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We know that Obama has claimed that he wants the report to be released, honest.

Finally, we know that Obama and Brennan are unlikely allies in the war on transparency on torture. Two fronts of that war are relevant here.

First, the President’s chief of staff/scandal doctor is making Senate house calls to save the CIA director’s professional life — even though under his leadership the agency spied on the Senate and even though he lied about his agency spying on the Senate (an Atlantic article theorizes that the extraordinary efforts to spare Brennan could spare the president from a fired-and-fired-up-CIA director talking about drone strikes).

Second, the famously articulate Obama is considering whether he can get away with using the same grimly absurd definition of torture that his lexiconically challenged predecessor coined, a definition stipulating that torture is only torture if America isn’t doing it abroad.

Knowing all this, here’s what we can’t know: that the Obama administration will soon deliver transparency and accountability on torture.

More broadly though, knowing all that we know and knowing what we can’t know, we have to remember the one thing we always forget: the person who promises transparency and accountability when he has little power may be the same person who ducks and covers when he has a great deal of it — even if he has to cover for someone else’s transgressions in order to duck accusations about his own.

Whatever party is in government, we can only urge its opposition to fight fiercely for strong oversight of intelligence programs. We certainly can’t trust the opposition to fight for oversight when it’s not just the opposition anymore.

Shannon Gormley is a Canadian journalist.