The Administration has reserved some of its most punitive uses of their prosecutorial discretion for government leakers and whistleblowers. Government information gets leaked all the time, often by official sources doing so on behalf of the Administration for political reasons. But no Administration has prosecuted as many government officials for leaking as this one. The chilling effect on whistleblowers damages the rule of law.

The neocons and torture lovers tried to justify waterboarding by saying that it saved lives because it got a high-level icky terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, to provide “actionable intelligence”, as they’d claimed with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We already knew it was horsepucky in Mohammed’s case, and now it’s been confirmed to be horsepucky in Zubaydah’s — and by the very man who made the original claim of efficacy to ABC News.