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.

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.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has taken to many stumps lately to proclaim that the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" saved the United States from another terrorist attack.

That leaves the question of what prevented another terrorist attack after the torture, as some call it, of terrorist suspects stopped.

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."

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.

The former head of the CIA unit charged with liquidating Osama Bin Laden said that national security officials in the Clinton administration "had no qualms" about transferring al Qaeda suspects to countries with reputations for torture.

Michael F. Scheuer, who worked on finding Bin Laden from 1996 to his retirement in 2004, made the allegation during an April 17, 2007 House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing on the treatment of terrorism suspects picked up by the CIA.

"I know there was much more consideration under the Bush administration about how to handle these people than there was under the Clinton administration, sir," Scheuer maintained in response to a question from Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., the panel's chairman.

"There were no qualms at all about sending people to Cairo," he said, adding that there was a "kind of joking up our sleeves about what would happen to those people in Cairo in Egyptian prisons, sir."

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.)

"A sobbing Canadian teenager begged for help as he was interrogated at the US 'war on terror' camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the very first video glimpse of any such questioning released on Tuesday," AFP reports.

The video was posted online by attorneys for terror suspect Omar Khadr, who is shown being questioned at the prison by Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) agents in February, 2003. He was 16 years old.

Khadr, accused of killing a US soldier in a firefight in Afghanistan, has been held at Gitmo since his arrest in 2002, when he was 15 years old.

"Help me, help me, help me," Khadr says in the video, weeping, holding his head in his hands.

The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. 

I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. 

Abu Omar is broke, and emailing people for help.

Omar is a suspected al Qaeda operative who in 2003 was kidnapped off a street in Milan, Italy by CIA agents and secretly flown to Cairo for a hard interrogation by Egyptian security forces, overseen by a CIA official.

Now free but physically broken -- he has shown his wounds to visiting reporters -- Omar took to the Internet from Egypt last week and began e-mailing human rights organizations, the United Nations and bloggers who have written about his case, asking for financial help with bringing his family together.

I received mine last Saturday, June 21, having written extensively about the case.

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?