The intelligence community hasn't exactly felt the love in the past few years.
First, infighting among intelligence agencies helped contribute to the successful Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, as The 9/11 Commission Report happily pointed out. Then, there was the whole faux pas about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and that the war would be a "slam dunk!" as former CIA director George Tenet supposedly exclaimed to President George W. Bush in early 2003.
And now, Attorney General Eric Holder's appointment of a prosecutor focusing on detainee torture and abuse by CIA agents only serves as the latest wound to the intelligence community's fragile ego.
As a people who espouse a world view incorporating our benevolent morality and virtue, the CIA and its brethren have often perfected the art of overthrowing dictators, or, in many historical cases, installing pro-American military dictatorships in countries most of us have never heard of. Essentially, they've done the dirty work in the dark so our conscience could remain light.
There is no question that the intelligence community serves a vital role in national security and promoting U.S. interests abroad. Besides providing the foundation for countless action movies, Americans owe a huge debt to the hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens in the intelligence community that defends our interests here and abroad each day.
This is why Holder's decision this past week to criminally investigate CIA interrogators is so galling. The surely resulting macabre atmosphere in the intelligence community will do little to improve the quality of intelligence collected and will only make skittish those responsible for protecting America.
That was also the collective response from seven past directors of the CIA in a letter sent to President Barack Obama last week pleading him to back Holder off from the proverbial fence. The former directors, including Porter Goss, Tenet and William Webster, warned that "Attorney General Holder's decision to reopen the criminal investigation creates an atmosphere of continuous jeopardy for those whose cases the Department of Justice had previously declined to prosecute."
The precedent set by Holder's decision to reopen a criminal investigation after it was closed, simply because a new administration has come into town, is reason enough for seven former intelligence directors to pen a letter to the president. But what should infuriate the former directors and anyone else is around whom the investigation is centered.
Holder's decision not to expand his probe to the upper echelons of the last Bush administration and former Department of Justice lawyers, and instead focus on the officers who followed orders, a la Abu Ghraib, is what flies smack in the face of true justice.
Sure, waterboarding, mock executions and threatening to sexually assault detainees' family members - all breaches of conduct found by the 2004 CIA Inspector General Report on Torture - are abhorrent. But what's more appalling is the attorney general's investigation of the interrogators themselves, instead of the policymakers who approved of such atrocious breaches of our national character and the Department of Justice lawyers who mangled the law to allow these breaches, as many now believe to have happened in the previous administration.
Investigating those who performed the abuses is certainly justice, but failing to investigate those who possibly authorized the abuses is anything but justice.
Matthew Christ is a political science sophomore. His column appears on Mondays.
