On Thursday, April 16, the Obama administration released previously top-secret Bush administration memos laying out Republican lawyers’ rationale for why they believed the harsh interrogations techniques used on terrorist suspects were legal.

A week later, on Tuesday, April 21, Dick Cheney told Sean Hannity in an interview on Fox News that Obama’s move to declassify these memos is partial, as it avoided revealing the positive effects of the interrogations, asserting that “They didn’t put out the memos that show the success of the effort,” and that he has requested to the CIA to release more information.

A day later, on Wednesday, April 22, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mocked Cheney: “It won’t surprise you that I don’t consider him to be a particularly reliable source of information.”

On the same day, the National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair passed a memo to his employees concerning these interrogations and confirming his stance with the President on banning such “disturbing” methods of interrogation, while suggesting that “High-value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.”

After this caused much controversy within his office and the media, Blair sought to clarify his thoughts that night by saying that “The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means… The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

Then, that night, Sean Hannity offered to be waterboarded for charity in an interview with Charles Grodin.

This week in sum = political duraaaamaaah.

It all comes down to this: to what extent can human rights be twisted in the name of national security, if to any extent at all? and if there is no other way that such vital information could have been obtained from terrorist suspects as Blair stated, how will we ever determine whether it was all “worth it”? Furthermore, even if it was proven that the interrogations were successful, does that validate its use? This is going to be a long and torturous (no pun intended) debate.

In the mean time, the CIA has found itself caught in the middle, and experiencing the emblematic side effect of an administration’s transition; so much so that Obama felt the need to awkwardly console the agency and, as a New York Times reporter said eloquently, “sounded like a teacher gently correcting his pupils”: “Don’t be discouraged that we have to acknowledge potentially we’ve made some mistakes… That’s how we learn.”

As they wade their way through all their scandals and lawsuits, it is going to be entertaining (although frustrating) to watch them squirm in the coming months.