Along with her colleague Joby Warrick, Carrie Johnson at Washington Post has a follow-up to Johnson’s Eric Holder story from last night. Emphasis mine.
After trying for months to shake off the legacy of their predecessors and focus on their own priorities, Obama administration officials have begun to concede that they cannot leave the fight against terrorism unexhumed and are reluctantly moving to examine some of the most controversial and clandestine episodes.
The acknowledgment came amid fresh disclosures about CIA activity that had been hidden from Congress for seven years, the secrecy surrounding a little-understood electronic surveillance program that operated without court approval, and word that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. favors naming a criminal prosecutor to examine whether U.S. interrogators tortured terrorism suspects.
The bolded part strikes me as very interesting. Do the writers mean to convey some inside information, or are they just putting a gloss on current events? Johnson also repeated that a torture inquiry will only look at interrogators who overstepped the Yoo memo’s limits, for what that is worth.
Overall, the number of column inches that the story devotes to dark threats from the right make it harder to argue with Zandar that the Washington Post is essentially giving the Obama administration one last chance to turn back before we all drown in Republican tears. The Bush administration left a ton of suspicious-looking threads hanging out in the open, and the story seems to imply that pulling any one of them hard enough will irreversibly open a Pandora’s Box of unwelcome surprises. I certainly hope so.
Overall the story gives the impression of a quiet moment just before a black anvil-shaped cloud blots out the sun, when the wind dies down and you can hear a plastic bag crinkle as it settles onto asphalt. If we’re lucky, Johnson’s clear implication that compromise and half measures won’t steer team Obama around this storm will convince them to give up trying and instead work with legislators like Chuck Schumer who want to do accountability right.