The Agency

CIA Fires Torture Psychologists

Had originally renewed their contract.

One sign that outsider CIA Director Leon Panetta is reversing the troubled agency’s course? Weeks after President Obama took office, the CIA renewed its contract with the firm run by two psychologists who introduced waterboarding to the agency—that is until two months later, when Panetta fired them. In his first interview since taking the job, Panetta tells The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that, when he took over, he “wanted to be damn sure” that no one was on the payroll who could be prosecuted for war crimes. But once the agency was clean, he “didn’t want to spend a lot of time dealing with the past and what mistakes were made.” Panetta also says that he actually supported a truth commission to investigate the CIA’s use of torture, at least until President Obama nipped the idea in the bud.