Hoekstra op-ed distorts truth

Rep. Pete Hoekstra has an op-ed piece in the Detroit Free Press — it’s really little more than a campaign press release full of talking points — that contains at least one clearly false statement. In that op-ed, Hoekstra criticizes the Obama administration for not doing enough to stop terrorism, including this criticism:

On the one hand, the Obama administration claims it will protect our nation from terrorists, but is pursuing CIA officers who used approved interrogation techniques against al Qaeda terrorists.

But this is false. Despite demands from civil libertarian and human rights organizations for a much broader investigation that would go after the legal advisers in the Bush administration who approved the use of a full range of “enhanced” interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, Attorney General Eric Holder explicitly did not approve such an investigation and opted instead to appoint a special investigator to look only at CIA interrogations that might have gone beyond the techniques approved by the Office of Legal Counsel under Bush. The Washington Post reported this quite clearly:

Any criminal inquiry could face challenges, including potent legal defenses by CIA employees who could argue that attorneys in the Bush Justice Department authorized a wide range of harsh conduct. But the sources said an inquiry would apply only to activities by interrogators, working in bad faith, that fell outside the “four corners” of the legal memos. Some incidents that might go beyond interrogation techniques that were permitted involve detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are described in the secret 2004 CIA inspector general report, set for release Aug. 31.

Not only has the Obama Department of Justice so far refused to even investigate the legal advice given in support of torture during the Bush administration (the Office of Professional Responsibility investigation of John Yoo was mostly completed under Bush), the DOJ continues to defend Yoo in federal court, where he is being sued by Jose Padilla for producing the now-infamous torture memos while working in the Office of Legal Counsel.

They have also made very clear that they have no intention of investigating any CIA or military officer for interrogation techniques that were approved by the OLC, even though those approval memos were later rescinded even by the Bush administration as legally untenable. This despite the fact that, as the Washington Post reported the day that Holder appointed John Durham to begin the investigation, more than 100 detainees have died in U.S. military custody — and those are just the ones we know about.