links for 2009-09-23
Presidents Should Take Organizartional Advice from Bruce Bartlett

The Torture Memos: A Very Good Catch by Marc Ambinder

Marc writes:

Another Justification For Holder's Torture Re-Examination: One of the main lines of argument cited by the seven former CIA directors in urging President Obama to reverse his attorney general's decision to review CIA interrogations is that career lawyers at the Department of Justice had already reviewed those same files.... But the Justice Department's response to these claims contains a buried piece of information: "Given the recommendation from the Office of Professional Responsibility as well as other available information, he believed the appropriate course of action was to ask John Durham to conduct a preliminary review..."

For the uninitiated, this means that the preliminary report sent to Holder by the Office of Professional Responsibility on the torture-related lawyering of the Bush-era DOJ political appointees--a report prepared by career prosecutors--recommended that the cases deemed closed during the Bush administration be re-examined.

Holder is following the advice of his in-house 'internal affairs' shop... and didn't simply make the decision after reviewing the files himself.

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