a further crime if all that happens now is that a few relatively-low level functionaries, however blood-soaked their uniforms, are scape-goated, Abu Graib-style. This fish was rotting from the head. The only way that these and other crimes can be prevented from happening in the future is to hold the perpetrators accountable. If this were some failing garrison in the Third World, instead of the failing Leader of the World, the State Department would be piously scolding them to clean-house. The United States needs to be live up to its ideals. If we can't clean our house, if we can't prosecute the criminals ourselves, as domestic and international law requires, then we should turn Bush, Cheney, and their co-conspirators over to the International Criminal Court and let the world community help us out.

More:
CIA tortured, misled, U.S. report finds, drawing calls for action by Mark Hosenball (Reuters)

Return of the CIA's 'Rogue Elephants': The Senate's report on torture shows U.S. intelligence agencies need to be reined in again by Peter Fenn (US News)

There Is Something Worse Than Torture in the Senate Torture Report: It's not the torture—it's the CIA lying by David Corn (Mother Jones)

U.S. under fire over Senate's report on CIA torture by Bill Trott (Reuters UK)

The Bush administration's response to the torture report is straightforward:

The CIA's actions were fully authorized. And we didn't know anything about them.

What's at stake

"The torture was widespread, vicious and conducted in secret 'black sites' around the globe. This is what is being lost in the Beltway power struggle between Sen Feinstein and the CIA. Lives have been ruined; some in US detention died violent deaths at the hands of their captors. In the grim American gulag at Guantanamo Bay, hunger-striking prisoners charged with no crime, some of whom have been cleared for release for more than a decade, are subjected to vicious force-feeding and torture techniques that date back to the Spanish Inquisition.

"Let's hope Feinstein's indignation is not quickly salved, and that the Intelligence Committee's oversight of the sprawling US intelligence agencies is invigorated, with real teeth. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden weighed in from political asylum in Russia, saying, 'We're seeing another "Merkel Effect", where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it's a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them." -- Amy Goodman in The Guardian (UK) March 13, 2014

The Long War: Will the international community stop the drones?

A senior United Nations official is expected to call on the United States next week to stop Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes against people suspected of belonging to Al Qaeda, complicating the Obama administration’s growing reliance on that tactic in Pakistan. -- U.N. Official to Ask U.S. to End C.I.A. Drone Strikes by Charlie Savage (New York Times 2010-05-27).