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Obama: Holder's Call

Could the Bush administration lawyers who wrote the torture memos really be on the hook, as I suggested Monday (and plenty of their critics have longed for)? President Obama left that door surprisingly ajar today. From his press conference:

With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that.  I think that there are a host of very complicated issues involved there.

Eric Holder's Bold Move in the Ted Stevens Case

Racial Slur? What Racial Slur?

Gitmo Drama

Binyam Mohamed, the first Guantanamo detainee released by President Obama, flew back to his native Britain this week and, like many a former detainee before him, said the U.S. had tortured him. He used the adjective "medieval" to make sure to get his point across.

In a sense, this is useful for the Obama administration, as Attorney General Eric Holder travels to Guantanamo for military briefings about the 245 remaining detainees. Disturbing accounts like Mohamed's—though aspects of them can't be verified—spotlight all the problems with the Bush approach to the detainees, and all the reasons for Obama to deal with them differently and eventually to close Gitmo. And there's another kind of utility, as well: The attention to Mohamed and torture takes attention away from the dense, tricky legal questions on which the Obama lawyers have been siding with their Bush predecessors. So far, there's the new administration's defense of the state-secrets privilege in the case about extraordinary rendition and torture by the CIA, its quiet effort to dismiss the lawsuit demanding that Bush officials find 15 million e-mails missing from White House accounts, and the distinct lack of enthusiasm for Senatory Leahy's truth commission proposal. Mohamed's story is terrible, and also easier to make a headline out of.

Tough Talks

We often talk here at Slate about how to have tough conversations. Whether it’s Bristol and Greta and their inability to be candid about teen pregnancy or Meghan’s stunning account of how badly we do at talking about death. Emily and I wrote several years ago about the brutal isolation that arises when you try to talk about pregnancy loss. So often the public call to real, brutal, and honest dialogue is met with a lot of earnestly nodding heads and a request to pass the remote. That said, it’s hard to ignore yesterday’s speech by Attorney General Eric Holder, who used the occasion of Black History Month to ask Americans to stop being “a nation of cowards” when it comes to talking about race. This was not a policy speech. Holder returned over and over to the idea that the “artificial” construct of Black History Month should be used “to foster a period of dialogue among the races.” The call here is for a public debate that is “nuanced” and “principled” and “spirited” and above all, honest. He doesn’t exactly tell us how to get there—he wants us to talk to our colleagues more and blend America's race history into our core curriculum. But it was an incredibly poignant speech about silence and the failures of political speech on hard questions. Here’s hoping it’s not met with more silence.

Politics in the New Era of Responsibility

Thanks, Dahlia, I knew Cornyn was playing games with Hillary's Cabinet confirmation (first his delay over transparency, then being swayed in a “private conversation”).  Now I know why: Just a little demonstration of how we play hardball up on the Hill, Mr. Obama.

Holder’s testimony that waterboarding is indeed torture opened the way for legal consequences for interrogation techniques used under the previous administration. Now Cornyn wants the attorney general nominee to walk back the cat by agreeing to not prosecute. The problem for the Texas Republican senator is he just looks like a thug. Like Secretary of State Clinton, Holder will be confirmed with or without Cornyn’s support. I imagine the torture investigations will make their way through one or two newly constituted committees in the 111th Congress, so the terribly busy new Justice Department won't need to waste resources for a while. Cornyn's weeklong delay of Holder is so bullyish, though, I'm tempted to say, let the witch hunt begin.

Holding Up Holder

Just to connect some dots here: Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are holding up the confirmation vote on President Obama’s nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, in large part because they have “questions for Holder about whether he would favor prosecuting Bush administration officials for their involvement in warrantless wiretapping and harsh detainee interrogation practices.” John Cornyn, R-Texas, says he wants assurances in advance that Holder won’t launch a “witch hunt.”

Anyone else bothered by the fact that America’s top prosecutor is being asked to pledge that he will avoid investigating possible criminal conduct, despite the fact that this newly released Washington Post/ABC poll (h/t Glenn Greenwald) shows the majority of Americans (50 percent to 47 percent) would favor investigating abusive interrogation? As Glenn argues, that polling data pretty much sinks a massive meat fork into the unending false claim that there is no public will to scrutinize these matters. But it's worse than that: These numbers also suggest that some Senate Republicans want advance assurances from the nation’s top lawyer that he won’t even look into a crime most Americans want to see investigated.

Obama's AG Pick

On my blog, I wrote at length about what Obama's attorney general pick may mean to the adult movie industry. I've been writing about the sex business for over a decade now, and while every previous presidential election has seen some discussion around obscenity, this one was remarkable for its total lack thereof. As Declan McCullagh opined on CNET, Eric Holder is a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to free speech. A decade ago, as deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, he pushed U.S. attorneys to prosecute pornographers, although the Clinton administration took a mostly hands-off approach toward obscenity prosecutions. Interestingly, Clinton's leave 'em alone attitude toward the adult industry spawned one of the most dramatic changes in the business, as the largely unchecked business of making porn movies became increasingly more extreme. These days, most liberals believe the less government intervention the better when it comes to free speech, but in Porn Valley, "anything goes" isn't always the best answer when it comes to the hardcore day-to-day lives of adult performers.

Eric Holder for Attorney General?

And now on to a different Obama Cabinet post: At Newsweek, Michael Issikoff is reporting that Eric Holder will be tapped as Obama's attorney general, assuming he vets well. What I like about this choice is that it's bold but not crazy bold. The strike against Holder is that he signed off on Bill Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich, a crackup wherever you are on the ideological spectrum. On the other hand, Holder has a solid-to-gold reputation as a federal prosecutor. And he served as a not-fancy judge in the District of Columbia's Superior Court. When the right tried to tar him with the Rich screw up when he was on Obama's vice-president selection team, it didn't much stick--at least, not enough to fell him. The Obama folks must be making a similar calculation here.

I don't know enough about Holder's particular role in the Rich episode to know for sure whether they're right to look beyond it, but taken as a whole, Holder's record shows that he knows his stuff and should be able to run the Justice Department well. On national security, his rep is not hard left. That's of a piece with the move to the center that Obama made on wiretapping by the National Security Agency over the summer. It could mean that he's going to disappoint liberals who want to rip up every Bush administration DoJ order. This is the test of governing as opposed to criticizing from the outside. The Democrats are about to own the war on terror. Holder will be nothing like Alberto Gonzales; that I think we can count on. It's harder to know how many degrees apart he will be from the current attorney general, Michael Mukasey, who was sent in to clean up the Gonzales mess. For example, what will Holder do with Mukasey's recent order expanding the FBI's powers to infiltrate and investigate? May the tests begin.