Ethics

Holder's Investigations: Better Than Nothing?

By Ed Brayton

Last week I wrote about Attorney General Eric Holder moving closer to appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush torture regime, but only to focus on "rogue" agents who may have gone beyond the scope of the now-infamous torture memos.

In that post I agreed with Andrew Sullivan and most civil libertarian leaders in calling that idea worse than doing nothing, because it would validate what went on within the boundaries of those torture memos and facilitate the punishment of low-level functionaries while letting those who built the torture regime to go unscathed. Daphne Eviatar of the Washington Independent and a frequent guest on my radio show, filling in for Glenn Greenwald, argues that such investigations might, in fact, lead to prosecutions of the right people:

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on August 19, 2009 (boomark / email).