Team Obama Opens Investigation of CIA Officials for Treating Al-Qaeda Killers Badly

“On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.

Barack Obama
This Week
Interview with George Stephanopoulos
January 2009


Just words…

Team Obama will go ahead with their investigation of the CIA. After all, three psycho Al-Qaeda terrorists were waterboarded by intelligence officers. And, because they were waterboarded the evil Bush regime was able to prevent another 9-11 style attack on Los Angeles that saved thousands of US lives.
These officials must be punished!

The Obama Administration announced today that they will go ahead and investigate the previous administration after all.
The Washington Post reported:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has decided to appoint a prosecutor to examine nearly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators and contractors may have violated anti-torture laws and other statutes when they allegedly threatened terrorism suspects, according to two sources familiar with the move.

Holder is poised to name John Durham, a career Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut, to lead the inquiry, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is not complete.

Durham’s mandate, the sources added, will be relatively narrow: to look at whether there is enough evidence to launch a full-scale criminal investigation of current and former CIA personnel who may have broken the law in their dealings with detainees. Many of the harshest CIA interrogation techniques have not been employed against terrorism suspects for four years or more.

The attorney general selected Durham in part because the longtime prosecutor is familiar with the CIA and its past interrogation regime. For nearly two years, Durham has been probing whether laws against obstruction or false statements were violated in connection with the 2005 destruction of CIA videotapes. The tapes allegedly depicted brutal scenes including waterboarding of some of the agency’s high value detainees. That inquiry is proceeding before a grand jury in Alexandria, although lawyers following the investigation have cast doubt on whether it will result in any criminal charges.

Word of Holder’s decision comes on the same day that the Obama administration will issue a 2004 report by the then-CIA Inspector General. Among other things, the IG questioned the effectiveness of harsh interrogation tactics that included simulated drowning and wall slamming. A federal judge in New York forced the administration to release the secret report after a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union.

This is outrageous.

UPDATE: Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell responded to the news this afternoon:

U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell made the following statement Monday regarding reports that Attorney General Holder has appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the CIA officials who interrogated Al-Qaeda terrorists:

“We must remain mindful that we still are very much a nation at war with terrorists who spend every hour of their day planning how to hurt America and Americans. That’s why reports that the Department of Justice has directed a special prosecutor to investigate the men and women tasked with keeping America safe is such a poor and misguided decision.

“Several years ago, career professionals at the Department decided the facts did not support prosecuting America’s intelligence professionals based on the practices at issue today. Now, the administration risks chilling our defense and intelligence community’s ability to protect us from future terrorist attacks by reopening this matter. If these reports are true, the American people will be rightly outraged by the administration’s actions in this critical area.”

More… Tom W. added this on the investigation, via Uncle Jimbo at BlackFive:

It’ll bomb, like everything else Obama does. Here are some of the so-called crimes committed by the interrogators:

1. They told Khaled Sheik Mohammed that if there was another terrorist attack, they’d murder his family. They didn’t murder his family or even intend to. It was a ruse.

2. They brought a power drill into an interrogation and played with it to make the detainee think they might use it on him. They didn’t use it on him.

3. They pretended to shoot another detainee, which made the detainee in question begin singing.

Good luck trying to convince the electorate that these are “war crimes,” Obama, especially since the same CIA Inspector General’s report proves that using these ruses saved American lives and allowed us to foil several terrorist attacks.

UPDATE 2: Joe Leiberman slams Holder’s investigation.

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Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016. In 2023, The Gateway Pundit received the Most Trusted Print Media Award at the American Liberty Awards.

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Thanks for sharing!