Vice President Joe Biden came out in favor of declassifying a secret report on the U.S.’ use of torture during the Bush administration on Friday, raising expectations that the Obama administration will back the report’s release.

Biden was speaking at an event in Sedona, AZ, appearing on stage in a conversation with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). During the McCain Institute event, according to Roll Call, the conversation shifted to a recently completed report on the United States’ use of torture in combating terrorism in the post-Sept. 11-era.

“[Torture] offends the fundamentals of what kind of country we are, and the practical side of it is, don’t think it didn’t damage the United States’ image in the world in ways that we’ll be paying for for years to come,” McCain said, echoing his previous support for the report’s wide release. Biden quickly agreed:

“It is not resolved yet, John, but I’m where you are. I think the only way you excise the demons is you acknowledge, you acknowledge exactly what happened straightforward,” Biden said. He explained his position that issues related to torture must be laid out before a country can move beyond them, citing the war crimes committed in the Balkans and other acts of torture overseas.

“The single best thing that ever happened to Germany were the war crimes tribunals, because it forced Germany to come to its milk about what in fact has happened,” Biden said. “That’s why they’ve become the great democracy they’ve become.”

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence approved the nearly 6,000-page report approved the nearly 6,000-page report back in Dec. 2012, which was then sent to the Executive Branch for “review and comment.” According to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Intelligence Committee, that includes going “to the White House, to the attorney general, to the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], to the CIA for possible technical amendments.” Only after that review is complete will the Senate consider declassifying the report.

Vice President Biden’s comments come just weeks after a bipartisan group determined that the U.S. did, in fact, utilize torture — also euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation” — on detainees in order to gain information in the years after 2001. That panel’s conclusion that not only did the United States engage in torture but it was ineffective as an information gathering tool seems to fall in line with those from the Senate’s, according to a 2012 report from Reuters.

Should the Obama administration wind up siding with Biden on releasing the report, such a move would help mute criticism the administration has faced over refusing to launch investigations into Bush-era torture.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) smacked down Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) attempt to link Boston bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to Islamic extremists based in the American Muslim community with no evidence, an allegation that emerged as part of a theme among House Republicans on Sunday morning.

The exchange between Feinstein and King took place on Fox News Sunday, when host Chris Wallace asked whether he agreed with the idea that “political correctness be damned, we have to do more effective surveillance inside the Muslim community.” King tried to link “Muslim communities” to the attack, a claim which Feinstein demolished:

KING: Listen, the threat is coming from within the Muslim community in these cases. In New York. that’s why Commissioner Kelly has 1,000 police officers out in the community. Unfortunately, he gets smeared by the New York Times and the Associated Press, but the fact is we’ve stopped 16 plots in New York because we know that al-Qaeda is shifting its tactics…If you know a certain threat is coming from a certain community, that’s where you have to look.

WALLACE: Senator Feinstein, your reaction to this?

FEINSTEIN: That’s exactly where they will look. I don’t think all of this is very helpful. I think the important thing is to get the facts. Let the investigation proceed. The FBI has very good interrogators. They know what they are doing. I believe that they will put a case together that will be very strong. With respect to whether we are doing enough in the Muslim community, I think we should take a look at that, but I don’t think we need to go and develop some real disdain and hatred on television about it.

Watch it:

As Feinstein implies, King’s speculation about the Muslim community playing some role in the Boston bombing is entirely unconnected to the available facts. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) has written that “I am not aware of any evidence so far that the Boston suspect is part of any organized group, let alone al Qaeda, the Taliban, or one of their affiliates.” Nor does there exist any evidence that Tamerlan or Dzhokhar were radicalized as a consequence of contact with person or persons in the American Muslim community.

While King suggested that stepped-up NYPD surveillance of Muslims should be a model for the nation, the program terrified the Muslim community while failing to produce a single actionable lead or investigation.

King was not the only House Republican to speculate without evidence about a connection between the Tsarnaevs and jihadists. On CNN’s State of the Union, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) speculated that Tamerlan was trained by al-Qaeda during a 2012 visit to Chechnya, once again lacking any direct evidence for the charge. Though Islamist terrorist groups are often quick to take responsibility for attacks, the Caucusus Emirate, the main Islamist terrorist group in the region, denied any connection to the bombers and said “we are not fighting against the United States of America.”

The White House cleared a huge hurdle for John Brennan’s path to becoming CIA Director on Tuesday, agreeing to provide Congress with classified memos on the administration’s targeted killing program.

Brennan received approval to move forward to the full Senate this afternoon in a closed session of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the aftermath of the White House decision. The Obama administration had previously provided an unclassified white paper summarizing the classified Department of Justice memos that laid out the legal justification for the targeted killing of an American citizen, while only allowing access to briefly view some of the memos themselves. The white paper leaked to the press several weeks ago, kicking off debate about the extent to which the administration viewed its powers to execute suspected terrorists without trial.

