The big question is what this means for the future. Torture is extremely illegal (no matter what Bush’s Justice Department said) — but as the blog emptywheel points out, so is perjury, making false statements as a government employee, and obstruction of justice, all of which has continued up to this year. (It is worth keeping in mind that there is no statute of limitations on torture that is known to risk or cause serious injury or death.) Any halfway competent prosecutor would be able to roll up half the agency with those tools and this report.

But the only person who has gone to jail over this program is the man who exposed it in the first place: John Kiriakou, for leaking classified documents. Nobody gets prosecuted when they leak classified information to win public support for war crimes, but a decent and honorable whistleblower got 30 months in federal prison.

It’s time to start treating the CIA for what it is: a clear and present danger to the United States as a democratic nation. The CIA has proved time and again that it is a rogue institution that follows its own destructively idiotic instincts — and the post-9/11 era has been no different.

A legislature with even the slightest scrap of dignity or self-respect would at a minimum immediately undertake a complete reorganization of the security apparatus, followed by a truth and reconciliation commission. Better yet, an official war crimes tribunal.

But we’re not going to do that. Republicans overwhelmingly support torture as affirmatively good policy, which means the only change we’ll see with the incoming Congress is more deference to CIA goons. The executive won’t punish anyone, either — President Obama, to his shame, has already ruled that out, again. And much of the mainstream media is incapable of treating this subject seriously. John Yoo, author of the worst legal memos in American history justifying the torture program, gets a respectful hearing on Morning Joe. Michael “37 pages of lying” Hayden gets kid glove treatment in Politico.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the SSCI, says the point of the report is to prevent torture from ever happening again. But without any accountability, it’s just as likely that America will torture again in the future.

—Ryan Cooper
Why America Will Torture Again