More torture

Last week, it was Dianne Feinstein, incoming chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who let it be known she was okay with torture (see Glenn Greenwald). She had previously endorsed the Army Field Manual as a rule book for the C.I.A. and other agencies conducting investigations. Not anymore. As the NYT reported:

'I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible,' she said, raising the possibility that an imminent terrorist threat might require special measures.

She said that "extreme cases might call for flexibility."

This week, it's Silvestre Reyes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who's letting people know that torture is okay with him:

"We don’t want to be known for torturing people. At the same time we don't want to limit our ability to get information that’s vital and critical to our national security," he added. "That's where the new administration is going to have to decide what those parameters are, what those limitations are."

Spencer Ackerman sums it up:

How charming. The chairman of the House intelligence committee just framed the debate as between effective torture and ineffective compliance with the law. Anyone who has paid the slightest bit of attention to the actual debate on torture knows how clearly fallacious this is. And yet this is the man in charge of one of the two oversight committees for the intelligence community. Maybe it shouldn't just be those leaders who lose their jobs.

Reyes, interestingly enough, was the one who replaced Jane Harman as chair; Pelosi rightly found Harman to be too conservative. Reyes also said in an interview that he thinks Al-Qaeda is primarily a Shiite movement.