President Barack Obama has long said he wanted to look forward, not backward, when it came to investigating Bush-era interrogation policies – but his good friend, Attorney General Eric Holder, went ahead anyway Monday.
And it didn’t take long to see just what Obama was worried about.
The immediate reaction to Holder’s announcement suggested the investigation will be politically divisive, drive down Obama’s stock at the CIA and almost certainly re-open an uncomfortable question for the White House: just how far is Obama willing to go to extract information from terror suspects?
Several Democrats cheered Holder’s announcement of a preliminary investigation – then immediately insisted he didn’t go far enough. The chairmen of the House and Senate judiciary committees kept up their calls for a “truth commission” into Bush-era practices.
Others said veteran federal prosecutor John Durham must have free rein to target any potential wrongdoing, even if it takes him to the most senior levels of the Bush administration.
“I applaud the Attorney General for this first step. But, we must go further,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said. “Seeking out only the low-level actors in a conspiracy to torture detainees will bring neither justice nor restored standing to our nation.”
At the same time, a number of Republican senators warned Holder that Durham’s investigation has the potential to spiral into a witch hunt that could hamstring the CIA.
“History has shown that special prosecutors. . .often take an expansive view of their investigative authority,” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and eight others wrote to Holder. “Despite your assurances that this investigation will be narrow and focused, there is a real risk that today's announcement portends a long, arduous, and unpredictable process for the intelligence community.”
And reaction from the intelligence community was swift, and largely negative. CIA Director Leon Panetta tried to pre-empt the Holder announcement – and the release of CIA investigative report on some of the most egregious abuses – with a statement seeking to bolster morale at Langley. Durham is already investigating the CIA’s destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano echoed some of Obama’s forward-not-back language in pledging to cooperate with the investigation. “The CIA’s primary focus remains, as the American people expect, the present and the future, not the past,” he said. - Politico Story
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