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sponsorship
Could the Bush administration lawyers who wrote the torture memos really be on the hook, as I suggested Monday (and plenty of their critics have longed for)? President Obama left that door surprisingly ajar today. From his press conference:
With respect to those who formulated those
legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the
Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to
prejudge that. I think that there are a host of very complicated issues
involved there.
So it's Eric Holder's call. Despite Obama's push to move forward without looking back, once you put historical evidence out there that's as disturbing as these memos are, it takes on a life of it's own. At the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates asks how we can expect the attorney general to be independent of the president since he or she is an appointee of the executive branch. It's a good question, and the difficulty Ta-Nehisi has his finger on is why we cherish the memory of Eliot Richardson, the Nixon AG who refused to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox when the president ordered him to. Richardson famously had to resign, but Obama is deliberately signaling that Holder has room to make his own decision. What happens next? I'd say all eyes are on the long-delayed report from DoJ's Office of Professional Responsibility that reportedly creams the DoJ lawyers who provided the legal rationale for torture. The Bush administration sat on it. Time for the Obama team to let the report fly.
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