1 Boring Old Man

World economy stabilizing: Krugman
Reuters
May 25, 2009

The world economy has avoided "utter catastrophe" and industrialized countries could register growth this year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said on Monday.

"I will not be surprised to see world trade stabilize, world industrial production stabilize and start to grow two months from now," Krugman told a seminar.

"I would not be surprised to see flat to positive GDP growth in the United States, and maybe even in Europe, in the second half of the year."

The Princeton professor and New York Times columnist has said he fears a decade-long slump like that experienced by Japan in the 1990s…

"In some sense we may be past the worst but there is a big difference between stabilizing and actually making up the lost ground," he said. "We have averted utter catastrophe, but how do we get real recovery?

In Flanders Fields
John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

This is the poem we learned in grammar school for Memorial Day. It was written during World War I by a Canadian Physician after the poignant loss of his friend. In my childhood, veterans sold red poppies made of wire and red crepe paper to be worn in the lapel on Memorial Day [Decorations Day]. Then in 1963, on a visit home for the holidays, I was told that a childhood friend, David, had been killed in a war – a place called Viet Nam. At the time, I’d never heard that name. It was before the Gulf of Tonkin incident that heralded our full engagement in Viet Nam.

I never found out for sure how David died, or why he was in Viet Nam so early – at a time when we had only "advisers" there. His name didn’t appear on the Memorial Wall in Washington. He is still listed as ‘address unknown’ on our high school alumni roster. I suppose it was so early in that conflict that casualties from that period weren’t yet being catalogued.

But he’s the one I always think of on Memorial Day, and at other times throughout the year. And I think of the people who died in 9/11. And I think of the kids I met at an airport motel one morning a couple of years ago loading onto the bus to go for basic training at Fort Benning Georgia before deploying to Iraq. Like McCrae, I don’t want David to be forgotten, but I don’t have a sense of taking up the torch to honor him. It just feels tragic.

Selective Intelligence
Donald Rumsfeld has his own special sources. Are they reliable?
New Yorker
by Seymour M. Hersh
May 12, 2003

They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C., the exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi. By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. And although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question.

The director of the Special Plans operation is Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Shulsky has been quietly working on intelligence and foreign policy issues for three decades; he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early nineteen-eighties and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle during the Reagan Administration, after which he joined the Rand Corporation. The Office of Special Plans is overseen by Under Secretary of Defense William Luti, a retired Navy captain. Luti was an early advocate of military action against Iraq, and, as the Administration moved toward war and policy-making power shifted toward the civilians in the Pentagon, he took on increasingly important responsibilities.

W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the D.I.A., said, “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A.”

… Shulsky’s work has deep theoretical underpinnings. In his academic and think-tank writings, Shulsky, the son of a newspaperman—his father, Sam, wrote a nationally syndicated business column—has long been a critic of the American intelligence community. During the Cold War, his area of expertise was Soviet disinformation techniques. Like [Paul] Wolfowitz, he was a student of Leo Strauss’s, at the University of Chicago. Both men received their doctorates under Strauss in 1972. Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived in the United States in 1937, was trained in the history of political philosophy, and became one of the foremost conservative émigré scholars. He was widely known for his argument that the works of ancient philosophers contain deliberately concealed esoteric meanings whose truths can be comprehended only by a very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses. The Straussian movement has many adherents in and around the Bush Administration. In addition to Wolfowitz, they include William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, and Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, who is particularly close to Rumsfeld. Strauss’s influence on foreign-policy decision-making [he never wrote explicitly about the subject himself] is usually discussed in terms of his tendency to view the world as a place where isolated liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad, and face threats that must be confronted vigorously and with strong leadership.

^{Leo Strauss [1899-1973]}

How Strauss’s views might be applied to the intelligence-gathering process is less immediately obvious. As it happens, Shulsky himself explored that question in a 1999 essay, written with Gary Schmitt, entitled Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence [By Which We Do Not Mean Nous] — in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form of rationality. In the essay, Shulsky and Schmitt write that Strauss’s “gentleness, his ability to concentrate on detail, his consequent success in looking below the surface and reading between the lines, and his seeming unworldliness … may even be said to resemble, however faintly, the George Smiley of John le Carré’s novels.” Echoing one of Strauss’s major themes, Shulsky and Schmitt criticize America’s intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment.

