The state dropped the procedure after 2009, citing budgetary woes even though the price tag for the independent oversight measure was $105,000. While explaining most administrators do not cheat, the writers of the editorial explained, “[t]he rising tide of cheating scandals shows that the job of curbing unethical behavior cannot be left solely to schools and school districts, which are directly affected by the outcomes.”

An erasure analysis — a once-arcane accountability device that has garnered increased public awareness following high-profile testing impropriety scandals in Pennsylvania,New Jersey and Georgia — is part of a portfolio of precautions undertaken by state education officials to prevent cheating on standardized tests. The process consists of examining electronic bubble sheets on which students record their answers for a high rate of wrong-to-right answer erasures.

Twenty states lack an erasure analysis mechanism, according to USA Today.

The American Independent interviewed a former Louisiana school superintendent for a previous erasure-analysis story on how the process works:

Charles Hatfield, a former superintendent in charge of testing and accountability of what was the unified school district (Orleans Parish School Board) in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina struck, explained erasure analysis in greater detail. “They [the analysts] scan the bubble sheets following a mathematical algorithm,” he said, “meaning from a statistical point of view, it is highly unlikely that so many wrong-to-right erasures can occur.”

Since No Child Left Behind rules punish schools for not making sufficient improvements based on Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) — the minimum standard of proficiency among student test takers the federal governments expects states to achieve each year — the incentive for senior school officials to prop up scores to avoid decreased funding and school closure is immense.

But a forthright approach to school performance indicators has its pitfalls for school employees, as well. While the Atlanta saga has led to dismissal notices and ignominy for the teachers and administrators caught in the scandal, states like Louisiana have instituted semi-privatization measures for struggling schools that led to teacher dismissals and campus shutdowns anyway.

In New Orleans’ Recovery School District, administrators invited charter schools to cauterize the low-score bleeding of their districts; some improvements followed but critics allege serious collateral damage as mostly high-needs children are still being shipped around schools that are either underfunded or unwilling to tend to their needs.

The trouble, critics allege, began with decisions made in Baton Rouge after Hurricane Katrina when the Louisiana Legislature passed Act 35 that put most of New Orleans’ schools in the hands of RSD, a school system introduced in 2003 by a separate piece of legislation that manages troubled institutions. Prior to the passage of Act 35, RSD operated five city schools. The new law increased the minimum performance threshold schools had to meet, deeming many in the city as failing.

As a result, between 107 and 115 schools were shuffled from the city’s original district — The Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) — into either RSD or Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) control. The two bodies in turn left a majority of schools in New Orleans under control of charter operators.

Charter operators rarely permit unionized teachers to work in their classrooms, allowing them to pay teachers less than they would earn at traditional schools. The smaller overhead allows charter schools to generate a profit even though they usually receive as much per-pupil funding as traditional schools. And many charter schools have fewer transparency requirements, as demonstrated by a ProPublica story.

President Obama’s signature K-12 Race to the Top initiative relies heavily on charter school involvement. A handful of studies have shown these publicly-funded, independent schools often perform worse than their traditional public school counterparts.

The national daily was selected to receive the Associated Press Media Editors First Amendment Sweepstakes Award for its “Grading the Teacher” series and accompanying database ranking teacher performance. The distinction is the newswire’s most prestigious and is dolled out by a committee comprised of Associated Press editors.

The Times says the “value-added” model “projects a child’s future performance by using past scores — in this case, on math and English tests. That projection is then compared to the student’s actual results. The difference is the ‘value’ that the teacher added or subtracted.” The scores of 11,500 teachers were made available to the public on the Times’ website. Each scorecard is accompanied with a comment section where teachers can explain their results. Parents and students are also welcomed to describe their experiences with that educator and school. An internal search engine allows parents to easily look up teachers by their last name or the school in which the teachers are employed.

Groups representing teachers and the school district, the second largest in the country, were critical of the paper’s decision to publish similar results last year. While the school district attempted to dissuade the Times this second time, union groups have largely stayed silent.

While the newspaper was careful to explain the limitations of the statistically generated results, it’s FAQ section regarding the topic reads, “Research has repeatedly found that teachers are the single most important school-related factor in a child’s education. Until now, parents have had no objective information about the effectiveness of their child’s teacher.”

