Unplugged: CIA "Freaking Out" Over Investigations

On "Washington Unplugged" today, Newsweek investigative reporter Mark Hosenball said people at the CIA are "freaking out" over Attorney General Holder's appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate interrogation practices during the Bush adminstration.

"I was just speaking to some people [at the CIA], they're really freaking out over this; it is going to cause them to start giving them second thoughts about doing risky things or creative things in the future and maybe that's good, maybe that's bad. It is tying them down," he told CBS News' Bob Orr .

Hosenball also weighed in on comments made by former Vice President Dick Cheney's yesterday on Fox News when he said the techniques used by the CIA were valuable.

"It is true that the CIA program to interrogate and detain high value al Qaeda detainees produced a lot of intelligence," he said.

The interrogation, Hosenball said, "produced the kind of intelligence that was like totally central to the CIA's intelligence gathering about al Qaeda." But he added that the question is whether the enhanced interrogation techniques revealed reliable intelligence, and the recently released documents do not answer this question.

Hosenball said the documents also do not contain any " assessment of the ratio of good information to bad information."

Mike German of the American Civil Liberties Union also discussed Cheney's comments, referring to John McCain's point on "Face the Nation" this Sunday, that "the terrorists gain" in recruitment due to the CIA's interrogation techniques.

Watch Monday's "Washington Unplugged" above. "Washington Unplugged" appears live on CBSNews.com each weekday at 12:30 p.m. ET. Click here to check out previous episodes.