Of all the Bush administration policies that Obama was supposed to change, the torture programme was, for many of Obama’s core supporters, at the top of the list. Yes, we kept being told by the Bush spinners that this wasn’t “torture” as such. “We don’t torture,” President Bush told the world with a straight face. The US was just seeking to “ask questions”. This wasn’t a torture programme; it was just “the program”. It authorised not torture but “enhanced interrogation techniques”. This was “robust” or “harsh” interrogation.

Leaving semantics to one side, we now know for a fact that “the program” included the indisputable torture technique of waterboarding. Vice-President Dick Cheney boasted on national television of authorising that ancient technique and called the decision a “no-brainer”. We also know that “the program” included torture methods innovated by the Gestapo – and finessed by the Chinese communists – as tools to procure false confessions and to leave no physical scars. Among these techniques were forcing prisoners to endure freezing temperatures for long periods, twisting limbs into stress positions for excruciating spans, hanging people from shackles, denying them sleep, repeatedly beating them or depriving them of sensory experience for months on end.

Rumsfeld’s own signature is on one memo, urging harsher periods of sleep deprivation. The Pentagon has conceded many deaths during interrogation; and the evidence showing that many of these prisoners were made permanently mentally ill by the treatment is now indisputable.

A bipartisan Senate committee unanimously confirmed all this last month. All those ghastly pictures from Abu Ghraib were explicitly authorised by the White House – nudity, hooding, leashes, stress positions, you name it, Bush approved it (and then brazenly pretended to be shocked). Under Bush and Cheney, the United States was de facto in breach of the Geneva conventions. This once sounded like rhetoric. It is now simply fact.

Obama vowed to end this. But he also vowed to end divisive and partisan politics in Washington. How he was going to do both at the same time left many of us on ten-terhooks over Christmas and the new year. It’s not exactly engendering good feelings to act on the fact that your predecessor is a war criminal. On no other issue was he going to have to confront not only the Bush administration but also the leading Congressional Republicans and Democrats who had acquiesced to the programme and whom he yet needed for the rest of his agenda. For good measure, Obama was also going to have to run the CIA from day one. After seven years of “the program”, who was there capable of running the place who wasn’t implicated in the war crimes?

The first name floated for CIA head was John Brennan, a career spook well regarded in intelligence circles who had backed Obama early on. But his record was one of ambivalence towards “the program” and he even publicly expressed sympathy for it in some interviews. After an outcry, he quickly withdrew his name. Then last week: a nomination that surprised everyone.

Leon Panetta is someone everyone who is anyone in Washington knows well. He’s a huge player in California Democratic politics, a congressman for many years and a former Clinton chief of staff. A centrist, his expertise is in managing bureaucracies and budgets, not intelligence. But he served on the 9/11 commission and knows his way around the federal labyrinth. He is also the kind of genial fellow who appeals beyond party. Among the surprising supporters of his nomination were several leading neoconservatives – among them, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle – who had long been suspicious of CIA lifers.

Michael Ledeen, who makes Cheney look like Jane Fonda, put it this way: “I always liked Panetta. He served in the army and is openly proud of it. He seems to be a good lawyer (oxymoronic though it may seem). He’s a good manager. And he’s going to watch Obama’s back at a place that’s full of stilettos and has a track record for attempted presidential assassination second to none.”

The latter political point is particularly relevant. Getting solid intelligence to the president’s desk outside other pressures and departments is the key task for a CIA director. With the heavyweights Hillary Clinton at the State Department and Bob Gates at the Pentagon, a CIA officer promoted from within to run the agency would never have stood a chance. Panetta is a real pol with great connections. Sometimes that matters more than being marinated in CIA culture for decades. And Obama could always give him a deputy who is more of a company man – and that figure has indeed been proposed in the figure of Stephen Kappes, the current CIA deputy director, whom Obama is tipped to keep on.

But Panetta’s core qualification at this particular moment was his public statements on the Bush-Cheney torture programme. This is what Panetta wrote in the Washington Monthly last year: “How did we transform from champions of human dignity and individual rights into a nation of armchair torturers? One word: fear. Fear is blinding, hateful and vengeful. It makes the end justify the means. And why not? If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what’s wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock? The simple answer is the rule of law. Our constitution defines the rules that guide our nation. . .

“Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don’t. There is no middle ground.”

Panetta may soon find out more than the rest of us will ever know about the CIA’s activities in the Bush-Cheney years. And nobody doubts he is a centrist and patriot who genuinely wants to ensure the safety of Americans and has no intention of doing anything but bring the best out of a demoralised espionage service. He may make difficult moral decisions in the years ahead and may fail in a difficult job. But what he has that is indispensable right now is an understanding that humane and decent treatment of all prisoners in war-time is critical to winning the intelligence war and winning it the right way.

With him in place and with Obama in the White House, we now have something very, very precious back in the government of America. It’s called trust and lawfulness. As they say in some of the most beleaguered places on the planet: know hope.

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