Isikoff: Justice Dept. may pursue torture probes anyway

[kpete]

Source: Raw Story

Isikoff: Justice Dept. may pursue torture probes anyway

By David Edwards

Published: April 21, 2009

The Obama administration has made it clear that it has no intention of prosecuting individual CIA officers who acted in good faith under the Bush administration’s torture memos, and White House advisor Rahm Emanuel stated on Sunday that the officials who devised the policy “should not be prosecuted either.” However, the desires of the White House do not control the Justice Department.

Journalist Michael Isikoff, who has been talking with Justice Department officials, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday, “Just listening to some of the comments in the last few days, particularly from Rahm Emanuel and Robert Gibbs about how the president is focused on looking forward, not backward, and he is not interested in seeing these people prosecuted, there are some people in the Justice Department who are listening to that and saying, ‘That’s not their decision to make. Decisions about criminal prosecutions are made by the Justice Department based on the facts and the law.’”

“There’s actually sort of a taboo,” Isikoff added, “about the White House meddling and dictating to the Justice Department about who should be investigated and who shouldn’t.”

According to an article by Isikoff and Evan Thomas in the current issue of Newsweek, “Senior Justice Department lawyers and other advisers, who declined to be identified discussing a sensitive subject, say Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has discussed naming a senior prosecutor or outside counsel to review whether CIA interrogators exceeded legal boundaries–and whether Bush administration officials broke the law by giving the CIA permission to torture in the first place.”


Read more: http://rawstory.com/08/blog/2009/04/21/isikoff-justice-dept-may-prosecute-officials-for-ordering-torture/

[ixion]

1. the desires of the White House do not control the Justice Department.

Unless, of course, that was the DoJ under BushCo... then it was there only to do his bidding.

[No Elephants]

2. Holder to buck the guy who hired him on an issue this big? I would like to

think the world actually works that way, but I'll wait for the convictions to be handed down before I start doing the happy dance.