Eric Holder Should End Investigation of CIA Interrogators

May 10, 2011 05:22


As the Obama administration takes its well-deserved bows for having given the order to have a Navy seal team go into Pakistan and kill Osama bin Laden, how is it possible for Attorney General Eric Holder to still be leading a criminal investigation of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers for their interrogations of captured terrorists.

The Americano

The point has been made twice over the weekend. Daniel Henninger said it first in a column printed in The Wall Street Journal. Former vice president said pretty much the same thing Sunday in an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.

The point is simple. As the Obama administration takes its well-deserved bows for having given the order to have a Navy seal team go into Pakistan and kill Osama bin Laden, how is it possible for Attorney General Eric Holder to still be leading a criminal investigation of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers for their interrogations of captured terrorists.

Yes, you read right. These men, according to Cheney had been investigated and cleared by career investigators under the George W. Bush administration. Several members of Obama’s own administration have said that interrogation techniques found legal by the Bush administration may indeed have played a role in finding bin Laden.

Obama found the time to be gracious and invite former president Bush to a Ground Zero ceremony where he placed a wreath where the Twin Towers once stood. The nation has rejoiced. Americans had come together when Al Qaeda attacked Sept. 11, 2011, and it came together again a week ago Sunday when president Obama announced the death of bin Laden.

Yet Holder has a different agenda. It was easy to see in his press conference announcing that the Guantanamo detainees would be tried by military tribunals that he was displeased by the decision; and that it was one that either congress, the president or both had imposed on him.

Well, this is something similar. While President Obama and America takes a “bin Laden victory lap”, it is time, according to Henninger and Cheney, to stop this investigation. When Attorney General Holder announced he was re-opening the case in 2009, it was already too much. Now, it is just unacceptable.

In his column, Henninger said: “It is time for the Holder CIA investigation to end. The death of bin Laden 10 years after 9/11 makes the Holder investigation of the CIA interrogators politically, emotionally and morally moot. The moment has come for Mr. Holder to end his investigation of the CIA’s interrogators of terrorist detainees.”

Forget about whether as the Associated Press and several other news organizations have found that the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” provided information that led to bin Laden’s demise. For the purpose of this exercise, forget that point.

The point is simple. The CIA officers acted under orders approved by legal counsel at the White House. The policies were approved by the White House, by then president Bush. President Obama and Holder disagree; they believe water-boarding is torture and they will not engage in it.

Yet how can this administration take credit for killing bin Laden and at the same time judge the legality of those who interrogated terrorists in the past. When the first investigation concluded without any charges last November, Holder ordered them to continue.

“I have concluded,” he said “that the information known to me warrants opening a preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations,” Henninger quoted Holder as saying.

Last year Holder said in a speech in Washington that the investigation was coming to an end, yet when the Justice Department was asked this week about it, its reply was that “it was still ongoing.”

Mr. Holder wasn’t free-lancing; both he and Obama had called waterboarding “torture.”

This week the Associated Press reported that the name of bin Laden’s courier may have come from CIA interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi, who received “harsh” interrogation at CIA prisons in Poland and Romania. On Tuesday, Holder said the information came from a “mosaic of sources.”

For the sake of this exercise, ignore that argument.

On June 18 last year, Holder said in a Washington speech that the investigation was “close to the end.” But nothing has happened. Asked this week about the status of this investigation, a Justice Department spokesman for Mr. Durham, whose office is in Connecticut, said the project is “still ongoing.”

Times have changed.

The Obama administration is doing many of the things in office for which he had criticized former president Bush. Now he is taking the bows, with curtain calls and all. It is time for Holder to fall in line with his president, or one day in the future someone may be investigating him for prosecutorial misconduct.

Henninger said it well: “After 9/11, when the fraying started, George W. Bush passed through a seven-year political minefield of media leaks and lawsuits over the Patriot Act, surveillance, renditions, Guantanamo and CIA interrogations. Now bin Laden is dead, and Barack Obama’s got the credit. We’re all fine with that. . . Now how about letting those CIA interrogators come in from the cold and join the celebration?

The Americano/Agencies



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