Chris Hayes dis­cusses the audac­ity of Cheney’s con­tin­ued defense of tor­ture with Rachel. Hayes calls for the Obama admin­is­tra­tion to pros­e­cute rather than ignore acts of tor­ture and the defense of tor­ture and pro­vides some his­tory in his recent arti­cle in The Nation.

…thanks to the work of the Church Com­mit­tee. Chaired by Idaho Sen­a­tor Frank Church in 1975–76, the Select Com­mit­tee to Study Gov­ern­men­tal Oper­a­tions With Respect to Intel­li­gence Activ­i­ties labored for six­teen months to pro­duce a 5,000-page report that is a canon­i­cal his­tory of the secret gov­ern­ment. Over the past three decades the Church Com­mit­tee has faded into rel­a­tive obscu­rity. (I was some­what sur­prised to dis­cover how few peo­ple my age had heard of it.) But in the wake of fur­ther dis­clo­sures of crimes and abuses com­mit­ted by the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and the esca­lat­ing war of words between the CIA and Con­gress over just how much Con­gress knew about (and approved) these activ­i­ties, the specter of the com­mit­tee has begun to haunt Capi­tol Hill.

Mostly, the Church Com­mit­tee is invoked by con­ser­v­a­tives as a cau­tion­ary tale, a case of lib­eral over­reach that hand­i­capped the nation’s intel­li­gence oper­a­tions for decades. Dick Cheney bemoaned the fact that his time as Pres­i­dent Ford’s chief of staff was “the low point” of pres­i­den­tial author­ity, thanks to a feck­less Con­gress “all too often swayed by the pub­lic opin­ion of the moment.”