The Department regularly uses preliminary reviews to gather information to determine whether there is sufficient predication to warrant a full investigation of a matter. I want to emphasize that neither the opening of a preliminary review nor, if evidence warrants it, the commencement of a full investigation, means that charges will necessarily follow.
Heading up the inquiry will be AUSA and career prosecutor John Durham:
Assistant United States Attorney John Durham was appointed in 2008 by then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate the destruction of CIA videotapes of detainee interrogations. During the course of that investigation, Mr. Durham has gained great familiarity with much of the information that is relevant to the matter at hand.
Accordingly, I have decided to expand his mandate to encompass this related review. Mr. Durham, who is a career prosecutor with the Department of Justice and who has assembled a strong investigative team of experienced professionals, will recommend to me whether there is sufficient predication for a full investigation into whether the law was violated in connection with the interrogation of certain detainees.
The ACLU responds:
"It is encouraging that the Justice Department's ethics office recognizes that prior decisions to cut off investigations of serious abuse cases were ill-advised, and that those who broke the law must be held accountable.
It is critical, though, that the scope of any criminal investigation not be limited at the outset to exclude the investigation of senior officials who authorized torture or wrote the memos that were used to justify it.
An investigation that begins and ends with so-called 'rogue' interrogators would be indefensible given the evidence of high-level involvement that is already in the public domain. Nor should any 'good faith' limitation be used as a shield for interrogators who knew or should have known that they were violating the law."
The Center for Constitutional Rights responds:
“Responsibility for the torture program cannot be laid at the feet of a few low-level operatives. Some agents in the field may have gone further than the limits so ghoulishly laid out by the lawyers who twisted the law to create legal cover for the program, but it is the lawyers and the officials who oversaw and approved the program who must be investigated.
“The Attorney General must appoint an independent special prosecutor with a full mandate to investigate those responsible for torture and war crimes, especially the high ranking officials who designed, justified and orchestrated the torture program. We call on the Obama administration not to tie a prosecutor’s hands but to let the investigation go as far up the chain of command as the facts lead. We must send a clear message to the rest of the world, to future officials, and to the victims of torture that justice will be served and that the rule of law has been restored.”
CBS Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen
provides his take.
Like the disgraced soldiers at Abu Ghraib, we now know that the CIA interrogators, and their supervisors, and maybe their bosses as well, clearly got the drift of the torture memos. The gloves were indeed off. The lawyers had said so. And those agents of the United States acted accordingly. All that remains now is to see what more our government, and the new administration, is willing to do about it.
