Year: 2009

This piece of sorry news comes from NewsWeek:

It’s the morning after Independence Day, and Eric Holder Jr. is feeling the weight of history. The night before, he’d stood on the roof of the White House alongside the president of the United States, leaning over a railing to watch fireworks burst over the Mall, the monuments to Lincoln and Washington aglow at either end. “I was so struck by the fact that for the first time in history an African-American was presiding over this celebration of what our nation is all about,” he says. Now, sitting at his kitchen table in jeans and a gray polo shirt, as his 11-year-old son, Buddy, dashes in and out of the room, Holder is reflecting on his own role. He doesn’t dwell on the fact that he’s the country’s first black attorney general. He is focused instead on the tension that the best of his predecessors have confronted: how does one faithfully serve both the law and the president?

Alone among cabinet officers, attorneys general are partisan appointees expected to rise above partisanship. All struggle to find a happy medium between loyalty and independence. Few succeed. At one extreme looms Alberto Gonzales, who allowed the Justice Department to be run like Tammany Hall. At the other is Janet Reno, whose righteousness and folksy eccentricities marginalized her within the Clinton administration. Lean too far one way and you corrupt the office, too far the other way and you render yourself impotent. Mindful of history, Holder is trying to get the balance right. “You have the responsibility of enforcing the nation’s laws, and you have to be seen as neutral, detached, and nonpartisan in that effort,” Holder says. “But the reality of being A.G. is that I’m also part of the president’s team. I want the president to succeed; I campaigned for him. I share his world view and values.”

These are not just the philosophical musings of a new attorney general. Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama’s domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. “I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president’s agenda,” he says. “But that can’t be a part of my decision.”

[….]

Holder began to review those policies in April. As he pored over reports and listened to briefings, he became increasingly troubled. There were startling indications that some interrogators had gone far beyond what had been authorized in the legal opinions issued by the Justice Department, which were themselves controversial. He told one intimate that what he saw “turned my stomach.”

It was soon clear to Holder that he might have to launch an investigation to determine whether crimes were committed under the Bush administration and prosecutions warranted. The obstacles were obvious. For a new administration to reach back and investigate its predecessor is rare, if not unprecedented. After having been deeply involved in the decision to authorize Ken Starr to investigate Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, Holder well knew how politicized things could get. He worried about the impact on the CIA, whose operatives would be at the center of any probe. And he could clearly read the signals coming out of the White House. President Obama had already deflected the left wing of his party and human-rights organizations by saying, “We should be looking forward and not backwards” when it came to Bush-era abuses.

Still, Holder couldn’t shake what he had learned in reports about the treatment of prisoners at the CIA’s “black sites.” If the public knew the details, he and his aides figured, there would be a groundswell of support for an independent probe. He raised with his staff the possibility of appointing a prosecutor. According to three sources familiar with the process, they discussed several potential choices and the criteria for such a sensitive investigation. Holder was looking for someone with “gravitas and grit,” according to one of these sources, all of whom declined to be named. At one point, an aide joked that Holder might need to clone Patrick Fitzgerald, the hard-charging, independent-minded U.S. attorney who had prosecuted Scooter Libby in the Plamegate affair. In the end, Holder asked for a list of 10 candidates, five from within the Justice Department and five from outside.

[…]

The next few weeks, though, could test Holder’s confidence. After the prospect of torture investigations seemed to lose momentum in April, the attorney general and his aides turned to other pressing issues. They were preoccupied with Gitmo, developing a hugely complex new set of detention and prosecution policies, and putting out the daily fires that go along with running a 110,000-person department. The regular meetings Holder’s team had been having on the torture question died down. Some aides began to wonder whether the idea of appointing a prosecutor was off the table.

