Newt Gingrich: President Obama should fire Attorney General Eric Holder
By: Newt Gingrich
Examiner Columnist
August 28, 2009
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| (AP file photo) |
Among the president's cabinet appointments, the Attorney General is unique.
Whereas the Secretary of Transportation is responsible for the nation's highways and airways, and the Secretary of Agriculture oversees the nation's farms, the Attorney General's charge is upholding the rule of law - the glue that holds together a self-governing people.
In the latest skirmish in the Democratic Party's war on the CIA, Attorney General Eric Holder has failed to uphold this fundamental public trust. And for that, there should be consequences.
Earlier this week, on the same day that the administration released a six-year-old report on terrorist interrogations, Holder announced he is appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the CIA officials who conducted the interrogations.
We know from long experience, of course, that special prosecutors in Washington quickly become self-justifying. To rationalize their existence, they must find people to prosecute, and find they do.
So Holder is tasking his lawyers to prosecute the men and women who worked - successfully - to keep America safe since September 11, 2001. Fair enough. It's not too politically palatable perhaps, but the law is the law.
Or is it?
Americans could be forgiven for believing, on the basis of shamefully twisted mainstream media coverage, that the recently revealed 2004 CIA Inspector-General report at the center of this controversy is merely a cataloging of CIA abuse.
But in fact, the report methodically described a carefully limited and, with a few exceptions, faithfully implemented program of enhanced interrogation techniques - techniques that yielded what the report itself deems valuable results.
The report also details the exceptions, cases in which interrogation techniques were used that were outside the carefully developed regime.
But here is the crucial fact for Holder: All of the allegations of unauthorized methods - all of them - have already been carefully evaluated by career prosecutors. These were legal officials who, unlike Holder, do not owe their jobs to any partisan political figure.
Impartial prosecutors evaluated 20 incidents of unauthorized activity and decided against taking legal action in all cases but one. In that one case, in which a contract employee attacked a terrorist detainee with a metal flashlight, the contractor was found guilty. His case was appealed and his conviction upheld.
In other words, justice was done.
But apparently for Holder, justice under a Republican administration doesn't mean the same thing as justice under a Democratic administration.
On the day the report was released, CIA Director Leon Panetta - himself an Obama appointee - protested that the CIA received "multiple written assurances its methods were lawful."
The report reveals that the men and women of the CIA not only worked diligently to develop and adhere it these methods, but that their work also yielded intelligence that saved lives.
Never mind. There's a new sheriff in town.
Holder, uniquely duty-bound to uphold the law, has disregarded the law as applied by his predecessors because he disagrees with their politics.
You could say that this is behavior more befitting a Third World dictatorship than the United States of America, except that even Third World dictators don't unilaterally disarm in the process of administering politically driven "justice."
The Obama Administration, still in the middle of a war with the radical wing of Islam, is waving a white flag of surrender. The honorable thing would be for the president to come out and say it; to tell the American people that be believes the threat manifest on 9/11 has passed. That we can now return to business as usual.
Instead, the president is silent on Martha's Vineyard, and his surrogates are blaming the political prosecutions of CIA officials on the Attorney General.
Even if you believe this convenient division of political culpability, the Attorney General has failed to honor the law. He has given into - or faithfully carried out - the revenge fantasies of the anti-American left.
If Obama won't uphold his fundamental duty as Commander-in-Chief to defend those who have been defending America, the least he can do is insist that his Attorney General uphold his fundamental duty to defend the rule of law.
If Holder and his senior team won't do the right thing and resign their positions, Obama should do the right thing and fire them.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has published 19 books, including 10 fiction and nonfiction best-sellers. He is the founder of the Center for Health Transformation and chairman of American Solutions for Winning the Future. For more information, see newt.org. His exclusive column for The Examiner appears Fridays.
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