Will Holder’s ‘Reckoning’ on Detainee Abuse Fall Flat?

Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to name a career prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA interrogation abuses would seem to fulfill a dramatic pledge he made last year when he was promoting the election of Barack Obama. "We owe the American people a reckoning," Holder said in a much-quoted speech that blasted the excesses of the Bush administration in its prosecution of the war on terror.

But while Holder's move in choosing John Durham to probe agency abuses has roiled the intelligence community and infuriated Republicans on Capitol Hill, it is far from clear that such a "reckoning" will ever come. The investigation Holder has directed Durham to conduct is sharply circumscribed. It won't involve the conduct of senior Bush officials who approved waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques. In a statement Monday, Holder said it won't endanger any CIA operatives who relied "in good faith" on controversial Justice Department memos that gave the green light to such practices.

Instead, it will involve a "review" of "less than a dozen" cases of alleged abuse by individual CIA operatives and contractors that took place years ago, according to a senior official who asked not to be identified talking about what is about to become a criminal investigation. The operatives are alleged to have violated the letter, if not the spirit, of those Justice Department memos. But Justice Department officials acknowledge that Durham's review may never result in any prosecutions.  Indeed, virtually all of them were previously examined by a special Justice Department task force and rejected for prosecution due to a lack of witnesses and evidence. "These are hard cases," said the senior official.

This will hardly satisfy human-rights advocates and others who say the startling alleged abuses unveiled Monday with the release of a long-suppressed CIA inspector general’s report require a far more fundamental probe of how the U.S. government lost its moral compass in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.

"Simply anemic," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, about the scope of  the new Justice probe.