The Long Play

by Patrick Appel

Daphne Eviatar once again defends Holder prosecuting CIA interrogators who went beyond the Yoo memos:

Whether it’s a good idea to focus on these sorts of cases, which clearly went beyond the bounds laid out by the Bush Justice Department’s legal memos, or whether Holder ought to be prosecuting the authors of the memos themselves is beside the point. Because the CIA agent who clubbed a man to death or hung him from his wrists on the ceiling or left someone in sub-zero temperatures chained to the floor naked is going to have to explain how he came to think that was acceptable interrogation conduct. And that’s likely to reveal that the bounds we’ve all seen in John Yoo’s torture memos – many of which were drafted years after these murders occurred were never articulated to the interrogators on the front lines.