One of the insights we have gleaned into the all-too-human, but curiously error-prone heroes of our intelligence community since Edward Snowden made off with his flash-drive is another deep look into the level to which many of those institutions are swollen with a messianic sense of mission that regards oversight as a nuisance and constitutional safeguards as the tacit accomplices of the people trying to do us harm. These are people who create in themselves, and in the curious bubble of a world in which they operate, a constant sense that the existential is hanging on their very action, that all threats are immediate, and that the fate of the world turns on everything that happens, that Armageddon is coming down the aisles between the cubicles, probably with the sandwich cart. Even the most basic covering of one's own ass takes on a Doomsday gravity of its own

We see this again today as the Congress and the CIAstart laying clubs on each other.

The agency's inspector general began the inquiry partly as a response to complaints from members of Congress that C.I.A. employees were improperly monitoring the work of staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to government officials with knowledge of the investigation. The committee has spent several years working on a voluminous report about the detention and interrogation program, and according to one official interviewed in recent days, C.I.A. officers went as far as gaining access to computer networks used by the committee to carry out its investigation.

(And, no, I am not mollified that the CIA's Inspector General is looking into this now, after it's happened. I'm more concerned about the rogue culture within which somebody thought spying on congressional offices was a good idea in the first place.) There is no question that the material under dispute is something that the American people have a right to know. It involves the horrors that were done in our name.

The origins of the current dispute date back more than a year, when the committee completed its work on a 6,000-page report about the Bush administration's detention and interrogation program. People who have read the study said it is a withering indictment of the program and details many instances when C.I.A. officials misled Congress, the White House and the public about the value of the agency's brutal interrogation methods, including waterboarding. The report has yet to be declassified, but last June, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, responded to the Senate report with a 122-page rebuttal challenging specific facts in the report as well as the investigation's overarching conclusion - that the agency's interrogation methods yielded little valuable intelligence.

If all that has happened over the last couple of years is that we've become less vulnerable to the incantations and magic spells of the secret priesthood, then that's all to the good.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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