The agency’s analysts, Shulsky and Schmitt argue, “were generally reluctant throughout the Cold War to believe that they could be deceived about any critical question by the Soviet Union or other Communist states. History has shown this view to have been extremely naïve.” They suggested that political philosophy, with its emphasis on the variety of regimes, could provide an “antidote” to the C.I.A.’s failings, and would help in understanding Islamic leaders, “whose intellectual world was so different from our own.”

Strauss’s idea of hidden meaning, Shulsky and Schmitt added, “alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception”…

• _{In a famous book, which laid out an agenda for the development of U.S. intelligence analysis in the post-World War II era, Sherman Kent, Yale history professor and former member of the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services [the OSS, forerunner of the CIA] argued that intelligence analysis should adopt the social science method which was then being elaborated in the academy…}
• _{Another nontraditional feature of Kent’s program was that it explicitly downplayed the importance of the possibility of deception.…}
• _{While Strauss never, of course, addressed the question of intelligence analysis, it is easy to guess what he might have said about Kent’s proposed methodology, since it was based squarely on the developments in social science that Strauss attacked. The primary point of attack would have been that it ignored the differences among "regimes" in its search for universal truths of social science. While Strauss was interested in understanding human nature, he understood from his study of the tradition of political philosophy – from Aristotle, most of all – that, in political life, universal human nature is encountered not in its unvarnished state, but as reflected through the prism of the "regime"…}
• _{Be this as it may, Strauss’s view certainly alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics…}

There is some kernel wisdom in Strauss’s thinking. He’s cynical about utopian governments, as he should be. His idea that deception is rampant in political discourse, particularly the public variety, is probably righter than it is wrong. Schmitt and Shulsky may, themselves, even be partially right that applying the scientific "social science" methodology to intelligence information may lead to missing some things – requiring too much proof. They are certainly making explicit the general attitude rampant in the right wing think tanks of the 1990’s – that the C.I.A., the State Department, and the Clinton White House were naive and missing the essential evil and duplicity of the Middle Eastern "regimes" [particularly Saddam Hussein].

Rumsfeld and his colleagues believed that the C.I.A. was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. “The agency was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,” the Pentagon adviser told me. “That’s what drove them. If you’ve ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.” The goal of Special Plans, he said, was “to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see. Shulsky’s carrying the heaviest part”…

If Special Plans was going to search for new intelligence on Iraq, the most obvious source was defectors with firsthand knowledge. The office inevitably turned to Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. The I.N.C., an umbrella organization for diverse groups opposed to Saddam, is constantly seeking out Iraqi defectors. The Special Plans Office developed a close working relationship with the I.N.C., and this strengthened its position in disputes with the C.I.A. and gave the Pentagon’s pro-war leadership added leverage in its constant disputes with the State Department. Special Plans also became a conduit for intelligence reports from the I.N.C. to officials in the White House…

The O.S.P. found any number of hints and allegations that connected Hussein and Bin Laden. They jumped on any whiff of a thought that Hussein was developing an ominous weaponry – the lies of the Iraqi National Congress, the duplicity of the Italian Secret Service legitimizing the cheap Niger Yellowcake forgery of Rocco Martino, the Italian Aluminum Tubes [for missles] that they morphed into centrifuge tubes for concentrating uranium, and when their al Qaeda captives wouldn’t confess to the Iraqi connections [deceptive guys that they were], they tortured them until at least one of them said what they wanted to hear to keep from being buried alive in Egypt [Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi].

Cheney Intervened in CIA Inspector General’s Torture Probe
22 May 2009
Jason Leopold, | t r u t h o u t

    Former Vice President Dick Cheney intervened in CIA Inspector General John Helgerson’s investigation into the agency’s use of torture against "high-value" detainees, but the watchdog was still able to prepare a report that concluded the interrogation program violated some provisions of the International Convention Against Torture.

    The report, which the Obama administration may soon declassify, was completed in May 2004 and implicated CIA interrogators in at least three detainee deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq and referred eight criminal cases of alleged homicide, abuse and misconduct to the Justice Department for further investigation, reporter Jane Mayer wrote in her book, "The Dark Side," and in an investigative report published in The New Yorker in November 2005.

    In "The Dark Side," Mayer described the report as being "as thick as two Manhattan phone books" and contained information, according to an unnamed source, "that was simply sickening."  "The behavior it described, another knowledgeable source said, raised concerns not just about the detainees but also about the Americans who had inflicted the abuse, one of whom seemed to have become frighteningly dehumanized," Mayer wrote. "The source said, ‘You couldn’t read the documents without wondering, "Why didn’t someone say, ‘Stop!’""

