Is This Going to Be a Problem?

This week, at his confirmation hearing, Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general-designate, did not hesitate to express a clear view. He noted that waterboarding had been used to torment prisoners during the Inquisition, by the Japanese in World War II and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

“We prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam,” Mr. Holder said. “Waterboarding is torture

[...]

Yet his statement, amounting to an admission that the United States may have committed war crimes, opens the door to an unpredictable train of legal and political consequences. It could potentially require a full-scale legal investigation, complicate prosecutions of individuals suspected of committing terrorism and mire the new administration in just the kind of backward look that Mr. Obama has said he would like to avoid.Mr. Holder’s statement came just two days after the Defense Department official in charge of military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, said in an interview with The Washington Post that she had refused to permit a trial for one detainee there, Mohammed al-Qahtani, because she believed he had been tortured.

Together the statements, from a current and an incoming legal official, cover both the Central Intelligence Agency, which has acknowledged waterboarding three captured operatives of Al Qaeda, and the military’s detention program.

[...]

Two obvious obstacles stand in the way of a prosecution: legal opinions from the Justice Department that declared even the harshest interrogation methods to be legal, and a provision in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that grants strong legal protections to government employees who relied on such legal advice in counterterrorism programs.

  NYT

And a third obstacle: Obama’s recent remarks that he wants to look forward and not back.

And a fourth obstacle: Only a handful of people who could bring about an investigation want one.

Still, Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, said, “It would be contrary to the principles of the criminal justice system for the attorney general to say he believes a very serious crime has been committed and then to do nothing about it.”

Well, those were principles of the criminal justice system before the Bush Admin.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Update:

At any rate, I don't think anybody in the Bush Administration or the CIA need lose any sleep over their criminal activities:

At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Holder was asked by Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, whether he would pursue a criminal investigation of the interrogation programs.

Mr. Holder hedged his response, saying, “Senator, no one’s above the law, and we will follow the evidence, the facts, the law, and let that take us where it should.”

But he added, quoting Mr. Obama, that “we don’t want to criminalize policy differences” and finally pleaded for time to study the matter.

“One of the things I think I’m going to have to do,” Mr. Holder said, “is to become more familiar with what happened that led to the implementation of these policies.”

After which time, he will undoubtedly find that there were "extenuating circumstances" and everything is okay. Move along.