A blogger for the Atlantic wondered this week: “Where would health care be right now if Tom Daschle were in charge of shepherding it through Congress?” Former Senate Republican leader Bill Frist also said of former Democratic leader Daschle, who now has an informal advisory role to Obama: “His experience with being leader, his understanding of the legislative process, his ability to negotiate is what President Obama needs now, and what he needed months ago when he started the process — and he doesn’t have it.”
Attorney General Eric Holder did the right thing when, responding to a recommendation from the Justice Department’s ethics office, he appointed veteran federal prosecutor John Durham to investigate up to a dozen cases of terrorist suspects being subjected to illegal abuse during CIA interrogations between 2001 and 2004. Despite pressure within his own administration to protect the CIA, President Obama — to his credit — is leaving to Holder any decision to prosecute interrogators. Whatever the complications, or the embarrassment, of a legal accounting for past violations of U.S. torture statutes and the Geneva Conventions, a refusal to apply the law would only compound one betrayal of American values with another. — Boston Globe Follow us