    Mayer added that Cheney routinely "summoned" Inspector General Helgerson to meet with him privately about his investigation, launched in 2003, and soon thereafter the probe "was stopped in its tracks." Mayer characterized Cheney’s interaction with Helgerson as highly unusual. Cheney’s "reaction to this first, carefully documented in-house study concluding that the CIA’s secret program was most likely criminal was to summon the Inspector General to his office for a private chat," Mayer wrote. "The Inspector General is supposed to function as an independent overseer, free from political pressure, but Cheney summoned the CIA Inspector General more than once to his office."

    "Cheney loomed over everything," the former CIA officer told Mayer. "The whole IG’s office was completely politicized. They were working hand in glove with the White House." But Mayer said Cheney’s intervention in Helgerson’s probe proved that as early as 2004 "the Vice President’s office was fully aware that there were allegations of serious wrongdoing in the [torture] Program." Helgerson has denied that he was pressured by Cheney…

    In October 2007, former CIA Director Michael Hayden ordered an investigation into Helgerson’s office, focusing on internal complaints that the inspector general was on "a crusade against those who have participated in [the] controversial detention program."

    News reports have suggested that when Helgerson’s report is declassified it will seriously undercut claims made by Cheney in numerous interviews that the systematic torture of "high-value" detainees produced valuable intelligence, thwarted pending terrorist plots against the United States and saved "hundreds of thousands of lives"…

    In an interview with Harper’s magazine last year, Mayer said Helgerson "investigated several alleged homicides involving CIA detainees" and forwarded several of those cases "to the Justice Department for further consideration and potential prosecution." "Why have there been no charges filed? It’s a question to which one would expect that Congress and the public would like some answers," Mayer said. "Sources suggested to me that … it is highly uncomfortable for top Bush Justice officials to prosecute these cases because, inevitably, it means shining a light on what those same officials sanctioned"…

    In "The Dark Side," Mayer wrote that Helgerson was "looking into at least three deaths of CIA-held prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq." One of those prisoners was Manadel al-Jamadi, who was captured by Navy SEALs outside Baghdad in November 2003. "The CIA had identified him as a ‘high-value’ target, because he had allegedly supplied the explosives used in several atrocities perpetrated by insurgents, including the bombing of the Baghdad headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, in October 2003," Mayer reported in The New Yorker. "After being removed from his house, Jamadi was manhandled by several of the SEALs, who gave him a black eye and a cut on his face; he was then transferred to CIA custody, for interrogation at Abu Ghraib. According to witnesses, Jamadi was walking and speaking when he arrived at the prison. He was taken to a shower room for interrogation. Some forty-five minutes later, he was dead." At the time of his death, Jamadi’s head was covered with a plastic bag, he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe and according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he suffocated.

[see also Dan Froomkin’s Establishing the connection between the Bush White House and Abu Ghraib]

In Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, we enter the story at the end when the central character, Kurtz, is dying. Kurtz was a man of promise and ambition whose descent into the darkness of the Congo was accompanied by a plunge into hatred and madness. We know the story more recently from Marlon Brando’s role in the movie adaptation, Apocolypse Now. I don’t think it’s a reach to make an analogy between Kurtz and Dick Cheney. In his speech, Cheney sanitizes his Enhanced Interrogation Program, but as we read these stories of his direct involvement and the things that were done, it’s clear that the truth is that he personally shepherded this walk on the "dark side" – one that approached that of Conrad’s fictional Kurtz. From his speech:

In top secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do.

Why would a Vice President of the United States personally oversee such a program? Why would he immerse himself in the details of the gathering of intelligence, making personal trips to the C.I.A. to question our analysts? Why would he and his lawyer David Addington personally involve themselves in getting the legal memos to approve torture? Why would he interfere with the C.I.A. Inspector General’s inquiry into the C.I.A.’s activity? How does he know about what really happened at Abu Ghraib? Why does he claim that the Obama Administration is out to get him when we all know that the President would love for us to shut up and "look forward?" Why is he making a pro-torture speech at the American Enterprise Institute after leaving office instead of riding the range in Wyoming? Was this dark trend in his personality there from the start, or did the events of 9/11 drive him there? This week he said:

In the years since, I’ve heard occasional speculation that I’m a different man after 9/11. I wouldn’t say that. But I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities.

