Last week, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 400-page report on what they called CIA "torture" of imprisoned suspects in the aftermath of September 11. Yesterday on NBC's Meet the Press, former Vice President Dick Cheney defended the program. "We got the authorization from the president and authorization from the Justice Department to go forward with the program. It worked. It worked now for 13 years. We've avoided another mass casualty attack against the United States and we did capture Bin Laden and we did capture an awful lot of the senior guys of Al Qaeda who were responsible for that attack on 9/11. I'd do it again in a minute."
One-time POW John McCain is one of few Republicans to agree with Senate Democrats that American values were endangered along with national security. "There were violations of the Geneva conventions for the treatment of prisoners, there were violations of the convention against torture which Ronald Reagan was a primary signatory of, and I think in retrospect some of these practices fly in the face of everything America values and stands for."
Former CIA insiders blame inexperienced agents and outside contractors, along with orders from Washington to "get tough" with prisoners. What are the prospects for accountability 13 years later?