re: #405 tradewind

No, they don’t have to.
One quiet word from TOTUS to Holder would have quashed that, and everyone in Washington knows it.

False. Look at six degrees comment above as well.

Had Holder not appointed the special prosecutor, the outcry from civil libertarians would have been much uglier and much more widespread. Holder is doing damage control. So is Obama.

The result is that some lowlevel CIA interrogators will be hung out to dry for exceeding the guidelines—- which will have the effect of retroactively legitimising the guidelines themselves and the people who wrote them and ordered them written, thus insulating people like Yoo from any possible future prosecution. It will also end all debate about the guidelines themselves.

i realise many on the right would like to pretend that this prosecution is really about Obama paying back the Bush admin, or pandering to the left, or something else— but it is, quite literally, the least Holder and Obama can do, and it is intended to protect themselves from future prosecutions at least as much as it is intended to protect the former administration and its officials.

As usual, politics turns out to be a lot more complicated than it might at first appear.