Cheney Lost to Bush
New York Times
By DAVID BROOKS
May 21, 2009

President Obama and Dick Cheney conspired on Thursday to propagate a myth. The myth is that we lived through an eight-year period of Bush-Cheney anti-terror policy and now we have entered a very different period called the Obama-Biden anti-terror policy. As both Obama and Cheney understand, this is a completely bogus distortion of history. The reality is that after Sept. 11, we entered a two- or three-year period of what you might call Bush-Cheney policy. The country was blindsided. Intelligence officials knew next to nothing about the threats arrayed against them. The Bush administration tried just about everything to discover and prevent threats. The Bush people believed they were operating within the law but they did things most of us now find morally offensive and counterproductive.

The Bush-Cheney period lasted maybe three years. For Dick Cheney those might be the golden years. For Democrats, it is surely the period they want to forever hang around the necks of the Republican Party. But that period ended long ago. By 2005, what you might call the Bush-Rice-Hadley era had begun. Gradually, in fits and starts, a series of Bush administration officials — including Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Jack Goldsmith and John Bellinger — tried to rein in the excesses of the Bush-Cheney period. They didn’t win every fight, and they were prodded by court decisions and public outrage, but the gradual evolution of policy was clear.

From 2003 onward, people like Bellinger and Goldsmith were fighting against legal judgments that allowed enhanced interrogation techniques. By 2006, Rice and Hadley brought Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in from a secret foreign prison to regularize detainee procedures. In 2007, Rice refused to support an executive order reviving the interrogation program. Throughout the second Bush term, officials were trying to close Guantánamo, pleading with foreign governments to take some prisoners, begging senators to allow the transfer of prisoners onto American soil…

Obama has embraced the Afghan surge, a strategy that was brewing at the end of the Bush years. He has stepped up drone activity in Pakistan. He has promoted aggressive counterinsurgency fighters and racked up domestic anti-terror accomplishments. As for the treatment of terror suspects, Jack Goldsmith has a definitive piece called “The Cheney Fallacy” online at The New Republic. He lists a broad range of policies — Guantánamo, habeas corpus, military commissions, rendition, interrogation and so on. He shows how, in most cases, the Obama policy represents a continuation of or a gradual evolution from the final Bush policy.

What Obama gets, and what President Bush never got, is that other people’s opinions matter. Goldsmith puts it well: “The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging. The Bush administration shot itself in the foot time and time again, to the detriment of the legitimacy and efficacy of its policies, by indifference to process and presentation. The Obama administration, by contrast, is intensely focused on these issues.”

Obama has taken many of the same policies Bush ended up with, and he has made them credible to the country and the world. In his speech, Obama explained his decisions in a subtle and coherent way. He admitted that some problems are tough and allow no easy solution. He treated Americans as adults, and will have won their respect. Do I wish he had been more gracious with and honest about the Bush administration officials whose policies he is benefiting from? Yes. But the bottom line is that Obama has taken a series of moderate and time-tested policy compromises. He has preserved and reformed them intelligently. He has fit them into a persuasive framework. By doing that, he has not made us less safe. He has made us more secure.

• Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales were more like an echo chamber than advisers – playing little or no part in the decision making processes.
• Karl Rove was a popularizer and a strategist, but not much of an adviser. …
• Colin Powell was a "figurehead," not because he’s African American, but because he was a General. Cheney/Neocons hated the interference of the State Department, so they put a soldier in the position. Powell tried to give good counsel, but never really had the ear of the President or [more importantly] the top guns…

• Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who had been together in one form or another for 30 years, both in the Neocon orbit, predetermined to attack Saddam Hussein at the earliest juncture.
• Condi Rice and Steven Hadley, Conservative Republicans, but rational – not part of the AEI/PNAC Cabal – neither of them the in the bulldog category.

We could count on almost universal support back then, because everyone understood the environment we were in. We’d just been hit by a foreign enemy – leaving 3,000 Americans dead, more than we lost at Pearl Harbor. In Manhattan, we were staring at 16 acres of ashes. The Pentagon took a direct hit, and the Capitol or the White House were spared only by the Americans on Flight 93, who died bravely and defiantly.

When Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he’s not really attacking the Obama administration. He’s attacking the Bush administration. In his speech on Thursday, he repeated in public a lot of the same arguments he had been making within the Bush White House as the policy decisions went more and more the other way.

