Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he will be appointing U.S. attorney John Durham as a special prosecutor to investigate possible crimes committed by CIA interrogators who “went beyond the legal guidelines” for interrogations set out by the Bush administration.

Human Rights Watch responded to the announcement by imploring Holder to go further and investigate those who “planned, authorized, and facilitated the use of abusive methods.” As constitutional attorney and blogger Glenn Greenwald has noted, Holder’s investigation would effectively immunize interrogators who complied with the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) interrogation memos, which authorized brutal torture, and ensure that White House officials who authorized torture “will never be held to account.”

In an appearance today on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) echoed the concerns of these advocates. He told Fox’s Megyn Kelly that Holder should not “limit the investigation” to field interrogators and that he should also investigate the people who gave the orders that resulted in abuse and torture, including former Vice President Cheney:

NADLER: Now, the law says very clearly that it is the obligation of the Attorney General to investigate, to see whether crimes were committed, any time there was torture under American jurisdiction. He must do that. If he didn’t do that, he’d be breaking the law. My criticism of the Attorney General is that he should not limit the investigation to people in the field who may have committed the torture, but to people who may have ordered it, such as the Vice President, for example.

Watch it:

Nadler has been one of the most vociferous critics of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and its record on civil liberties. In the past, he has said that Bush officials “clearly committed war crimes” and that the Obama administration would be “breaking the law” if it did not fully investigate the Bush administration’s complicity in torture. Most recently, he responded to Cheney’s comments opposing a torture probe by saying that his objections show that he “still fails to understand the law.”

Nativists and anti-health care reform activists often warn that health care reform would “lure more immigrants” into the US, but they don’t mention that the nation’s current health care system is motivating many US citizens to leave. USA Today reports that thousands of American retirees have crossed the Southern border to sign up for a health care plan run by the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS).

Mexican immigrants to the US are, for the most part, economic migrants whose primary concern is (and likely always will be) finding work. However, the broken US health care system has been driving American retirees who are less worried about finding jobs, and more concerned about staying healthy to Mexico where they can enroll in “a health care plan with no limits, no deductibles, free medicines, tests, X-rays, eyeglasses, even dental work — all for a flat fee of $250 or less a year.” There are approximately between 40,000 and 80,000 U.S. retirees currently living in Mexico. “It was one of the primary reasons I moved here. I couldn’t afford health care in the United States…To me, this is the best system that there is,” said one retiree who now lives in Sonora.

Many citizens of immigrant-sending countries have better access to health care at home than they would in the US, but that also doesn’t mean that they will flood the borders if the US health care system significantly improves. The big difference is that American retirees are eligible for IMSS benefits, while subsidized health care won’t even be on the table for most foreigners who might consider migrating to the US. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for credits or subsidies under the current House and Senate health care bills and legal immigrants have to wait five years to receive any benefits. Irrespective of whether they are covered or not, health care is usually a secondary concern for most migrants who are more worried about being able to simply put food on the table.

Our guest blogger is Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In an op-ed in Saturday’s New York Times, novelist Joseph Finder charged that Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to appoint career prosecutor John Durham to begin a preliminary investigation into allegations of homicide and torture made by the CIA Inspector General “serves to delegitimize our government.” Finder claims Holder recklessly overturned the conclusion of the Alberto Gonzales-led Justice Department to close the criminal inquiry in a move that “doesn’t look much like justice; it looks like politics.”

It was a hallmark of the Bush administration to conflate politics and justice, but even on those terms, Finder has a peculiar understanding of the rule of law. Torture and murder by U.S. government officials is what has “delegitimized our government.” Far from any effort by the attorney general to enforce the law, the failure to investigate those crimes is what would cause further grievous harm to our country.

It’s disappointing that some have been persuaded by Finder’s allegations because they don’t withstand even minimal scrutiny. He accused Holder of being unconcerned that “these cases were exhaustively reviewed,” prior to the decision to close the first criminal investigation. And he also claims that “[i]f any new information has come out about these cases, any complaints about undue influence or any new witnesses, Mr. Holder hasn’t mentioned it.”

But the very first lines of Holder’s statement announcing the preliminary investigation read:

The Office of Professional Responsibility has now submitted to me its report regarding the Office of Legal Counsel memoranda related to so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. I hope to be able to make as much of that report available as possible after it undergoes a declassification review and other steps. Among other findings, the report recommends that the Department reexamine previous decisions to decline prosecution in several cases related to the interrogation of certain detainees.

Finder obviously overlooked Holder’s actual statements in a rush to pass judgment on his motives. But it is simply willful ignorance to believe that it is “unlikely” that “high-level officials in the George W. Bush administration put their thumbs on the scale of justice.”

Seriously? Wasn’t Gonzales forced to resign in disgrace after his involvement in politically motivated firings of U.S. Attorneys? Didn’t we just learn of Karl Rove’s push for criminal investigations to help Republican candidates in advance of the 2006 mid-term elections? Read more

The last few days have seen a real ramping up of conservative jingoism on Iran. On Sunday we had Dick Cheney admitting that he had pushed the Bush administration to attack Iran, vindicating those who had suggested that there were strong voices in that administration for such an attack.

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, former UN ambassador John Bolton scoffed at the idea of changing Iranian behavior through non-violent means, writing that “adopting tougher economic sanctions is simply another detour away from hard decisions on whether to accept a nuclear Iran or support using force to prevent it.”

Now the right-wing website Newsmax has posted a truly amazing video on the Iranian menace featuring, among other delights, neoconservative Frank Gaffney gravely warning against the threat of an Iranian-launched electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attack:

GAFFNEY: Within a year of that attack, nine out of ten Americans would be dead. Because we can’t support a population of the present size in urban centers and the like without electricity. That would be a world without America, as a practical matter. And that is exactly what I believe the Iranians are working towards.

Watch it:

It is true that the consequences of an attack like the one described in the video would be catastrophic. As a practical matter, however, it’s probably worth pointing out here that the likelihood of Iran, or anyone, actually pulling off such an attack is roughly the same as Iran building an enormous, space-bound vacuum cleaner and sucking up all of America’s oxygen. But Gaffney and other EMP threat promoters like Newt Gingrich are betting that most Americans aren’t going to invest the amount of time it would require to learn this.

As the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel has reported, next week the group EMPact America is hosting a conference on the EMP threat featuring Gaffney, Gingrich, and keynote speaker Mike Huckabee.