[There was a video here]

Is the CIA physically capable of speaking the truth about its torture program? Not under conventional interrogation. About 20 minutes into CIA director John Brennan's somber-squirrel performance in his press conference yesterday, a reporter for the Associated Press asked him a pointed question: "Do you agree with President Obama's statement that the CIA, in common parlance, tortured detainees?"

To this point, Brennan had been carefully going on and on about "EITs": the acronym for "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," which is the agency's preferred term for its global campaign of beating, waterboarding, freezing, raping, and otherwise violating—torturing—its captives. Thus the question. Could he step out from behind the obfuscatory jargon and name the agency's misdeeds in plain American English?

Not at all. Instead, for more than a full minute, Brennan delivered the halting filibuster in the above video—his agents had "exceeded [pause] the policy [pause] guidance that was given"; they had gone "outside the bounds in terms of their actions"; their actions were "harsh....In some cases I considered them abhorrent." It was all "regrettable" and there were "mistakes, shortcomings, and excesses."

But as for the naming of the CIA's behavior, the director of the CIA said, "I will leave to others how they might want to label those activities" (for instance, the Justice Department, which found "no prosecutable crimes"). It would be "EITs" the rest of the way. The CIA is nothing if not deferential.