Expert: Special prosecutor would be 'PR move' to 'bury' torture David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Published: Thursday April 23, 2009





Print This Email This As public support grows for investigating and possibly prosecuting Bush administration figures involved in torture, an argument is developing among progressives over the best way to handle the mechanics of that process.



Law professor Jonathan Turley and groups such as MoveOn.org have been calling for Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs downplayed these calls on Wednesday, emphasizing that the matter rests with the Justice Department and "the lawyers that are involved are plenty capable of determining whether any law has been broken."



According to former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega, however, appointing a special prosecutor would "be the worst possible eventuality" and would risk "dumping the entire issue of torture into a black hole."



"The concept of an independent prosecutor is kind of an illusion," de la Vega told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday. "It's almost, more than anything, a PR move on the part of an administration that wants to get people to stop talking about something. ... I believe that's what the Bush administration did with allowing a special prosecutor for the Libby case."



De la Vega noted that in the Libby case, "September 30, 2003, the special prosecutor decision was made, and we basically didn't hear anything else about that until 2005." In the end, Libby was indicted for perjury, nobody was charged with the underlying crime of outing CIA officer Valerie Plame, "and we never did have the ... full story."



De la Vega emphasizes that because a special prosecutor operates in the context of a secret grand jury, public hearings and the public release of evidence can be deferred for years.



"Congress will have a perfect opportunity -- people from either party who do not want this to be publicly aired -- to say, 'Well, we're not going to do anything else,'" she explained. "If the administration ... were inclined to bury this, they too would have a perfect excuse."



"Let the public narrative keep going," de la Vega urged. "We need to let this flood continue. Not only does that allow for eventually to have a cohesive public story, it really enables the internal Justice Department people to have time to look at all these documents -- and there are hundreds of thousands of them."





This video is from MSNBC's Countdown, broadcast Apr. 22, 2009.









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