That would be a war crime....

From the less redacted 2004 CIA IG report due out next week,

The CIA's internal investigator found that agency interrogators conducted mock executions of terror suspects and in one case threatened a detainee suspected in the USS Cole bombing with a gun and power drill, congressional officials said late Friday.

From a different AP version, we also get a significant political bit,

The report casts doubt on the effectiveness of the harsh interrogation methods employed by CIA interrogators, according to quotes from the report that were contained in Bush-era Justice Department memos declassified this spring. It says no attacks were averted by information obtained using harsh interrogation methods.

Both pretty damning.

Also, I should mention that the original story is by Hosenball and Isikoff in Newsweek.

In that version, we also learn that "The inspector general's report alludes to more than one mock execution," and that the interrogations of Nashiri, the subject of waterboarding and mock execution, was on the interrogation videotapes the CIA had destroyed.

What it doesn't seem to contain is the direct chain of orders, involvement, and knowledge above the CIA which is the real political bombshell.

If you'll remember from April, ABC described dozens of top level staff meetings in the White House (Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet, and Ashcroft all meeting and deciding on individual "interrogation" methods on individual detainees.)

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

There's apparently nothing to say that they authorized mock executions, but they were clearly very deep in specifics of interrogations, and you gotta wonder if they saw the videotapes and were aware of the worst of it.

And, Cheney is finally going to get his document release, but amid all the rest of this, the political value he sought will likely be lost.

At the same time the administration releases the inspector general's report, it is also expected to release other CIA documents that assert the agency collected valuable intelligence through the interrogation program. For months, former vice president Dick Cheney has called for these documents to be released. However, a person familiar with the contents of the documents says that they contain material that both opponents and supporters of Bush administration tactics can use to bolster their case.

So, they'll offer a little cover to those already prone to the Cheney position, but won't really impact the overall debate.

(Does AG Holder have any choice but to prosecute now that clear war crimes have been so clearly and publicly revealed?

And, as next week will be another torture week, is it any wonder Obama went on vacation.)