Torture

On The DOJ's Torture Investigation

NPR's website is running a story by Liz Halloran today about Eric Holder's decision to investigate the CIA, which includes some observations from yours truly:

It didn't help Obama's standing in the liberal community that on the same day Holder appointed John Durham to investigate the CIA's interrogation tactics, the White House said it would continue the Bush administration practice of transferring suspected terrorists to other countries to be held and interrogated.

The administration said that the practice, known as rendition and condemned by human rights advocates, would proceed with more oversight.

"I think the Obama administration is having a hard time calibrating all of this," says Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the New Democrat Network. "They were left a bad set of practices and realities by the Bush administration."

"The Obama team is finding that unraveling this is harder than they thought it would be, and they're trying," Rosenberg says. "But we're going to be having this debate a long time, and this [inquiry] is an important step."

That debate, he says, will necessarily involve how the country treated terrorism suspects in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Suggestions that discussion about what happened in the Bush era is either partisan or out-of-bounds is ridiculous," he says. "Laws may have been broken, and our standing in the world was affected."

"We need to have a conversation about this in our country."

That conversation may be one the president wanted to avoid, but it's one his supporters have insisted on. But many remain unsure of what Obama will do when the investigation is complete and when someone will have to decide whether and how to act on the facts.

It order for you to know where you want to go it sure is helpful to understand where exactly you have been.

Eric Holder's decision was clearly the right one.  We need to know more about what happened with these matters in the Bush era.  This is a good first step.  And enough already with the GOP arrogantly defending the CIA now, after spending much of the Bush era blaming it for all the President's mistakes.

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