That withholding of full access to the classified memos had been a major snag in Brennan’s confirmation process. Today’s agreement between the White House and Senate allowed for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Intelligence Committee, to bring Brennan’s nomination to a vote. The memos released to Congress are only those memos related to the killing of Americans. Other legal opinions related to the use of drone strikes and other methods to target suspected terrorists for killing were not provided. Likewise, only one member of each committee member’s staff will be granted access to view the memos provided along with the Senators themselves.

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mark Udall (D-CO) and Susan Collins (R-ME) in a joint statement praised the administration for releasing the memos and agreeing to provide unclassified answers on when the President can use “lethal authorities” within the United States. “In our view, the appropriate next step should be to bring the American people into this debate and for Congress to consider ways to ensure that the President’s sweeping authorities are subject to appropriate limitations, oversight, and safeguards,” the statement said, reflecting Wyden’s commitment to further declassification of the drone program.

Despite clearing the Intelligence Committee by a vote of 12-3, several Senate Republicans still are insisting that they may tie up Brennan’s nomination further. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) believes that the administration has yet to clearly answer his question on whether the Executive Branch can launch a strike against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, citing discrepancies in letters from Brennan and Attorney-General Eric Holder. Sens. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and John McCain (R-AZ), meanwhile, have been using the Brennan nomination as a platform to receive more information about the Sept. 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

Momentum is growing among lawmakers to form some sort of new oversight panel or court to weigh in on targeted killings carried out by the Obama administration.

Yesterday’s Senate hearings on the confirmation of John Brennan as CIA Director brought several questions from Senators related to the program, started under the Bush administration, but expanded over the last four years, involving the targeted killings of suspected militants associated with Al Qaeda. Concern has grown over the past several days, following the leak of a Department of Justice white paper laying out the legal justification for the killing of American terrorists abroad.

Sen. Angus King (I-ME) during the proceedings raised the idea of sending cases where Americans have been accused of collusion with Al Qaeda to a special court of some sort. Such a court, one of several possibilities to rein in the program this blog suggested this week, could potentially be based around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts that approve the wiretapping of individuals suspect of being foreign agents:

KING: A soldier on a battlefield doesn’t have time to go to court. But if you’re planning a strike over a matter of days, weeks, or months, there is an opportunity to at least go to some outside of the Executive Branch body — like the FISA court — in a confidential and top secret way. Make the case that this American citizen is an enemy combatant. At least that would be some check on the activities of the executive.

Brennan said that the concept was “certainly worthy of discussion,” without elaborating on whether he was for or against the idea. Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein (D-CA) after the hearings seemed to be supprotive of the the idea put forward by King, saying that she and other lawmakers “may explore setting up a special court system to regulate strikes.” Such a system, however, could prove to be as susceptible to abuse as the FISA courts currently are.

Commentators on both sides of the political spectrum have spent the week expressing their concern about the extensive nature of the program and the lack of investigation into whether the strategy behind it is working. While the House and Senate Intelligence Committees currently monitor the CIA’s drone program activities in Somalia, Pakistan and other locations, they are bound by secrecy rules to keep those reports under wraps. Some lawmakers have pressed the administration for more declassification of the information surrounding drone strikes and other methods of targeting, opening up what is already a widely reported on occurrence.

Criticism of the Obama administration’s drone program has heated up in recent weeks after the New York Times published a lengthy article highlighting some of its troubling aspects, particularly how and why suspected terrorists are targeted and the methods to which civilian casualties are documented. While many have since called for increased oversight of the program, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that Congress has been in the loop for more than two years:

The regular review of some of the most closely held [drone strike] video in the CIA’s possession is part of a marked increase in congressional attention paid to the agency’s targeted killing program over the last three years. The oversight, which has not previously been detailed, began largely at the instigation of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, officials said.

The lawmakers and aides with the intelligence oversight committees have a level of access shared only by President Obama, his top aides and a small number of CIA officials.

In addition to watching video, the legislative aides review intelligence that was used to justify each drone strike. They also sometimes examine telephone intercepts and after-the-fact evidence, such as the CIA’s assessment of who was hit.

In response to a Los Angeles Times piece questioning the drone program, Feinstein wrote the paper saying top intelligence officials in Congress “receive notification with key details shortly after every strike,” adding:

“Committee staff has held 28 monthly in-depth oversight meetings to review strike records and question every aspect of the program including legality, effectiveness, precision, foreign policy implications and the care taken to minimize noncombatant casualties.”

Two top United Nations human rights officials recently criticized the Obama administration for the drone program’s lack of transparency and accountability and questioned its legality.

The Los Angeles Times reports that “the drone program is under far more scrutiny than in the past” and participants in the congressional briefings “say their review has made the CIA more careful.” “I don’t know that we’ve ever seen anything that we thought was inappropriate,” one senior intelligence committee staff member said.

A New America Foundation analysis found a 17 percent “non-militant fatality rate” in drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan since 2004 and ProPublica recently reported that the administration’s claims on civilian casualties “do not add up.”

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has seen the drone strike videos and told the Los Angeles Times that he wasn’t convinced that every person killed has been a militant but added, “If the American people were sitting in the room, they would feel comfortable that it was being done in a responsible way.”