Stuart Taylor on CIA Prosecutions:

The National Journal's Stuart Taylor has a typically excellent column up this week on the CIA prosecutor, Obama, and Holder. ("Why Holder May Enrage the Left," Opening Argument, National Journal, September 5, 2009.) The column speculates - Stuart's term; he doesn't suggest he is doing otherwise - that hard-boiled political calculations drive Obama and Holder:

I doubt that Holder or Obama has any intention of prosecuting such underlings as the CIA agent who strayed beyond Justice Department legal guidance by threatening terrorist mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed with the murder of his children.

I also see no reason to disbelieve Holder's and Obama's promises not to go after interrogators who acted "in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance," or to suspect them of targeting the high-level Bush administration officials who approved brutal methods such as waterboarding.

Although Holder was reportedly horrified when he read detailed accounts of brutal interrogations, he must understand that horror cannot justify explosive prosecutions -- with little chance of convictions -- of honorably motivated public servants.

That's not to deny the possibility that John Durham, the career Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut to whom Holder assigned the inquiry, may bring more cases like the one in which a CIA contractor, David Passaro, has already been imprisoned for torturing a detainee to death. But Passaro's actions were so outrageous that his prosecution was relatively uncontroversial.

The column then offers a series of more specific reasons why Holder would take the step of naming a prosecutor, even though the result, in the article's view, is likely to be anticlimactic. I myself am not so sanguine....

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