Did AG Eric Holder doublecross his boss?

When I first heard that Attorny General Eric Holder was at this late date considering prosecutions for detainee mistreatment, I assumed that he was again pondering the windown left open to him by President Obama. That is, to consider prosecuting administration officials who developed detainee treatment policies.

... Obama added that prosecutions for those who drafted the memos would be up to Attorney General Eric Holder. "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."
(MSNBC)

Holder had appeared to let that window close for the most part by leaving it up to bar associations to discipline administration lawyers for dispensing bad advice.

But Holder seems to have found another window of opportunity.

"For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it's appropriate for them to be prosecuted," (Obama) told reporters.

The flip side of the president's statement, of course, is that it might be appropriate to prosecute those who strayed from the guidelines for detainee treatment provided by the Bush administration. Those who overstepped the lines drawn by the administration, in other words.

Have we ever had a president so artful in his deployment of English words and phrases? Since Bill Clinton, anyway?

On the one hand, Obama committed to backing the CIA in the name of unity. But he left the door open to prosecuting agents who overstepped the authority granted by the old administration. It is something of a balancing act. One would hope that agents who went beyond their orders have already received in-house discipline. Holder could go well beyond that to charging agents with war crimes, and the CIA might not feel fully supported by the administration if that occurs.

As with Clinton, it helps to keep a magnifying glass on hand to deal with the fine print when the POTUS opens his mouth.


Is it politics?

The CIA, of course, also faces criticism from the left in Congress, stemming from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's charges that the CIA regularly lies to Congress. Pelosi never did much to make her case, but a handful of Democrats recently tried to put a tooth or two in the charge.

Is the Holder story part of a political battle in the federal government among factions in the Democratic Party?

If Obama does not treat carefully, he risks having his CIA turning against him as it did on occasion with President Bush.