The American Independent spoke to a data specialist at the American Federation of Teachers for a story in July. A reposting of the conversation:

To Rob Weil, director of field programs and educational issues at AFT , the way the Times apportions the soundness of the research is problematic. While he doesn’t disagree with the paper’s definition of “value-added,” he cautions, “value-added isn’t like statistics. If we said we want an average of numbers from the same data set, everyone does it the same way,” he told The American Independent. “But value-added is a developing statistical tool,” and therefore inconsistent. He points to a study by analysts at the University of Colorado at Boulder that ran the same data set the Times used only to come up with substantially different results.

Many large school districts and states have instituted evaluation policies that rely, in part, on value-added scores. Houston, Los Angeles (PDF) and New York state, where a provision to expand value-added scores to nearly half of a teacher’s overall performance index is being contested by labor groups in court, have introduced the controversial metric. New York City, in a surprise move, dropped its effort to employ the system Thursday, handing off the responsibility to the state. Administrators in Albany must institute a state-wide teacher assessment system as part of the $700 million New York won in Race to the Top funds from the federal government.

The Times says the “value-added” model “projects a child’s future performance by using past scores — in this case, on math and English tests. That projection is then compared to the student’s actual results. The difference is the ‘value’ that the teacher added or subtracted.” The scores of 11,500 teachers were made available to the public on the Times’ website. Each scorecard is accompanied with a comment section where teachers can explain their results. Parents and students are also welcomed to describe their experiences with that educator and school. An internal search engine allows parents to easily look up teachers by their last name or the school in which the teachers are employed.

Groups representing teachers and the school district, the second largest in the country, were critical of the paper’s decision to publish similar results last year. While the school district attempted to dissuade the Times this second time, union groups have largely stayed silent. George Jackson, a public affairs official with American Federation of Teachers (AFT), said, “there was back and forth last year [between the union and the Los Angeles Times], but things are kind of quiet now.”

While the newspaper was careful to explain the limitations of the statistically generated results, it’s FAQ section regarding the topic reads, “Research has repeatedly found that teachers are the single most important school-related factor in a child’s education. Until now, parents have had no objective information about the effectiveness of their child’s teacher.”

To Rob Weil, director of field programs and educational issues at AFT, the way the Times apportions the soundness of the research is problematic. While he doesn’t disagree with the paper’s definition of “value-added,” he cautions,“value-added isn’t like statistics. If we said we want an average of numbers from the same data set, everyone does it the same way,” he told The American Independent. “But value-added is a developing statistical tool,” and therefore inconsistent. He points to a study by analysts at the University of Colorado at Boulder that ran the same data set the Times used only to come up with substantially different results. The crux of the analysts’ findings are posted below:

For reading outcomes, our findings included the following:

• Only 46.4% of teachers would retain the same effectiveness rating under both models, 8.1% of those teachers identified as effective under our alternative model are identified as ineffective in the L.A. Times specification, and 12.6% of those identified as ineffective under the alternative model are identified as effective by the L.A. Times model.
For math outcomes, our findings included the following:
• Only 60.8% of teachers would retain the same effectiveness rating, 1.4% of those teachers identified as effective under the alternative model are identified as ineffective in the L.A. Times model, and 2.7% would go from a rating of ineffective under the alternative model to effective under the L.A. Times model.

Weil doesn’t dispute the potential of the “value-added” approach, but objects to the swiftness with which media outlets and some reformers have embraced the metric. He stresses that “value-added” is a mechanism in measuring potential rather than an evaluation of any real progress made by the student.

What complicates matters is the projection is based on the student’s performance at the previous grade level. For “value-added” to depict an accurate picture of how much a student learned controlling for issues like income, family stability, neighborhood violence and other factors, the publishers of the study would have to assume there is something called a “random assignment” in how the students are placed in classrooms.

Randomization in statistics is essential to its reliability. But often parents intervene in the enrollment decisions schools make for their children, preferring certain teachers over others. While Weil said parents have every right to feel a certain teacher is more likely to better educate their children, the statistical soundness of the “value-added” mechanism is undermined.

