July 22, 2009
News Analysis
For Holder, Tough Choice on Interrogation Inquiry
By DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON — As the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., debates whether to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate the interrogations of terrorism suspects after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he is at the brink of a career-defining decision that risks the anger of the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency, one of the Justice Department’s main partners in combating terrorism.
There is no surprise then that Mr. Holder is said by officials to have been resistant at first to the idea of appointing a prosecutor, particularly since the Obama administration has made it clear that it wants to put the issue of interrogation practices during the Bush administration behind it. But associates have said he told them that he reacted with disgust when he recently read graphic accounts of interrogations in a 2004 C.I.A. inspector general’s report to be publicly released next month.
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Mr. Holder’s choice is not simply a prosecutorial judgment. President Obama has said criminal acts should be prosecuted, but he has also warned that he does not want his administration distracted from its ambitious agenda by backward-looking inquiries.
A decision by Mr. Holder to investigate would stand as a defining gesture of independence from Mr. Obama and would serve as a sharp contrast to predecessors like Alberto R. Gonzales, who was said by lawmakers in both parties to have run the Justice Department as a satellite office of the White House.
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But in taking that route, Mr. Holder would run two risks. One is the political fallout if only a handful of low-level agents are prosecuted for what many critics see as a pattern of excess condoned at the top of the government. The other is that an aggressive prosecutor would not stop at the bottom, but would work up the chain of command, and end up with a full-blown criminal inquiry into the intelligence agencies — just the kind of broad, open-ended criminal investigation the Obama administration says it wants to avoid.
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In addition, an inquiry would probably examine whether the C.I.A. operatives who questioned high-level Qaeda detainees at secret prisons exceeded the Justice Department’s legal guidance. A footnote in a recently released 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum said that the C.I.A. inspector general had found in the 2004 report that interrogators used waterboarding with greater frequency and a larger volume of water than seemed to be approved by the Justice Department.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/us/22holder.html?hp
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