No, CIA lawyer John Rizzo didn’t give Greg Miller any comments for Miller’s Los Angeles Times profile today, but the piece is still worth reading, particularly for this:

Even as the interrogation controversy escalated over the last three years, Rizzo’s name was rarely mentioned among those of other lawyers, including John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, who were more closely associated with the program.

You really have to give Marcy Wheeler credit as the exception here. Way before the April declassification of the 2005 OLC torture memos, you could read Marcy placing Rizzo in such august company. For my part, I covered Rizzo’s June 2007 epic-fail testimony to the Senate intel committee for TPM. (Lacking reliable internet access, I actually phoned a post into the office — this one — and I see now for the first time, two years later, that it contained this mistranscription: " Not that he thought his 2002 decision was wrong: ‘I did not, certainly, object,’ Rizzo told Senator J. Rockefeller." J. Rockefeller was accompanied by fellow senators Murph and Barlow, until Barlow’s abrupt dismissal… There’s an epic-fail of my own.)

But anyway. Fairly deep in the piece there’s an account of how Rizzo personally visited the Afghanistan black site known as the Salt Pit:

Once, during a 2005 trip by senior CIA executives to Kabul, Afghanistan, Rizzo disappeared from the crowd after dinner with Afghan intelligence officials.

It wasn’t until the next day, one participant remembered, that Rizzo revealed he had arranged a midnight trip to the Salt Pit, a secret CIA prison on the outskirts of the city, to see detention operations up close.

A CIA detainee had died at the site in 2002. But Rizzo came away newly assured that the operation was well-run, former officials said.

That’s the sort of thing that ought to be brought before the Senate intel committee’s CIA-torture investigation. Rizzo saw the Salt Pit himself? What sort of assurances did he receive, under what sort of due diligence, that the place was "well-run"? What does "well-run" even mean — an efficient intelligence-extraction operation, or a humane place, and by what standard for judging either? These are the kinds of questions one really ought to answer while palming a Bible. 

Also, maybe I’m inured to accounts of CIA ass-coverage, but there’s a fair amount in the piece that suggests Rizzo went along with the Bush administration’s interrogations apparatus out of fear that resisting it would have meant the potential dismemberment of the agency, which was a really potent fearback then. (Like, uh, "Rizzo has told colleagues that although the CIA has faced criticism for its interrogation methods, failing to prevent a follow-on attack might have led to its dismantling.") I really hope the Senate intel panel’s report on CIA interrogations will go into that backstory. It doesn’t excuse anything, but it has some explanatory capability for figuring out what went wrong.