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Keith talks to Harper's Scott Horton about the reports that Attorney General Eric Holder is about to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate the CIA for torturing prisoners. Horton has more at Harpers:

Here’s another question. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Officials said it wasn’t clear that any CIA interrogators were ever informed of the limits laid out in the Justice Department memo. ‘A number of people could say honestly, correctly, “I didn’t know what was in it,”‘ said a former senior U.S. intelligence official.” How would that affect the work of a special prosecutor?

The Times piece builds off accounts furnished by “former senior Justice officials,” close to the torture issue, with apparent knowledge of “investigations.” In all likelihood, we’re talking about Bush Administration political appointees apprehensive about what a special prosecutor might uncover. I would strongly discount the claims that the investigations will never go anywhere because of a lack of witnesses and evidence. That conclusion can’t be justified until a serious investigation has actually been conducted—and it’s clear that the Bush Justice Department did not conduct a serious investigation because they were concerned about where it might lead.

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David Shuster and Harper's Scott Horton break down John Yoo's poorly written op-ed at the Wall Street Journal, defending his part in allowing the Bush administration to spy on millions of Americans under the guise of keeping us safe from terrorists.

From The Anonymous Liberal--John Yoo: Still Lying:

In this morning's Wall Street Journal, John Yoo has an op-ed defending himself from the malpractice charges set forth in the recent Inspecter General's report. As with the opinions themselves, the op-ed is deeply disingenuous and misstates the law repeatedly.

Not surprisingly, Yoo begins the op-ed with a collosal straw man. He points out how important it is to intercept al Qaeda communications and writes: "Evidently, none of the inspectors general of the five leading national security agencies would approve." Of course, the issue is not whether intercepting communications is a good idea, but whether the program violated the law. Yoo was not a policy maker. He was a lawyer. His job was to state what the law was, not what it should be.

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From Think Progress-- In Op-Ed Attacking IG Report, John Yoo Never Mentions That He Refused To Cooperate With The Investigation:

Last week, the Inspectors General of five separate intelligence agencies released a congressionally-mandated report on the Bush administration’s post-9/11 surveillance programs. The report focuses much of its criticism on John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote “legal memos undergirding the policy.”

In the Wall Street Journal today, Yoo responded to the report, claiming that the inspectors general are ignoring history and are simply “responding to the media-stoked politics of recrimination.” But in his attack on the report, Yoo neither responded to the specific criticisms of his legal reasoning nor mentioned that he refused to cooperate with the investigation.

Instead, Yoo persisted in pushing the flaws in his legal argument, such as the claim that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act did not take war into consideration.

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Scott Horton has more at The Daily Beast--Torture Prosecution Turnaround?:

The attorney general is leaning toward appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Bush-era torture policy, sources tell Scott Horton. Inside the logic driving Eric Holder’s possible conversion.

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Keith talks to Scott Horton about his article in Harpers Magazine, George W. Bush’s Disposable Constitution.

Yesterday the Obama Administration released a series of nine previously secret legal opinions crafted by the Office of Legal Counsel to enhance the presidential powers of George W. Bush. Perhaps the most astonishing of these memos was one crafted by University of California at Berkeley law professor John Yoo. He concluded that in wartime, the President was freed from the constraints of the Bill of Rights with respect to anything he chose to label as a counterterrorism operations inside the United States.