Critical Report
Still, Holder might face public pressure to expand the probe, if and when a CIA inspector general's report is released that reportedly calls into question the legality of the agency's torture of "high-value" detainees.
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The secret findings of CIA Inspector General John Helgerson led to eight criminal referrals to the Justice Department for homicide and other misconduct, but those cases languished as Vice President Dick Cheney is said to have intervened to constrain Helgerson's inquiries.
Holder may reopen those cases, but if an investigation is narrowly focused on the CIA interrogators and outside contractors and does not include the Bush administration officials who implemented the policies, then the probe would likely amount to a whitewash, much like the Abu Ghraib case.
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Of the 12 government investigations launched in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, not one scrutinized the roles of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or any other senior Bush administration official. The inquiries concentrated instead on the military police identified in the photographs, like Private Lynndie England and Corporal Charles Graner Jr.
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Back in 2004, even the neoconservative editorial page of The Washington Post found the Abu Ghraib "whitewashing" of the higher-ups' roles hard to take.
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"[D]ecisions by Mr. Rumsfeld and the Justice Department to permit coercive interrogation techniques previously considered unacceptable for US personnel influenced practices at the prison at Guantà ¡namo Bay, Cuba, and later spread to Afghanistan and Iraq," a Post editorial said. "Methods such as hooding, enforced nudity, sensory deprivation and the use of dogs to terrorize - all originally approved by the defense secretary - were widely employed, even though they violate the Geneva Conventions."
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Now, five years later in a July 27 editorial, The Post deviated from the logic of its earlier position, by urging Holder to move forward with an investigation focused only on rogue individual interrogators who exceeded the legal limits outlined in the torture memos.
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Evidence of Approval
But such an approach would ignore evidence that senior Bush administration officials and high-level officials at CIA headquarters in Langley micromanaged the torture of at least one high-level detainee.
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