The opening salvos on the partially declassified CIA Inspector General's report on detainee abuses included hair-raising anecdotes about threatening captives with power drills, guns to the head and the mock deaths of other prisoners.

Now the story is the dogs under the porch: what's beneath all those blacked-out paragraphs in the still heavily redacted, 2004 report by the spy agency's IG.

The National Security Archive, a nonprofit research center at George Washington University, today released a massive file of more than 83,000 pages of primary source documents "related to the detention and interrogation of individuals by the United States, in connection with the conduct of hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in the broader context of the 'global war on terror.'"

It's hard to find any clear winners in the new interrogations set-up confirmed by the White House on Monday, but it's easy to spot the losers: Leon Panetta and Dennis Blair.

Already wrestling with a renewed controversy over contract killers, the CIA reacted angrily Thursday to a news organization's revelation of yet another secret interrogation center.

ABC News reported that the CIA had a secret site in Lithuania where interrogators grilled terrorist suspects,  "one of eight facilities the CIA set-up after 9/11 to detain and interrogate top al Qaeda operatives captured around the world."

The White House beat a strategic retreat last week on its ideas for a new multiagency interrogation unit, giving its task force another two months to come up with a plan everybody can live with.

But if initial reactions are any guide, the White House faces an uphill fight in creating an organization that can satisfy military, intelligence and law enforcement needs at once.

About 20 years ago I had the privilege to interview Gen. George L. Mabry, the second most decorated soldier in the history of the U.S. Army, at his home in Columbia, S.C.

Mabry had been awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroics in World War Two. The young captain had already earned a chestful of ribbons for his "Saving Private Ryan" performance at Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Only the legendary Audie Murphy earned more medals.

There are 14 names in the confidential Red Cross report that surfaced last week on the CIA's "ill treatment" of detainees.

But you will not find in it the name of Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi who was picked up by U.S. Navy SEALS in Baghdad and interrogated by the CIA.

That's because Jamadi died in the care of Mark Swanner, a 44-year-old CIA interrogator who battered the prisoner at the ghastly Abu Ghraib in 2003. 

The Italian prosecutor who has been trying two dozen CIA agents on kidnapping charges says he will continue the case, despite a high court decision Wednesday that excludes the use of wiretapped conversations among top Italian intelligence officials.

Armando Spataro, reached by telephone on a train between Rome and Milan, said,  "the trial will go on" despite the Constitutional Court's decision excluding transcripts in which intelligence officials discussed a CIA plan for the  "extraordinary rendition" of an al Qaeda suspect from a Milan street to an Egyptian prison in 2003.

Don't expect the CIA to turn over the family jewels on its interrogation videotapes to the American Civil Liberties Union, just because it lost a legal round this week.

John L. Helgerson, the CIA's controversial inspector general, may be finally leaving the spy agency after three decades, but he will not be fading back into the shadows.

In the battle for public opinion on torture, Joe Navarro doesn't stand a chance against Jack Bauer.

The hero of the Fox action series "24," now entering its seventh season, seems to have cast a spell over the country -- including high level Pentagon, CIA and White House officials who continue to insist that torture works, despite all evidence to the contrary.

People, it's fiction!

Joe Navarro, on the other hand, is the real deal, an FBI counterterrorism veteran who's gone mano-a-mano in prison cells with many a bad guy.

"There are a lot of people that think that torture and pushing people around and just being nasty gets the work done," Navarro said during an almost completely ignored seminar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last week

"I assure you, I have never had anybody confess to me who said, well, I decided to confess to you because you treated me like crap. It just doesn't happen that way."

Another tough hombre on the panel, Ken Robinson, who spent 20 years in black ops with the Army Rangers, Special Forces, CIA and NSA, said bluntly: "It doesn't work."

Why do so many people think it does?