The Washington Post is reporting that Attorney General Eric Holder has indeed decided to appoint a prosecutor who would investigate if CIA interrogators or contractors broke the law during the interrogation of terrorist suspects. The prosecutor is reported to be John Durham, who has spent the last two years investigating whether the CIA had obstructed justice by destroying videotapes of interrogations, which we now know probably included the threatening of suspected U.S.S Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri with a gun and a power drill.
Durham's mandate, the sources added, will be relatively narrow: to look at whether there is enough evidence to launch a full-scale criminal investigation of current and former CIA personnel who may have broken the law in their dealings with detainees. Many of the harshest CIA interrogation techniques have not been employed against terrorism suspects for four years or more.
By "broken the law," we mean surpassed the legal threshold established by the Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel that allowed treatment that would have been illegal under torture statutes and the Geneva Convention. Technically, or at least as far as this DoJ is concerned, all the torture that occurred within those guidelines was "legal." Several human rights advocates have suggested that going after low-level interrogators rather than the architects of the torture policy itself is counterproductive. Personally, there's something that bothers me about CIA interrogators being prosecuted for behavior policy-makers essentially endorsed -- but I suppose it's possible (if doubtful) that the initial cases could lead to higher-ups being implicated.
Politically, this doesn't come as an opportune time for the president, since the GOP has had some success on national security issues and the White House is already on the defensive on health care. But it's worth noting that the attorney general is meant to be independent from the White House, and the president isn't supposed to be allowed to tell him who to prosecute and when. I realize that's something of a change from the last administration, but if Republicans want to criticize Obama for letting Holder go forward with these prosecutions, then they're essentially criticizing the president and the attorney general for not being corrupt.
UPDATE: Read Leon Panetta's reaction here. ABC reported that his initial response was considerably more emotional.
-- A. Serwer
