This may be good news. According to the Los Angeles Times, Attorney General Eric Holder appears increasingly likely to approve a criminal investigation of torture allegations.

But the description of the investigation in the article appears troublesome to me. Basically, the article states that the investigation would be limited to investigation of personnel who conducted harsh interrogations beyond those authorized by Bush administration DOJ memos, drafted primarily by John Yoo. While helping to discover the truth about what happened in the interrogation centers is worthwhile and necessary to avoid future wrong-doing, focusing the investigation on the front line personnel is insufficient.

The real question that should be fully explored is why and how the top level Bush administration authorized and condoned activities violative of our treaty obligations and the long-standing moral code of the United States. This is exactly what happened in the Abu Ghraib investigation, where low-level personnel were scape-goated as “bad apples” while higher command level personnel that brought harsher interrogation than that shown in the photos into the entire system.  The problem was fundamentally not with the front line, but with command and control.