Detainees

From WaPo:

Under a presidential directive and authorities approved by administration lawyers, the CIA is allowed to capture and hold certain classes of suspects without accounting for them in any public way and without revealing the rules for their treatment.

I'd be more worried about this, but it appears the CIA is actually more circumspect about torture than the DoD. I quote Matt Yglesias on this:

We've learned recently that both the CIA and FBI eventually decided that the interrogation tactics being used by the military in Iraq were going too far and that Agency and Bureau personnel ought not participate. The Defense Intelligence Agency, too, got into a dispute with the Special Operations soldiers conducting the interrogations. Phil Carter's comments on this are worth a read:

Both the FBI and the CIA -- not agencies with a good historical record when it comes to civil liberties -- objected to the Pentagon's approved interrogation tactics. The FBI objected primarily for courtroom reasons; the CIA appears to be object for operational reasons. Yet, both were unable to sway the Pentagon through the policy vetting process, so they simply decided to abstain from these practices in the field. The natural inference here is that the tactics approved, adopted and used by the military really did go too far, as evidenced by the FBI and CIA's refusal to play ball. Clearly, I think, the FBI and CIA cared as much about squeezing HUMINT out of foreign prisoners as the military, especially when it came to Al Qaeda members plotting against the U.S. (as opposed to insurgents in Iraq.) And yet, they either saw these interrogation methods as counter-productive, inhumane, illegal, or all of the above.

The other thing to note, I think, is that it's hard to see how this level of interagency disagreement could have arisen without the dissenting agencies' disquiet with what was going on coming to the attention of top policymakers. The FBI, CIA, and DIA all joined with the International Committee of the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations to push for changes and no one listened. The problems here, clearly, are systemic, but also somewhat narrow in their scope, with large swathes of the American security establishment wanting nothing to do with the Defense Department's policies.