While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that he prefers to wait for the Intelligence Committee to finish its work before moving forward with any sort of congressional "truth commission," pressure is mounting for action to be taken:
The release of the complete unclassified version of a Senate Armed Services Committee report on Tuesday, following the release last week of more Office of Legal Counsel memos that detailed the interrogation methods used by the CIA and their legal justifications, are ratcheting up the pressure on Congress, as well as on President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, to initiate more in-depth investigations that may, some experts say, ultimately lead to criminal prosecution.
... And European and U.N. officials are increasingly saying that if the United States does not prosecute what appears to be a violation of the Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a signatory, then European prosecutors may initiate prosecution themselves.
As The Washington Independent points out, the Senate Armed Services Committee report (pdf), "makes turning a blind eye to the past even more difficult" given that it shows that the Bush administration ignored legal advice that countered the results they were looking for:
Some of the facts set out in the report strongly suggest that further investigation is warranted as to whether the legal conclusions were reached in good faith by the lawyers, and whether policymakers acted reasonably in relying on them. That’s critical to the defense put forward by Bush administration officials such as former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Vice President Dick Cheney, who have consistently defended the Bush administration’s conduct by saying they all reasonably relied on the good-faith advice of government lawyers. [...]
"The consistent story is that there was high-level pressure to authorize these things," said Alex Abdo, a legal fellow with the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. "That certainly bears upon the question of whether DOJ lawyers were merely ratifying their bosses’ wishes."
... [and] support the view that the administration was not seeking objective legal advice, but justification of pre-ordained policies, say many legal experts.
It seems clear that this was another case where the "facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration, and while we can expect the arguments and accusations to fly on exactly what should be done in the coming weeks, the bottom line is, action needs to be taken.