Holder May Probe Torture

This Newsweek article (release today from the pending July 20 publication) proclaims in its subheading, “Obama doesn't want to look back, but Attorney General Eric Holder may probe Bush-era torture anyway.” In the article the author, Daniel Klaidman, says, “For a new administration to reach back and investigate its predecessor is rare, if not unprecedented.” When compared with the “unprecedented” lawlessness which was the hallmark of the Bush Administration, that ridiculous excuse holds no water.

On the release of the “torture memos,” Klaidman writes:

Holder and his team celebrated quietly, and waited for national outrage to build. But they'd miscalculated. The memos had already received such public notoriety that the new details in them did not shock many people. (Even the revelation, a few days later, that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another detainee had been waterboarded hundreds of times did not drastically alter the contours of the story.)

It is truly dishonest to make such a claim when the mainstream media—in the few instances in which the memos were mentioned at all—uniformly derailed the debate by using highly political (in MSM terms, “non-judgmental”) terminology to frame the issue (e.g. “enhanced interrogation techniques” and methods “which some call torture”) and quickly changed the debate to “did it work?” This was immediately followed by the obscene Cheney Torture Media Tour in which the former Vice Torturer repeatedly claimed that these “techniques” had “saved thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of lives.” A few public statements by President Obama and Attorney General Holder would have gone a long way toward refocusing the conversation.

If AG Holder hasn’t yet heard the voices of outrage, let’s help him out. He can be contacted at:

Office of the Attorney General
Phone: 202-514-2001
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Fax:202-307-6777