Attorney General Eric Holder has appointed a special prosecutor, John H. Durham, to investigate the interrogation of prisoners by the Central Intelligence Agency. His action was based on the long-secret report by the CIA. inspector general, John Helgerson, thousands of pages completed on May 7,2004, that came to three hard-hitting conclusions:

• Interrogators were exceeding the rules of the Justice Department.

• Some of the interrogation methods were not legal.

• The effectiveness of intelligence gained by the entire program was open to question.

Although President Obama has indicated strongly that he wants to "look forward not backward," Holder made his decision after reading the entire 2004 report and a second, classified report by the Justice Department's ethics office which recommended an independent review of abuse cases. He said he felt he had no choice given the seriousness of the allegations - including cruel treatment and deaths. Durham is a veteran criminal prosecutor from Connecticut who conducted the investigation into the CIA's 2005 destruction of videotapes showing harsh interrogation of two al-Qaeda detainees. This investigation is preliminary to determining if evidence warrants convening a grand jury or compelling witnesses to testify. The initial focus appears to be narrow, but past history has proven that a special prosecutor can broaden an investigation beyond individual cases.

The current director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, revealed the strained relations between the Justice Department and the CIA in an Op-Ed article in The Washington Post in early August. He warned that "The culture of recriminations" would distract CIA officers from risky missions in covert operations. He wrote, "Intelligence can be a valuable weapon, but it is not one we use on each other." Critics from the opposite point of view are concerned that the investigation by the special prosecutor will be too narrow and not reach back to the three lawyers who wrote the memorandums that framed the legal authority for extreme methods as water boarding that are considered torture.

The 2004 CIA report, released to the public by a federal judge complying with the Freedom of Information Act, was heavily censored with complete pages blacked out, including the four pages of recommendations. It described such methods as threatening a detainee's family with sexual assault and another with murdering his children, as well as pressing on a prisoner's carotid artery until he began to faint. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had read the entire uncensored 2004 report, said, "I was horrified so I understand the attorney general's reaction." Obama administration officials have denied claims by former Vice President Cheney and other Republican officials that the appointment of a special prosecutor was politically motivated. One official said that the attorney general "makes decisions with independence from the White House based on the facts and the law."

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who was tortured for five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, has challenged the Cheney argument that the CIA's use of extreme interrogation methods produced valuable intelligence information. He adhered to the position he has taken for years that we violated the Geneva Convention rules on torture, damaged our relations with allies and helped al-Qaeda in their recruitment. Robert S. Mueller III, who has been the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation since 2001, has also weighed in on Cheney's claim that "enhanced methods of interrogation" have kept us safe. In an interview last year, he was asked whether any attacks within the United States had been disrupted because of intelligence obtained through coercive methods. His answer was succinct, "I don't believe that has been the case."

Three senior lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department wrote opinions concerning interrogation methods from 2002- 2007 for the Bush administration. They were John Yoo, now a law professor at Berkeley, Jay S. Bybee, a federal appeals court judge in Nevada, and Steven G. Bradbury. On May 6, 2009, it was reported that an internal Justice Department inquiry concluded that the three lawyers showed serious lapses of judgment in secret memorandums that authorized brutal interrogations. The inquiry, conducted by the Office of Professional Responsibility, could ask state bar associations to consider disciplinary action which could include reprimands or disbarment. The 220-page report is in draft form, but it raises serious

questions about the legal foundation that was

crafted by Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury to advise the White House lawyers and President Bush.

When the report became known in the Bush administration in December, 2008, Michael Mukasey, attorney general at the time, wrote a l0-page rebuttal to the findings and warned of questioning the legal work of Justice Department lawyers. Judge Bybee, who was nominated later to the federal bench by President Bush, has asserted that his memorandums represented "a good-faith analysis of the law." John Yoo, who is believed to be the principal author of most of the legal opinions, has defended them regularly.

The special prosecutor will move through his investigation in the months ahead. And we will learn if he will eventually reach the three lawyers - Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury - who gave President Bush and the CIA the legal basis for their methods of detention and interrogation at Guantanamo Bay and the secret prisons abroad.

Joyce S. Anderson is the author of "Courage in High Heels," "Flaw in the Tapestry," "If Winter Comes" and "The Mermaids Singing." She can be reached at JSAWrite@aol.com.