Not just a Spanish prosecutor, please

Okay, I admit it.  On the one hand I'd like to see the Bush/Cheney administration investigated and stretched on the rack.  On the other, the self-righteousness of those who want-justice-and-want-it-now-!  gets tiresome. 

The lovely quiet work of a legal machine doing its job is almost sexy and  its critics are not -- as long as that machine is really at work and we're  not just watching a replay of Bleak House.  Scott Horton thinks Cheney is talking and walking a straight line into the newly-oiled legal machinery of Eric Holder's Justice Department.

Every harebrained scheme the country was dragged into over the last eight years seems to have had its start in Dick Cheney’s office. And now, the more Cheney talks, the more manifest his delusions and poor judgment become.

Horton quotes his colleague, Andrew Sullivan:

Eric Holder, the new attorney-general, while eschewing a formal investigation, has told Republicans “prosecutorial and investigative judgments must depend on the facts, and no one is above the law”. The justice department is also sitting on an internal report into the calibre of the various torture memos drafted by Bush appointees in the Office of Legal Counsel. The report has apparently already found the memos beneath minimal legal credibility, which implies they were ordered up to make the law fit the already-made decision to torture various terror suspects. But the big impending release may well be three memos from May 2005, detailing specific torture techniques authorised by Bush and Cheney for use against terror suspects. Newsweek described the yet to be released memos thus: “One senior Obama official . . . said the memos were ‘ugly’ and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a ‘truth commission’ on torture”…

The documents detailed horrifying CIA practices that the Red Cross unequivocally called torture—shoving prisoners in tiny, air-tight coffins, waterboarding, beatings, sleep deprivation, stress positions: all the techniques we have now come to know almost by heart. And torture is a war crime. War crimes have no statute of limitations and are among the most serious crimes of which one can be accused.

Horton is keeping an eye Eric Holder's Justice Department.  He warns Holder against "operating on auto-pilot."   The response of the new DOJ to the growing evidence of Cheney's high crimes and misdemeanors will tell us whether we're right to wait for justice to catch up with our impatience.