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.

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.

Former Air Force Maj. Matthew Alexander, whose questioning of a captured terrorist led to the elimination al Qaeda's top man in Iraq, said a pervasive "intolerance" of Arabs and Muslims among American interrogators led to abuses at Abu Ghraib and other prisons.

"Soldiers referred to them as rag heads and so on," Alexander said during a Monday talk at the International Spy Museum, in Washington, D.C. to promote his book, "How To Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq."

A former deep-cover CIA operative says the spy agency's congressional briefers routinely shade the truth or hide facts altogether from congressional overseers.

"They mumble, they dissemble, and there's a lot of  'on the one hand . . .'" said the retired official, who spent 25 years as a CIA operations officer but now writes blistering, unauthorized critiques of the spy agency using the pen name "Ishmael Jones."

Bricker has identified one of the men, Gerardo "Jerry" Arrechea as a "high-ranking member of the Comandos F4,"  a Miami based anti-Castro exile group that has vowed to carry out armed attacks on Cuba as well as Venezuela. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the connections Bricker turned up on Arrechea and his sidekick Jerry Wilson (AKA Orlando, AKA Andrew Wilson), last seen dragging a Mexican police trainee through his own vomit, are yet another sign that U.S. private security contractors are out of control. 

(Take a peek at my recent review of Tim Shorrock's Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, in The Washington Post, then read the rest of Bricker's comprehensive take.)

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?