But in late June Holder asked an aide for a copy of the CIA inspector general’s thick classified report on interrogation abuses. He cleared his schedule and, over two days, holed up alone in his Justice Depart ment office, immersed himself in what Dick Cheney once referred to as “the dark side.” He read the report twice, the first time as a lawyer, looking for evidence and instances of transgressions that might call for prosecution. The second time, he started to absorb what he was reading at a more emotional level. He was “shocked and saddened,” he told a friend, by what government servants were alleged to have done in America’s name. When he was done he stood at his window for a long time, staring at Constitution Avenue.

I hope that if and when Mr. Holder decides to appoint this special prosecutor; that he keeps the follow items in mind: (H/T to The Corner)

*  Alberto Gonzales did not attempt to mislead Congress in 2007 when he testified that the controversy that erupted at the Justice Department in 2004 was not over what was popularly known as the “terrorist surveillance program” (i.e., the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program to intercept suspected terrorist communications that crossed U.S. borders — the effort the Left smeared as “domestic spying”).  In fact, as Gonzales told the Senate judiciary Committee, the controversy was about other intelligence activities.

*  When congressional Democrats rolled their eyes, suggested that Gonzales was lying, and groused that a special prosecutor should be appointed, they well knew he wasn’t lying — but they also knew he couldn’t discuss the intellligence activities at the center of the controversy because those activities were (and remain) highly classified. That is, they knowingly badgered the Attorney General of the United States at a hearing in a calculated effort to make him look dishonest and to intimate something they knew to be untrue: namely, that the dispute at DOJ arose because senior officials believed warrantless surveillance was illegal.

*  Before Gonzales and President Bush’s then chief-of-staff, Andy Card, went to see Attorney General Ashcroft in the hospital (where he was being treated for pancreatitis), President Bush directed his administration to meet with top congressional Democrats and Republicans (Senate leaders Frist and Daschle, Speaker Hastert and House minority leader Pelosi, Roberts and Rockefeller from Senate Intel, and Goss and Harman from House Intel) to alert them that Ashcroft’s deputy, Jim Comey, had refused to sign off on intelligence activities that Ashcroft had previously approved.  Advised of the problem, the Gang of Eight did not agree to a quick legislative fix but, according to Gonzales’s contemporaneous notes, agreed that the intelligence activities should continue.  (Three years later, after Gonzales’s testimony, Pelosi, Rockefeller and Daschle claimed that they hadn’t agreed.)

*  Only after this meeting with the bipartisan congressional leaders, and with the prior 45-day authorization for all the program’s activities about to expire, did Gonzales and Card go to the hospital to visit the ailing Ashcroft — at the direction of President Bush.

*  Between the time the time the collection intelligence activities that came to be known as the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was first authorized after the 9/11 attacks until the warrantless surveillance aspect of the program was exposed by the New York Times in December 2005, the Bush administration briefed the bipartisan leadership of the congressional intelligence committees 17 times about the activities involved in the program.

In sum, congressional Democrats knew about the program and knew that the dissent of the Justice Department’s senior leadership in 2004 was not about warrantless surveillance. They knew that if they postured that the dissent was about warrantless surveillance, Gonzales — not an adept communicator — would not be able to rebut them in a public hearing because the details of the dispute were classified.  Congressional Democrats also knew that President Bush agreed to make changes in the program in March 2004 to assuage DOJ’s concerns, and they knew that the program activities continued thereafter for a year-and-a-half (i.e., until the Times blew part of the program) without incident and with bipartisan congressional leadership continuing to be briefed.

The point I am trying to make is this, that the so-called “torture”; which was approved by Congress, prevented attacks on Los Angeles and various cities around the country.  It also saves lives and gets people to talk. It is also used to train our Military as well.

My advice to Holder is this; if you want to tear this Country apart, again, after a long eight years of it being sharply divided; go right ahead. If you want to tear down the Democratic Party; you know; the one of your own boss? The go right ahead and do this. If you want ruin the chances of America ever defending itself from another terrorist attack, then go right ahead and do this.  If you want to make a mockery of yourself and the entire polical system in America, go right Mr. Holder and do what you must do. It will be on your hands, what becomes of this Country.

I dread the next coming months.

Others: Gateway Pundit, Atlas Shrugs,