Reports late
today that Attorney General Eric Holder is appointing career Justice
Department prosecutor John Durham to investigate whether CIA interrogators may
have tortured detainees in violation of the law have stirred the predictable
outcries.
From Capitol Hill, a
collection of Republican Senators produced a letter
saying, "The intelligence community will be left to wonder whether actions
taken today in the interest of national security will be subject to legal
recriminations when the political winds shift." Rumors
even swirled that renewed scrutiny of the agency's activities had CIA Director
Leon Panetta threatening to resign, though the White House rejected them as
unfounded.
Here's the reality: the Senators who sent up the
protest letter have a point. The law
should not be allowed to be tossed and twisted with every new breeze of public
opinion. The law is the law. And if one administration misinterprets
public outrage at a crime like a terror attack as license to overlook the law
or to bend it to suit the mood of the moment, it is not an option for the next
administration to question that action ... it is an obligation. The whole point of having a legal system is
to have objective standards by which to define acceptable parameters of
behavior.
No employee of the CIA has anything to fear if
they acted within those objective standards. If the investigation demonstrates that anyone in the government
misinterpreted the law for whatever reason and acted in violation of those
laws, their actions should be evaluated within the context of the justice
system. If they had good legal advice
and acted within a reasonable interpretation of the law, then they have nothing
to fear.
Those who fear the investigation are revealing
their lack of faith in our justice system ... a trait that happens to have been
shared by those who went beyond the boundaries of that system in the name of
justice. With some luck the
investigation will remind them that by suggesting justice may lie outside those
boundaries or by suggesting that fundamental rights may be waived due to
circumstances they do more damage to the system than those they were
interrogating were capable of.
My only concern: that by defining the
investigation too narrowly, the rank and file of the CIA will be sacrificed
while those who insisted the laws be bent, broken and ignored will be free to
walk away, perhaps even complaining from the sidelines about the process. If this investigation finds violations of the
law, we can only hope that the well-respected Durham will
follow the actions in question through to their origins and not prosecute
foot-soldiers for the violations of their most senior leaders.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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