Ryan J. Reilly reports that the Department of Justice's review of whether CIA interrogators who went past the Office of Legal Counsel's approved torture guidelines should be investigated is nearly finished, says Attorney General Eric Holder.
Holder took pains to emphasize how narrow the review would be:
“What I made clear is that for those people who acted in conformity with Justice Department opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel that said you could do certain things… people who acted in good faith in line with the Department of Justice guidance, will not be the people we are looking at or interested in,” Holder said.
“It's a question of whether people went beyond those pretty far-out OLC opinions, people who went beyond that,” Holder said. “That's what we're looking at.”
Of course, if there are prosecutable cases, and Holder chooses to pursue any of them, the GOP will paint the whole effort as a witch hunt against the CIA. That point if view is likely to draw more attention than the opposite one from the left, which is that the investigation didn't go far enough in that it did not include those administration officials who authorized torture to begin with.
-- A. Serwer
