The Los Angeles Times headlined Sunday,
"Insiders say Atty. Gen. Eric Holder is close to naming a prosecutor to look into reports of excessive waterboarding and other unauthorized methods."
Citing the LA Times, the Guardian also reported Sunday that the Justice Department is
"close to appointing a special criminal prosecutor to investigate alleged abuses by the CIA of prisoners held at detention centres around the world."
The Guardian adds that the British government
"continued to resist pressure over the torture and abuse of detainees abroad."
So one question would be, is the British government foreshadowing, paralleling or diverging from the Obama Administration's course on this issue? The jury is out.
Apparently on the "not invented here" principle,
(defined by Wikipedia as "a persistent social, corporate or institutional culture that avoids using or buying already existing products, research or knowledge because of its different origins,")
such news is not yet disseminated this week on cable or broadcast nor, more chillingly, in the two self-appointed "newspapers of record," the New York Times and the Washington Post.
But at least two bloggers are up to date on the case, Andrew Sullivan and Josh Orton of mydd.com. They both note how far the reputed prosecution falls below what is necessary. Sullivan picks up on a remark in the LA Times story,
"'An investigation that focuses only on low-ranking operators would be, I think, worse than doing nothing at all,' said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch."
Says Sullivan,
"If the Obama administration does not investigate those really responsible for war crimes, and scapegoats a few sadists down the line instead, then they risk retroactively justifying the crimes they ran against."
Orton warns,
"Too bad the policy authors aren't mentioned. Maybe the evidence against them is too weak, or the politics of investigating a previous administration are too thorny. Either way, lawyers shouldn't enjoy de facto immunity simply because accountability is hard work."
On the one hand, this is a "shoe about to drop" story and coverage of those is notoriously spotty for many reasons, some of them legitimate. And perhaps Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow, who have collectively risen to the level of "people's tribunes," pointing out issues and truths other outlets consider too hot to handle, will address the issue with their usual acuity tonight.
But it does seem odd that the major corporate media, the "bigfoot journalists" as Tim Crouse called them so long ago in the brilliant 1972 campaign history Boys on the Bus, are not all over the possibility of the CIA's perpetual presumption of innocence being formally breached. Even the Church Committee never saw its results in court. This is in a way a bigger deal than the prosecution of any cop for police brutality, notoriously difficult to achieve and always attacked lest it disturb the tender sensibilities of the remaining officers.
Despite the breakthrough nature of such an investigation, it is certainly true that it does not, as described, go nearly far enough. There is speculation in the LA Times story that the administration knows it cannot succeed, but if you examine it closely, you see that it emanates from two sources: the intelligence community and former Bush administration Justice Department figures. Both have an interest in either deflecting, or undermining, any investigation at all, much less one that goes beyond the phoney "Cheney guidelines" that were confected by complaisant Bush lawyers to retrospectively immunize torture.
As reported, however, it appears the investigation will focus on whether or not those guidelines were breached by "excessive" waterboarding, rather than investigating all torture, especially that which took place prior to the guidelines.
Those who remember Watergate remember that John Connally's prosecution was turned over to, as Molly Ivins wrote at the time, "a turkey named Turkheimer," who managed to throw the case in court by means of lethargy and incompetence. Turkheimer had been appointed by the Special Prosecutor, one Leon Jaworski, a Texas lawer and powerbroker not unacquainted with former Texas Governor Connally. Connally was the highest-ranking person prosecuted. He got off. In Rob Reiner's A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise is appointed to defend an underling because, it turns out, as a lawyer his character is customarily hasty, brash and sloppy. Nevertheless, in the movie, justice is served. In real life, not so much.
Simple, ordinary American justice demands real prosecutions of American torture inside and outside, before and after, and as well of those who wrote, the "Cheney guidelines." By turning these decisions over to the Justice Department and the Attorney General, President Obama at least understood the constitutional method of procedure, as his predecessor did not. You don't direct the Department to prosecute, you let it investigate. We seem close to an announcement that would bring that process out from behind the closed doors on Independence Avenue and into the news and, later, the courts. If this turns out to be a damage limitation effort rather than an inoculation against future unconstitutional depredations, there will be serious damage to the Obama legacy.
It hasn't come to that yet. But it is getting perilously close.