For example, in most public policy polling results, the sampling error stated is within three to five percentage points. The “value-added” sampling error is in a much higher range — 10 to 20 percentage points. To statisticians, that range makes “value-added” useful only in separating the highest performers from the lowest performers; the results in the middle are “statistical noise.”

The American Independent asked whether an evaluation device known as “simple gain,” which compares how knowledgeable a student was going into the classroom to how much the student learned, is more effective. Weil said “simple-gain is even more prone to volatility, because it cannot control for out-of-classroom impediments to the student’s ability to learn effectively. The improvements to “value-added” assessments means those factors can be controlled for, but those refinements are down the road.

As to why the Los Angeles Times is pursuing the topic, Weil offers two points. With respect to the results the paper published, he says, “they’re not trying to be inaccurate, it’s just the nature of mathematics.” But he also speculates media outlets that rely on “value-added” models to force teachers to adjudicate their talents in the public eye do so “because they make money off of it.”

Paul raised $3 million in the first three months of 2011, assisted by a moneybomb on Washington’s Birthday that brought in more than $700,000, The Texas Independent previously reported.

As Slate’s David Weigel (a former reporter for our sister publication The Washington Independent) writes:

Paul, who starts the race with the biggest grassroots fundraising network, good poll numbers, and no pundit thinking he can win, veered between protecting his vulnerabilities and screwing with the moderators. He said Israel “didn’t need us telling it what to do,” meant to be a calming line for conservatives who fear his isolationism. He was also so bemused by a question about drug legalization that he ended his answer with a wacky impression of a heroin user. And why shouldn’t he be bemused? As he debated, a one-day moneybomb for his campaign was raising more than $1 million.

Paul had a couple of other reasons to be in a good mood, namely a CNN poll that identified him as the GOP’s best matchup against Pres. Barack Obama (trailing 45 percent to 52 percent), compared to Mike Huckabee being down 8 points to Obama and Romney down 11 points — as well as a Suffolk University poll showing the libertarian congressman from Texas in a three-way tie for second among GOP hopefuls, with Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and Paul all receiving 8 percent in a survey of New Hampshire GOP primary voters.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney dominated the other 17 names in the survey, being favored by 35 percent of respondents to the Suffolk poll.

Giuliani, Romney and Trump did not participate in the Fox News debate last night; and neither did Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and other potential top GOP contenders.

The absence of those big names compelled Daily Beast columnist Matt Latimer to dub Fox News the biggest loser of the night. “The many, many voters who missed this clash of ‘Governor Tim Pawlenty and the also-rans’ can continue their lives without a care,” writes Latimer, a former speechwriter for Pres. George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Former Minnesota Gov. Pawlenty was the biggest target among the field of candidates at the debate, which also included Paul, pizza magnate Herman Cain, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and former Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum.

“If I’d been there to watch the governor walk onto the stage, I would have screamed at him, Admiral Ackbar-style: “‘It’s a trap!’” Latimer writes.

The Daily Beast‘s columnist Howard Kurtz writes, “Bottom line: Pawlenty took most of the flak but made no major mistake. And even if he had, who’s going to remember this debate a week from now?”

Meanwhile, our sister publication The Colorado Independent reports that Cain was the big winner of the debate, at least according to conservative RedState blogger Erick Erickson.

And the Wall Street Journal reports that Fox News terminated its contracts with Gingrich and Santorum after they started talking publicly about vying for the White House.

Read more about the debate in the Los Angeles Times.

The poll comes even as two Texas oil refiners have spent millions of dollars to pass the measure. The companies gave more money in support of the initiative on Friday, with Valero giving another $1 million and Tesoro giving $500,000 to the Yes on 23 campaign.

But environmentalists and others have launched a massive campaign in recent weeks to oppose the ballot initiative, with the League of Conservation Voters placing it on its Dirty Dozen list, the first time a the environmental group has placed a ballot initiative on the listing of congressional candidates with poor environmental records.

Opponents of Prop 23 have bested the oil companies in the money-raising game. In total, opponents have raised $30.1 million, while proponents of the measure have raised $10.7 million.

