Squabbling about Reports about Documents about Waterboarding

In the annals of Congressional oversight, the current squabble between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee sets a mark for inanity. The story is that when the committee began investigating the CIA's program of secret detention centers and illegal interrogations, the CIA provided committee staffers with access to thousands of internal documents. These were stored on a separate computer network, so that these researchers would not have access to the whole CIA system, and a room was set up in a small CIA building for the researchers to use. And then, nervous about what they had done, the CIA leadership asked their people to prepare a summary of what they had give the committee, no doubt for the usual reasons of bureaucratic self-preservation:

“This was not designed to be an analysis or rebuttal or alternative report. It was designed to merely keep track of, and provide short summaries of the documents that were being provided to the committee,” said Jeremy Bash, who was Mr. Panetta’s chief of staff at the C.I.A.

Then it turned out that the Congressional researchers had gotten access to this "Panetta Review." Rather than, you know, asking where they got it, the CIA began monitoring the computers used by the Congressional staffers, I suppose to see if they had access to things the weren't supposed to, or if somebody in the CIA was feeding them information. So now Senators are demanding that the Justice Department investigate the CIA, and the CIA is demanding that the Justice Department investigate how the Senators got their secret internal report, and the Justice Department is thinking, "We're supposed to pull people off fighting Mexican drug cartels or chasing corrupt mayors to babysit you?"

Buried in all of this is the still-secret conclusion of all these reports which, according to certain leakers, is that the whole program was pretty much useless:

Some people who have read the review memos said that parts of them were particularly scorching in their analysis of extreme interrogation methods like waterboarding, which the memos described as providing little intelligence of any value.