The Cautious Attorney General

Here are excerpts (with added annotation) from a Reuters article appearing in the online version of the New York Times on May 7 under the title, “Holder Cautious on U.S. Interrogations Probes”.

Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday vowed to move cautiously and avoid partisan politics in deciding whether any Bush-era officials should be prosecuted for justifying harsh interrogation techniques.

Since we assume that the highest legal officer in the land will act cautiously and evenhandedly when enforcing the law, why should it be thought necessary to point this out, unless it is to prime us that it would be partisan to go after Bush, should we consider Bush to be a Bush-era official. The same avoidance of “partisanship” would apply to such as Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and those in the general class.

Holder spoke a day after The New York Times reported that an internal Justice Department review had determined that Bush administration officials committed serious lapses of judgment in authorizing tough questioning procedures but should not be prosecuted.

It might be a serious lapse of judgment to authorize tough questioning procedures, but, of course, if it was just “tough” there would have been no need for an internal Justice Department review. Thus the review must have concluded that no lapse of judgment could excuse torture, and instead of examining the actions on merit, it merely defined them down.

Pelosi stuck to her argument that she had not been told waterboarding was used, said Brendan Daly, her spokesman.

“As this document shows, the Speaker was briefed only once, in September 2002. The briefers described these techniques, said they were legal, but said that waterboarding had not yet been used,” Daly said.

Only one briefing, and they hadn’t waterboarded yet. Nancy is only against waterboarding after it is used.

Republican Senator Lamar Alexander said he supported Obama’s view that it was best to look forward rather than launch potentially far-ranging investigations into past events.

“What about members of Congress who were informed of them or knew about them or approved them or encouraged them, wouldn’t they also be appropriate parts of such an investigation?” Alexander said.

You got it, Lamar. And while we’re at it, “far-ranging investigations into past events” can be described as good criminal work, and you can skip the “past events” because those are the only kind given to investigation.

“Our desire is not to do anything that would be perceived as political, as partisan. We do want to look forward to the extent that we can do that,” Holder said.

But he added, “to the extent that we see violations of those laws, we’ll take the appropriate actions.”

Eric, you are not going to see violations of those laws when it comes to the high-ups. It’s noteworthy that you used the word “perceived”. In so doing, you make the partisan designation in advance.