President Obama Should Fire Attorney General Eric Holder

Among the president’s cabinet appointments, the Attorney General is unique.

Whereas the Secretary of Transportation is responsible for the
nation’s highways and airways, and the Secretary of Agriculture
oversees the nation’s farms, the Attorney General’s charge is upholding
the rule of law–the glue that holds together a self-governing people.

In the latest skirmish in the Democratic Party’s war on the CIA,
Attorney General Eric Holder has failed to uphold this fundamental
public trust. And for that, there should be consequences.

Earlier this week, on the same day that the administration released
a six-year-old report on terrorist interrogations, Holder announced he
is appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the CIA officials who
conducted the interrogations.

We know from long experience, of course, that special prosecutors in
Washington quickly become self-justifying. To rationalize their
existence, they must find people to prosecute, and find they do.

So Holder is tasking his lawyers to prosecute the men and women who
worked–successfully–to keep America safe since September 11, 2001.
Fair enough. It’s not too politically palatable perhaps, but the law is
the law.

Or is it?

Americans could be forgiven for believing, on the basis of
shamefully twisted mainstream media coverage, that the recently
revealed 2004 CIA Inspector-General report at the center of this
controversy is merely a cataloging of CIA abuse.

But in fact, the report methodically described a carefully limited
and, with a few exceptions, faithfully implemented program of enhanced
interrogation techniques–techniques that yielded what the report
itself deems valuable results.

The report also details the exceptions, cases in which interrogation
techniques were used that were outside the carefully developed regime.

But here is the crucial fact for Holder: All of the allegations of
unauthorized methods–all of them–have already been carefully
evaluated by career prosecutors. These were legal officials who, unlike
Holder, do not owe their jobs to any partisan political figure.

Impartial prosecutors evaluated 20 incidents of unauthorized
activity and decided against taking legal action in all cases but one.
In that one case, in which a contract employee attacked a terrorist
detainee with a metal flashlight, the contractor was found guilty. His
case was appealed and his conviction upheld.

In other words, justice was done.

But apparently for Holder, justice under a Republican administration
doesn’t mean the same thing as justice under a Democratic
administration.

On the day the report was released, CIA Director Leon
Panetta–himself an Obama appointee–protested that the CIA received
“multiple written assurances its methods were lawful.”

The report reveals that the men and women of the CIA not only worked
diligently to develop and adhere it these methods, but that their work
also yielded intelligence that saved lives.

Never mind. There’s a new sheriff in town.

Holder, uniquely duty-bound to uphold the law, has disregarded the
law as applied by his predecessors because he disagrees with their
politics.

You could say that this is behavior more befitting a Third World
dictatorship than the United States of America, except that even Third
World dictators don’t unilaterally disarm in the process of
administering politically driven “justice.”

The Obama Administration, still in the middle of a war with the
radical wing of Islam, is waving a white flag of surrender. The
honorable thing would be for the president to come out and say it; to
tell the American people that be believes the threat manifest on 9/11
has passed. That we can now return to business as usual.

Instead, the president is silent on Martha’s Vineyard, and his
surrogates are blaming the political prosecutions of CIA officials on
the Attorney General.

Even if you believe this convenient division of political
culpability, the Attorney General has failed to honor the law. He has
given into–or faithfully carried out–the revenge fantasies of the
anti-American left.

If Obama won’t uphold his fundamental duty as Commander-in-Chief to
defend those who have been defending America, the least he can do is
insist that his Attorney General uphold his fundamental duty to defend
the rule of law.

If Holder and his senior team won’t do the right thing and resign
their positions, Obama should do the right thing and fire them.

Newt Gingrich is a senior fellow at AEI.