"With just two weeks of training, or about half the time it takes to become a truck driver, the CIA certified its spies as interrogation experts after 9/11 and handed them the keys to the most coercive tactics in the agency's arsenal. It was a haphazard process, cobbled together in the months following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington by an agency that had never been in the interrogation business.The result was a patchwork program in which rules kept shifting and the goals often were unclear.
So -- truck drivers get their work monitored by supervisors but these EIT villains did not have their crimes evaluated.
"But the road to Dick Cheney and his love of torture may be stunted; the special prosecutor will be conducting a 'preliminary' investigation to determine whether a 'full' investigation is warranted. It seems counterproductive to exert time and effort if one cannot take the evidence where it leads: the highest echelons of Bush administration officials.
And, in her Washington Post article, "Holder Hires Prosecutor to Look Into Alleged CIA Interrogation Abuses, Carrie Johnson writesthat this step may branch off in unforeseen directions and could conceivably capture the upper echelon of the Bush administration...
"Holder has named longtime prosecutor John H. Durham, who has parachuted into crisis situations for both political parties over three decades, to open an early review of nearly a dozen cases of alleged detainee mistreatment at the hands of CIA interrogators and contractors. The announcement raised fresh tensions in an intelligence community fearful that it will bear the brunt of the punishment for Bush-era national security policy, and it immediately provoked criticism from congressional Republicans. Legal analysts said the review, while preliminary, could expand beyond its relatively narrow mandate and ensnare a wider cast of characters. They cited U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation of the leak of a CIA operative's identity, which culminated with the criminal conviction of then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney's chief of staff.
Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Chair of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties said in a media advisory circulated Monday evening, "Former Vice President Cheney's objections to the investigation of possible violations of law committed as part of the Bush administration's interrogation program shows that he still fails to understand the law, the importance of a Justice Department free of political manipulation, or our nation's moral values.
Nadler said Cheney is "essentially saying that any acts performed by members of the CIA -- no matter how illegal or abhorrent -- are okay, and must never be the subject of a criminal investigation. He said, "No matter what anyone in the CIA may do, it need not be subject to the law. This is outrageous, and violates just about every traditional American concept of liberty and justice.
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