Time for answers

Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009 | 2:07 a.m.

President Barack Obama has been frank about his preference when it comes to investigating allegations of wrongdoing by the administration of his predecessor, George W. Bush. He has always said he would rather look forward, not backward.

But that preference, from the start, collided with the reality that many of the allegations were so serious that they would not go away. Among the most serious was that CIA interrogators had tortured many terrorism suspects.

Because torture is prohibited by federal law, Congress, human rights organizations, the media and Americans in general persisted in asking whether the CIA had grossly overstepped its authority.

In keeping with Obama’s commitment to an independent Justice Department, he decided not to impose his own preference on Attorney General Eric Holder. He decided Holder should be the one to decide whether any action should be taken on the torture allegations.

On Monday the news broke that Holder had decided to appoint a special prosecutor from within the Justice Department to investigate the most serious of the torture allegations. If the prosecutor, John Durham, finds persuasive evidence of torture by either CIA or contract interrogators, he may recommend a criminal investigation.

Durham was selected because he has made himself familiar with the CIA interrogation issue. For the past two years he has been investigating the 2005 destruction of a CIA videotape that allegedly showed terrorism suspects being waterboarded, a technique that Holder defined as torture during his confirmation hearing in January.

Included in the evidence Durham will examine is a 2004 report prepared by the CIA’s inspector general — containing several allegations of abuses — that was released Monday.

Holder made the right decision to appoint Durham. Such serious allegations cannot be allowed to keep circulating. They require definitive answers.