Torture Investigation(s) Imminent

There are some good news this morning on the possibility that many branches of our government might conduct special investigations of those who approved torture methods outlined in the memos President Obama released. Despite Obama's reluctance to prosecute even those who drafted the memos (John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury), Eric Holder's Justice Department leaked the news late last night that Mr. Holder is seriously considering appointing a special prosecutor to look into the ways in which these torture methods were authorized at the top. At the same time, the White House went back on Rahm Emmanuel's slip on "This Week" that no one should be prosecuted, retracting that wide-ranging blank check by saying that President's Chief of Staff meant to say that those who carried out orders would not be prosecuted and not those who ordered them. This was an obvious move to leave the door open to these prosecutions. Furthermore, there is a growing pressure in the Congress on the Justice Department to investigate: the Judiciary Committee and the Armed Service Committee are both conducting their own investigations. Finally, the pressure from the international community is building: UN's chief torture expert said yesterday that the US is obligated under the Convention Against Torture to investigate.

The fact that our Attorney General Holder (who is emerging to be my favorite guy in Obama's administration) is seriously considering this, despite Obama's objections, shows the level of independence this Justice Department has from the White House, contrary to what it looked like under the Bush regime. It is also interesting that today we hear of the terrible scandal implicating Rep. Jane Harman (D-California) in a complicated scheme, involving indicted Israeli lobbyists and Attorney General Roberto Gonzales. According to the still sketchy reports, Harman was inadvertently picked up by NSA's wiretapping program as she promised to the Israeli lobbyists to push for the FBI investigation of their espionage activities to be dropped in return for their help in getting the chair of the Intelligence committee. At the same time, Alberto Gonzales pressured his department to slow down the investigation in return for Harman's cooperation on the Bush administration's desire to keep the wiretapping program secret. I mean, this reads like a depressing spy novel! And it shows the level of incest between Bush's White House and their Justice Department. And finally, it shows the need for Obama's Justice Department to assert its independence and this would be the issue to do it with!

That an investigation seems imminent is confirmed by the increasingly panicked Dick Cheney who rushed to the Fox News Channel yesterday and hysterically argued that Obama revealed "our national secrets," of course ignoring the fact that all those memos had been revealed by the leaked International Red Cross report in the New York Review of Books, including day to day interrogations of the suspects. He also (falsely) argued that during those interrogations, we got some useful information that saved lives, again ignoring the testimonies of many CIA agents that by the time the torture started, the suspects had already told them everything they knew. Yesterday's NYT report that one of the suspects was waterboarded 183 times in a month (!!!) shows the ineffectiveness of the method. Leaked interviews with those CIA interrogators shows that even before the torture started they alerted their headquarters that the suspect had told them everything he knew but it was from the higher echelons of power that the orders for those methods came.

Which brings us to why Cheney seems so panicky these days. As he should be!