Legal News

John Durham, the Man Picked to Investigate the C.I.A.

By Ashby Jones

Well here we go.

Attorney General Eric Holder has decided the time is now to investigate whether CIA officials or contractors broke the law when interrogating terrorism suspects overseas during the Bush administration. He tapped federal prosecutor John Durham to lead the investigation. Click here for the WSJ story; here for the NYT story; here for the WaPo story.

The investigation wasn’t necessarily triggered by a report released by the DOJ, but did coincide with it. The report, prepared by the CIA’s inspector general, detailed some of the interrogation practices. The report says one interrogator threatened to kill the children of one Sept. 11 suspect, while others used a “pressure point” tactic that temporarily choked off the flow of blood to the brain before the detainee was revived.

The AP has also reported that another interrogator allegedly tried to convince a different detainee that his mother would be sexually assaulted in front of him, though the interrogator denied making such a threat.

So who is this John Durham? Early last year, he was tapped by former AG Mukasey to investigate destruction of videotapes made of certain CIA interrogations of detainees — an investigation that’s continuing.

At the time, the WaPo ran a profile of Durham, the deputy U.S. attorney up in the Nutmeg State.

The takeaway, Durham, a career prosecutor and registered Republican, is a guy who takes his job seriously. Wrote the Post:

Former colleagues said the deputy U.S. attorney is known for seeking maximum sentences, shunning plea bargains and avoiding the spotlight. Four friends said they could not recall him losing a case in more than 30 years as a prosecutor, almost all of it spent fighting organized crime and gang violence in Connecticut. . . . Friends describe him as nonpartisan and driven by a strong sense of morality that paid off in cases against violent criminals. . . .

Several courtroom adversaries compared Durham, a Roman Catholic reared in the Northeast, to Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the staid U.S. attorney in Chicago who served as special prosecutor in the investigation of the leaked identity of a CIA officer. “He’s Fitzgerald with a sense of humor,” said Hugh O’Keefe, a Connecticut criminal defense lawyer who has known Durham for 20 years.

“John is a dedicated prosecutor who sees things in absolute terms,” said H. James Pickerstein, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who hired Durham in the Connecticut office in the 1980s . . . . Pickerstein said Durham relied on a “good versus evil” vision of the world while overseeing the probe of former governor John G. Rowland.

Click here, also, for a story on Durham from the Hartford Courant in 2001, which makes hay of the fact that Durham really really doesn’t like publicity. Click here, as well, for a quick timeline of Durham’s career.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 24, 2009 (boomark / email).