NPR’s Nina Totenberg this morning had an excellent roundup on the issue, while The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all have sharply worded editorials today chastising Republicans such as Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sessions has vowed to vote against cloture for the Hamilton nomination after years of haranguing Democrats for daring to block Republican judicial nominees.

Hamilton is a widely respected federal judge in Indiana who has the support of his home state’s Republican senator, Richard Lugar. But critics, who call him “the anti-Jesus pro-Allah judge”, don’t like that he ruled against allowing sectarian prayers as part of the official proceedings of the Indiana House of Representatives. They also don’t like that he struck down a law requiring women to have face-to-face counseling before being allowed to exercise their constitutional right to an abortion.

While it’s not surprising that some Republicans don’t like those rulings, that’s not supposed to be grounds for blocking a vote on the president’s nominee. No one is arguing that the Yale-educated, former Fulbright fellow who’s won the support of the American Bar Association isn’t qualified for the job. In contrast, Democrats allowed a vote on President George W. Bush’s nomination of Judge Jay Bybee to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, even though as a Justice Department Lawyer Bybee approved memos authorizing the torture and abuse of detainees that even prominent Republicans have since disavowed and that sparked an ethical investigation into his conduct.

But in addition to Republican obstructionism, President Obama hasn’t exactly gone out on a limb to push his judicial nominations forward. Alliance for Justice has issued a report pointing out the paucity of judges nominated and confirmed by the Senate so far under Obama as compared to the first year of the previous administration. After Obama’s first ten months in office, only five judges had been confirmed by the Senate, 22 nominees remained pending and 97 vacancies were still open. During George W. Bush’s first year in office, the president had nominated 64 judges and won confirmation of 18 by mid-November. Meanwhile, Obama is operating with a strong majority of Democrats in the Senate, whereas Bush had to deal with a Democratic-controlled Senate in 2001.

Hamilton is likely to get a vote this week. Even so, the Obama administration still has a lot of catching up to do.

A federal judge in July said that without his statements given under torture, the government’s case against Jawad, who was around 12 years old when he was arrested for allegedly throwing a hand grenade at U.S. soldiers, was “riddled with holes” and based on wholly unreliable evidence. She ordered that he be freed.

Mark Magnier at the Los Angeles Times tracked down Jawad in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he found a 19-year-old struggling with mood swings as he tries to reconcile himself to having lost his adolescent and teen years to confinement and mistreatment in a U.S. prison. Jawad was one of many detainees who tried to commit suicide at Guantanamo.

Jawad tells Magnier that he now suffers from headaches, remains haunted by prison memories, and worries about those he left behind, who had become a sort of surrogate family. About 220 detainees are still at Guantanamo Bay, which may or may not be closed in January, as President Obama promised shortly after he took office.

Jawad reportedly asked Magnier to tell President Obama, the United Nations or anyone else who could do anything to help the prisoners who remain there. “People there are sick,” he told Magnier. “They should be treated. They should be freed.”

Although UNICEF and some other civil groups are trying to help Jawad get counseling, education and job training, neither the U.S. nor the Afghan government has provided Jawad with any assistance.

A Defense Department official told the L.A. Times that financial assistance for former Guantanamo detainees would cost too much, and “we don’t want to give them money to buy equipment that could come back to hurt us.”

Still, according to the recently released July 2007 memo from the Office of Legal Counsel, the technique was determined not to cause “serious physical pain or suffering” and not to violate the War Crimes Act. The War Crimes Act prohibits torture and “cruel and inhuman treatment.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

A comparison of the inspector general report with legal memos released from the Office of Legal Counsel within the Justice Department, however, reveals that lawyers were so uncertain about how and whether sleep deprivation could be used legally that their advice to the CIA ranged from restricting its use to 48 continuous hours, to allowing it for 180 hours or more. And although the 2007 legal memo specifically mentions that the CIA said it might use the technique for 180 hours, the lawyers restricted their analysis, in footnote 7, to only the legality of its use for up to 96 hours. Meanwhile, the inspector general report discusses the contemplated use of sleep deprivation on Abu Zubaydah for up to 11 days at a time — or 264 hours straight.

None of the former interrogators, physicians, lawyers or government officials could explain to TWI exactly why the CIA and Justice Department lawyers changed the rules so sharply and frequently. A call to Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard Law Professor and director of the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004 was not returned.

