As I reflect on the fight between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA (one I'll return to soon), I can't help but marvel at a detail that Senator Dianne Feinstein revealed.

"I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, the now-acting general counsel was a lawyer in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center—the unit within which the CIA managed and carried out this program," she said. "From mid-2004 until the official termination of the detention and interrogation program in January 2009, he was the unit’s chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study."

For the appropriate reaction, here's Andrew Sullivan, a longtime torture critic: "Think about that for a moment. A man who was once the lawyer for the torture unit is now the lawyer for the CIA as a whole!" he writes. "If that alone doesn’t tell you how utterly unrepentant the CIA is over its past, and how determined it is to keep its actions concealed, as well as immune to prosecution, what would? And how do we know that the lawyer is not just protecting his own posterior, because the report could lead to consequences for those who enabled such war crimes? We don’t."