Holder leaves door open to investigate Congress members who knew about interrogations

[masuki bance]

Alexander: Why not probe Congress on briefings?

During a scantly noticed exchange in a Thursday Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) asked Attorney General Eric Holder a potentially explosive question -- given the furor over Nancy Pelosi's 2002 interrogation briefing.

Alexander wanted to know if the AG would consider investigating what House and Senate members knew about torture and when they knew it. And Holder didn't exactly reject the idea.

ALEXANDER: Should you follow these facts and continue in an investigation if you’re investigating lawyers at the Department of Justice who wrote legal opinions authorizing certain interrogations, wouldn’t it also be appropriate to investigate the CIA employees or contractors or other people from intelligence agencies who asked or created the interrogation techniques or officials in the Bush Administration who approved them or what about members of Congress who were informed of them or know about them or approved them or encouraged them? Wouldn’t they also be appropriate parts of such an investigation?

HOLDER: Well there is, as has been publicly reported, an OPR inquiry into the work of the attorneys who prepared those OLC memoranda. It is not in final form yet and I have not reviewed that report. I will look at that report and make a determination as to what we want to do with it. It deals, I suspect, not only with the attorneys, but people that they interacted with, so I think we will gain some insights by reviewing that report. Our desire is not to do anything that would be perceived as political or partisan. We do want to report, to the extent that we can do that, but as I said, my responsibility is to enforce the laws of this nation and to the extent that we see violations of those laws, we will take the appropriate action.

ALEXANDER: If you’re going to investigate the lawyers whose opinion was asked about whether this is legal or not, I would assume you could also go to the people who created the techniques, the officials who approved them, and the officials in Congress who knew about them and may have encouraged them.

HOLDER: Hypothetically that might be true, I don’t know. What I want to do is look at, in a very concrete way, what that OPR report says and get a better sense from that report about what it says about the interaction of those lawyers with people in the administration and see from there whether further action is warranted.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0509/Alexander_Why_not_probe_Congress_on_briefings.html

Holder needs to stay away from right-wing rhetoric.

[w4rma]

1. Very good. (nt)