John Rizzo, CIA acting general counsel, 2001-2009rej

The new UN high commissioner for human rights, condemming the "meanspirited house of blood" of the Islamic State's extremists; Sri Lanka's government for obstructing inquiry into war crimes allegations and "bluntly reminding the United States of its obligation under international law to proseucte all those responsible for C.I.A torture", is the Jordanian prince, Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein.

The Prince said to the New York Times yesterday, of the efforts of some nations to hold his office to a narrow interpretation of its mandate, "I think they don't necessarily know how the international system has come about and how it exists. If all of us stuck rigidly to mandates given us by government, there would be no peace on the planet."

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of "The CIA: The Devastating Indictment", an interview with Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books (Feb. 5, 2015) regarding the Senate Intelligence Committee's Report on Torture, is Danner's assertion that the only really new information in the five-hundred page document is, "first, how amateurish the torture program was. It was really amateur hour, beginning in with the techniques themselves, which were devised and run by a couple of retired Air Force psychologists who were hired by the CIA and put in kacharge though they had never conducted an interrogation before. When it came to actually working with detained terrorists and suspected terrorists they were essentially without any relevant experience. Eventually, the CIA paid them more than $80 million."

What's being done in our name these days as citizens isn't very good, in fact most of it is evil and if not evil, then at best bad policy. We live beneath shameful government; perhaps we always have, maybe it's never been otherwise.