Mississippi City Known for Klan Killings Elects Its First Black Mayor
New York Times
By ROBBIE BROWN
May 21, 2009

The city of Philadelphia, Miss., where members of the Ku Klux Klan killed three civil rights workers in 1964 in one of the era’s most infamous acts, on Tuesday elected its first black mayor. James A. Young, a Pentecostal minister and former county supervisor, narrowly beat the incumbent, Rayburn Waddell, in the Democratic primary. There is no Republican challenger. The results, announced Wednesday night, were a turning point for a mostly white city of 7,300 people in east-central Mississippi still haunted by the killings, which captured front-page headlines across the nation and were featured in the 1988 film “Mississippi Burning.”

“This shows a complete change of attitude and a desire to move forward,” said Mr. Young, 53, a Philadelphia native who integrated the local elementary school as the only black student in his sixth-grade class in the mid-1960s. “When I campaigned, the signs on the doors said, ‘Welcome,’ and I actually felt welcome.”

Mississippi has the largest number of black elected officials in the country, but they rarely come from majority-white electorates, said Joseph Crespino, an expert in Mississippi history at Emory University. Mr. Crespino called Mr. Young’s victory “remarkable.”

“I think this speaks well to the town of Philadelphia,” he said. “Residents there have lived with the memory and the trauma of the killings for many decades”…

A Blight On Humanity
the left coaster
by Turkana
05/21/2009

Paul Krugman has a short but withering post about the fraud that was American conservatism. Riffing off a link to Crooked Timber, which has Richard Posner becoming the latest conservative to jump the movement’s ship, Krugman writes:

And yet — why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? I mean, anyone who actually listened to what Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey were saying in 1994, let alone what passed for thought in the Bush administration, should have realized long ago that if there ever was an intellectual basis for modern conservatism, it was long gone.

Why, indeed, would anyone pretend there is any shred of credibility in anyone who found the Gingrich and Bush eras credible? But Krugman gets to the real point in the next paragraph:

And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

They fought civil rights, and voting rights, and the creation of Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare. They fought the environmental movement. They fought science and education and basic human decency. They launched wars that shouldn’t have been launched, they supported terrorists and terrorist regimes all around the globe, and countless millions suffered and died for their greed, hypocrisy and plain old murderous evil. They were and are, in every way that matters, morally degenerate.

There was no golden era of the conservative movement. It held political power for many years, and if we are not vigilant, it could, yet again. Because there is literally nothing its dwindling band of deranged supporters won’t try, to regain power. But it’s time to stop acting as if it was a serious intellectual enterprise, or that its methods and ideals were even worth debating. It was sick. It was demented. It represented the very worst of humanity. It’s time to stop pretending that it was deserving of respect or legitimacy. It wasn’t. It was a blight on humanity, the human spirit, and the entire planet. It should be treated as such and remembered as such.

It feels like it started with money. But it was fueled by what are referred to as the "Culture Wars." Some, but not all, are in gated communities. It feels like there’s something under it that has little to do with the stated policies of the Republican Party or the Conservative Movement. It has to do with a vision of people and how they live together on the planet. Of course I would argue that my side is the "right" side, but I know that’s not the whole story. The gist of it to me is the view that the down and out of the world are down there for a reason. They don’t want to work their way out of their circumstances, they just want to get other people’s stuff. They are "lazy" or "parasites" or some other kind of negative thing. It’s like "I’ve worked hard for my stuff. Why should I give it to people who aren’t willing to …" It’s bigger than anti-communism, or anti-socialism. It’s more in the range of disdain.

Obama: Existing U.S. Institutions Can ‘Work Through And Punish’ Bush’s ‘Violations Of Our Laws’
ThinkProgress
05/21/2009

Obama said that instead of a 9/11-style commission, he favors an investigation of “abuses of our values” done through Congress. Most notably, the President reiterated his view that the DOJ “and our courts can work through and punish any violations of our laws”:

That is what I mean when I say that we need to focus on the future. I recognize that many still have a strong desire to focus on the past. When it comes to the actions of the last eight years, some Americans are angry; others want to re-fight debates that have been settled, most clearly at the ballot box in November. And I know that these debates lead directly to a call for a fuller accounting, perhaps through an Independent Commission.
I have opposed the creation of such a Commission because I believe that our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability. The Congress can review abuses of our values, and there are ongoing inquiries by the Congress into matters like enhanced interrogation techniques. The Department of Justice and our courts can work through and punish any violations of our laws.

Watch it:

In his confirmation hearings, Holder flatly said that “no one is above the law. … There are obligations that we have as a result of treaties that we have signed — obligations, obviously, in the Constitution.”