And Now For Something Completely Different
Washington Post: Holder to appoint prosecutor to investigate terror interrogations. Sounds like someone wants to change the subject. I like the part where they say the Obama admin doesn’t want him to do it, but add that the Obama admin is OK with him doing it.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has decided to appoint a prosecutor to examine nearly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators and contractors may have violated anti-torture laws and other statutes when they allegedly threatened terrorism suspects, according to two sources familiar with the move.
Holder is poised to name John Durham, a career Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut, to lead the inquiry, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is not complete.
Here’s the bit where the Post pretends to believe that the Obama administration may have a problem with the Obama administration’s actions in this matter. Even though the Obama administration says that the Obama administration is fine with it:
Holder’s decision could complicate the Justice Department’s relationship with the White House, where President Obama has repeatedly expressed a desire to move forward from the national security controversies of the Bush administration. Deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton told reporters Monday that the president had complete faith in Holder and that the decision whether to launch an investigation was the attorney general’s sole prerogative.
“The White House supports the attorney general making the decisions on who gets prosecuted and investigated,” Burton said.
Holder acknowledges the possible fallout from his decision, but has concluded in recent days that he has no other choice than to probe whether laws were broken in connection with the Bush administration’s interrogation program, the two sources said. Fewer than a dozen cases will be examined, most from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Just so no one gets the wrong impression, it isn’t like these cases haven’t been reviewed for prosecution in the past. Difficulties were encountered:
Any criminal investigation into the CIA conduct faces serious hurdles, according to current and former government lawyers, including such challenges as missing evidence, nonexistent or unreliable witnesses, no access to some bodies of detainees who died, and the passage of up to seven years since the questionable activity occurred far from American soil.
During the Bush years, a team of more than a half-dozen career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, which is renown for its expertise in probing clandestine operations, reviewed about 20 cases of alleged prisoner abuse after receiving referrals from the military and then-CIA Inspector General John Helgerson. Among the assistant U.S. attorneys involved in the review was Robert Spencer, who successfully prosecuted al-Qaeda operative Zacharias Moussaoui and who later won one of the highest awards the Justice Department bestows.
In only one of the cases did the lawyers recommend seeking a grand jury indictment. A federal appeals court earlier this month affirmed the assault conviction of David A. Passaro, a CIA contractor who wielded a metal flashlight against a detainee at a military base in Afghanistan. Passaro was not charged with murder. Abdul Wali, the detainee he questioned, died shortly after the beating but investigators could not conclusively link his death to the flashlight attack.
A former government official involved in the previous review said that, given problems with evidence, there was “no conceivable way we could have come out different” and sought criminal indictments. The official said that analysis might change if new and reliable witnesses emerged.
The Post notes there are concerns that revisiting this issue will have a chilling effect on intelligence gathering.
OK, here’s NYT with the crimes they want to prosecute:
Although large portions of the 109-page report are blacked out, the report gives new details about a range of abuses inside the C.I.A.’s overseas prisons, including threatening to kill and possible sexually assault members of detainees’ families, blowing cigar and cigarette smoke into the detainees faces to make them vomit, and staging mock executions.
Sounds bad. Not as bad as actual sawing off of heads, actual use of power tools, actual rape of detainees and their families, and actual blowing up of bombs in commuters’ and shoppers’ faces to make them dead, as practiced by various adversaries of the United States, crimes in which the Obama administration’s interest is beginning to wane as they relate to Iraq and Afghanistan. But also bad. Sounds like the kind of thing that in the civilian world, absent other crimes, might even get pleaded out with a suspended sentence.
Sounds like a good use of $20 million, or $100 million, or whatever the going rate on politically motivated persecutions is.
Anyway, as domestic and foreign policy agenda items continue to swirl down the toilet with no distractive relief in sight, bringing up some smelly blockage from the prior administration could be just the thing to placate the extreme left and get all that recent Obama failure off the front page.
Greenwald, at the forefront of recriminations against the Obamists for failure to persecute U.S. intelligence agents, objects to any kangaroo court for foot soldiers absent a star chamber for Cabinet members. I’m with him on that. A circus without three rings is just a sideshow.
HotAir’s got your Cheney statement. To paraphrase, it worked.
Surber’s got your GOP Senate minority statement. To paraphrase, the enemy’s that way, you dolts.
Also, not entirely unrelated, Surber notes, “Polls: Dems in trouble.”
Ouch, less than friendly fire … Malkin: “Republicans who voted to confirm Holder now complain about Holder.”
Powerline, “A good time to be a Jihadist … “
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:21 pm Comments (2) on Monday, August 24, 2009
2 Responses to “And Now For Something Completely Different”
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August 25th, 2009 at 3:17 am
There is dog wagging here, but that is actually the least of it!
The C.I.A. is being fundamentally dismantled, with the bulk of its operations to be vested in the F.B.I. — conveniently located over at the DoJ. The division between domestic and international purviews is being erased as we speak. The F.B.I.’s mandate now includes not just law enforcement, but pre-emption of terrorism. The tools they have at their disposal for the latter will be used without distinction. We’re looking at J. Edgar Hoover on steroids.
August 25th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
The CIA spent the last eight years trying to destroy the Bush Administration, and they were rewarded with BO and his thugs.
1. Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.
2. Payback is a bitch, then it has puppies.
3. “If you want gratitude, buy a dog” — Samuel Goldwyn.
4. “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.” –Mark Twain