I am not impressed over the political wrangle about the CIA torture report. The CIA works for the President of the U.S., and if Obama wanted the torture report released, he would order it to be done. There has been a continued whitewash of presidential participation in illegal activities perpetrated by the CIA over the years. While President Obama is not responsible for torture, Obama has shown no interest in holding the previous administration responsible for its crimes.
Since the days of the Church Committee, the CIA has been tarred as a rogue government agency. This was done on purpose. No one in Washington wanted to rehash past wrongdoing by President Kennedy or Johnson, so the fiction of the CIA as going rogue was invented. While Nixon's shenanigans with the CIA did get some coverage, the political establishment was not interested in sending Nixon to prison.
The CIA is part of the military-industrial complex, but the agency still works for and does the bidding of the sitting president. An examination of the CIA's history demonstrates that it tailors its product, intelligence gathering and analysis, to the political needs of the boss. The CIA will also do the boss's bidding when it comes to dirty tricks and illegal activities - political assassination of world leaders for one.
The various leaks to the media about the Bush Administration's cherry picking of intelligence to justify a war with Iraq shows that the CIA is not the tail wagging the dog. Remember all the reports of Cheney browbeating analysts when their interpretations of the data on Iraq conflicted with his political opinion? Does anyone think that those at the CIA did not get the message to get with the program?
If released in its entirety, the CIA torture report would show that Bush at Cheney's urgings authorized torture to obtain intelligence. It didn't matter that the final intelligence product was garbage. All that matter was that Cheney was satisfied that the CIA was doing the job he directed them to do.
And Cheney is safe from any prosecution because Obama is protecting him. President Obama announced that he wanted to look forward, not backwards when it come to holding anyone accountable from the Bush Administration. With this rationale, no one would ever be prosecuted for any crime because all crimes, by definition, happen in the past.
As for Obama's reasons for not taking Bush and Cheney to task, I can only speculate. In my opinion, Obama basically is a corporate leader, and he has not demonstrated any capacity to challenge those in positions of power. Obama would rather work with corporate or political power structures than assail them.
So here we are being treated to a farce. The CIA is acting like it is in total charge of releasing the torture report, and Obama stands aloof and above the fray. Obama had nothing to do with the past abuses of the CIA under Bush/Cheney, but his continued stonewalling on the torture report gives the green light for future abuses to be committed by future presidents.