In other words this investigation is guaranteed to piss off everybody and to solve nothing. The big boys skate while little guys sweat.

"Bull" Durham put a client of mine in prison 20-plus years ago. I didn't know he was still out there.

Well, they CLAIM "Many of the harshest CIA interrogation techniques have not been employed against terrorism suspects for four years or more."

Who says? We don't know, because the "journalist" doesn't say.

Well, excuse me if I assume whoever is making the claim is blowing smoke out their ass.

"Based on his c.v., Holder seems like a credible, veteran prosecutor." I think you mean Durham, not Holder. Great, so more little fish get netted while the sharks go free. Nation of laws indeed.

"Based on his c.v., Holder seems like a credible, veteran prosecutor." Steve, you mean Durham.

Until a full airing of what the special prosecutor finds regarding the illegal torture policies that monopolized the Bush/Cheney Era, our moral and political high ground will be moribund!

We are no better or worse than any third-rate polity when we choose to become what it is we contend is repugnant to our already firmly established culural identity. Originators, sanctioners, practitioners and complicit parties need to stand in the docket and take their sentences because they have crossed a line too firm to cross - they took the democratic and made it authoritarian. They took decency and turned it on its head. They took international and national law and shit on it!

For these transgressions, full and unconditional prosecution is in order. Anything short of such an outcome is dangerous folly! -Kevo

OK, so Durham will be investigating the small fry. Fine with me, as long as we rendition the big sharks to, say, Syria, *without* any nonsense about due process. Live by the sword (or torture), etc. And I'm only half joking...

In case anyone is wondering, equivocation on crap like this is exactly why Obama is loosing support on the left. It's not political jujitsu. It's hypocrisy. You want to be on the moral high-ground, then you have to take the moral high-ground. Don't tell us that it's immoral to have 47 million uninsured Americans, but you won't provide a public option. Don't tell us that it's immoral to torture, but you don't want to prosecute torturers.

Molly Ivan's once said "All anyone needs to enjoy the state legislature is a strong stomach and a complete insensitivity to the needs of the people. As long as you don’t think about what that peculiar body should be doing and what it actually is doing to the quality of life in Texas, then it’s all marvelous fun." It's disappointing that the same can now be said of the federal government with a democratic president, 60 senators in the democratic caucus, and an overwhelming number of democrats in the congress.

The Obama administration should spare us the charade and simply announce it was all Lynndie England's fault. Justice has already been served, and would the last person to leave the room please turn out the lights?

Obama has betrayed his oath to preserve and protect the Constitution no less than George W. Bush.

The law is dead. Long live presidential dictate.

As for Durham, if his name sounds familiar, there's a good reason -- in January 2008, then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed him to investigate whether CIA officials broke the law when interrogation videos of two al Qaeda suspects were destroyed.

And my, that was a credible, veteran whitewash, wasn't it.

I can never remember; was it Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer who tricked people into painting the fence for him?

So let me get this straight.

If one of these little guys has evidence directly implicating one or more of the big guys, Holder doesn't want to know about it. No plea deals. Just prosecuting guys at the bottom, while the white collar guys collect fees as comsultants and Fucksnews media personalities. Forgive me if I don't swoon with gratitude.

Investigating CIA interrogators is going to open up a big can of worms.

Holder is trying to criminalize mistorture.

"Investigating CIA interrogators is going to open up a big can of worms".

"Worms" sounds about right. Meanwhile, the vipers will slither free.

Obama is a utter disgrace.

Hmmm, I wonder if there are any prosecutors from the Nuremberg Trials still alive and kicking who could be appointed to investigate the eight years of the Bush/Cheney administration and prosecute anyone found to have committed war crimes?

And would they fall for this Nuremberg Trials-reversal?

What I mean is, at Nuremberg top Nazi officials were held accountable and any of their underlings who carried out war crimes on orders of top Nazi officials couldn't use the defense that they were "just following orders. All were held accountable, top to bottom.

On the other hand and sixty-five years later,under this Nuremberg Trials-reversal being pushed by the Washington D.C. establishment, all Bush/Cheney officials will face absolutely no consequences or punishment for their having authorized war crimes committed by those either ordered or paid to commit these war crimes in the name of the United States of America, and the low-low-low-level underlings who were "just following orders" (in the name of the Bush/Cheney administration and weaselly legal eagles like David Addington, John Yoo and other Bush/Cheney administration criminal lawyers, and presumably all branches of our federal government), will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Unfortunately, there probably aren't any Nuremberg Trial prosecutors still alive to make sure that justice is done and the Bush/Cheney administration war criminals are prosecuted and punished, and based on what we've seen so far from the Obama administration, President Obama (the Constitutional Scholar President) wouldn't appoint one anyway. Sigh.

The closest thing you have is Senator Chris Dodd, son of Thomas J Dodd.

Go look it up...

an article about Dodd and his father from 2007. It contains some revelatory passages.

In the book's opening pages, which puts Nuremberg in the context of today, the Connecticut senator recalls how the patriotism of former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland was questioned by the White House because the Democratic lawmaker opposed a provision in the bill creating the Homeland Security Department in 2002.

Cleland, a triple amputee Vietnam War veteran, lost his Senate seat that year.

``I had no doubt that if we, as a group, had the audacity to take a firm stance against the commander in chief on the interrogation issue we'd get the same treatment,'' Dodd writes.

Chastened Democrats backed a GOP compromise that ``seemed to favor a reasonable plan for treatment of prisoners and retain elements of habeus corpus,'' Dodd writes.

But the compromise didn't withstand Bush's review, and the final legislation allowed the president to define U.S. commitments under the Geneva conventions.

`` ... We had been played,'' Dodd writes. ``In agreeing to all this, Congress has shirked its oversight responsibilities.''

Dodd's conscience took another blow when he agreed to drop plans to block the bill via filibuster.

``The filibuster might have worked,'' Dodd writes, ``Dropping it, I decided, would be my last compromise on the issue.''

With the bill poised to pass into law, Dodd voted against it after delivering a floor speech in which he quoted Justice Robert Jackson at Nuremberg: ``We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our lips as well.''

Dodd now seems to wonder whether he dampened his lips on a poisoned chalice by not fighting harder against the Bush administration in the face of fears raised by Cleland's demise.

``That element (fear) was part of the rational why people were so gun-shy in '06,'' Dodd told The Associated Press in an interview about the book. The Supreme Court will hear challenges to the new law this term.

I wrote at the time:

"It's rather sad that Dodd admits the Democratic leadership are more concerned with losing their sinecure seats than with upholding the standards and principles that made America the home of liberty - but it isn't new news. As for the GOP, they sold their freedom-loving souls in return for political power built on fearmongering a long time ago. It would be nice if the next U.S. president would be someone we could trust to roll back all this unjust trampling on the rule of law - especially from the point of view of the rest of us on this planet who must live with the biggest kid on the block no matter how he throws his weight around - but I won't be holding my breath."

I'm still not.

Regards, Steve @ Newshoggers