“How they go from 48 to 100 plus hours is anybody’s guess,” said Jack Cloonan, a former FBI special agent who worked in the Osama Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002. “I think that they were making the rules up as they went along,” he said, adding that “they outsourced a lot of this,” referring to the role, recently revealed by The New York Times, of Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two businessmen-psychologists who developed the interrogation procedures for the CIA but had no interrogation experience themselves.

But the experts on sleep deprivation all appear to agree – and the literature on the subject is remarkably consistent – that sleep deprivation is physically and mentally harmful, and largely ineffective at producing useful information. Still, it’s tempting for government officials desperate to get detainees to talk.

“It will elicit information, that’s true,” said Cloonan. “People will talk. But in point of fact the substance is what separates what works and what doesn’t. Did they provide actionable intelligence, and could you verify what was being told?” asks Cloonan. “There’s a big diff between compliance — giving information to stop what they’re being subjected to — and real cooperation, where they’re giving useful information.”

Scientists, physicians and interrogators all say that because sleep deprivation causes extreme confusion and even psychosis, it’s impossible to know if what the detainee is telling interrogators is true or not.

“Sleep deprivation has been extensively studied,” said Dr. Steven Miles, professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, as well as the author of the book, “Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors.” “It will cause people to speak. It does not produce reliable intelligence. It impairs the ability to concentrate in a way that allows the interrogatee to assemble coherent narratives. So it’s counterproductive in terms of information solicitation.”

A December 2006 report from the Intelligence Science Board of the National Defense Intelligence College says that sleep deprivation is associated with, among other things, “increased suggestibility,” adding: “On this last point it is worth noting that suggestibility increases specifically under conditions simulating an interrogation. At least one study has found that “the effect on suggestibility of one or two night’s sleep loss is comparable to the difference in suggestibility between true and false confessors.”

That’s such a basic fact for interrogators that in the book, “Introduction to Forensic Psychology,” by Curt and Anne Bartol, the glossary lists “Coerced-compliant false confessions” as “Admissions of guilt most likely to occur after prolonged and intense interrogation experiences, especially in situations where sleep deprivation is a feature. The suspect, in desperation to avoid further discomfort, admits to the crime even knowing that he or she is innocent.”

As Tom Parker, a former British Intelligence agent, now Amnesty International’s Policy Director for Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Human Rights explained: “Sleep deprivation was never designed as an interview tool. It was used by the KGB and its precursors as a way to break people down to give false confessions. These techniques are not about getting people to tell the truth, they’re about breaking people down to kill their spirit.”

The justification for the technique originated with the idea of learned helplessness, based on studies conducted decades ago on dogs.

“They took dogs, tied them in a cage and shocked them,” explained Miles. “They showed that the dogs would act to resist or escape, unless the dogs learned there was nothing they could do to resist. Then they would just lie there and take it.”

The theory, explained Miles, is that “when used with other techniques it will induce dependence on the interrogator, which will cause the person to comply.” But all the research done on this from around the world reveals that “this technique simply does not gather intelligence.”

Sleep deprivation is always part of a package: as described in CIA inspector general report, prisoners were shackled, semi-starved, put in diapers and forced to stand that way. Their hands were cuffed along the wall close to their chins, according to Department of Justice memos. If they nodded off and stopped standing, the chains would pull at their wrists, waking them up.

Andrea Northwood, director of client services at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, recently told The Associated Press that her organization considers 96 hours of sleep deprivation to be torture.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was tortured in Vietnam, has also said that prolonged sleep deprivation is torture, and recently denied the claim in the CIA inspector general report that he was among several members of Congress who approved its use.

Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister from 1977-83, tortured by the KGB as a young man, famously described sleep deprivation in his book, White Nights:

“In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep… Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it,” he wrote. “I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them” — time to sleep.

Although the technique was prohibited by President Obama, some worry it could be revived in the future because it at least gets people to talk, and it’s generally perceived as less offensive than waterboarding, head-slamming or forced nudity. “Sleep deprivation may be seen as a tempting technique to restore,” wrote reporter Greg Miller in the Los Angeles Times recently.

In justifying the use of sleep deprivation in a 2005 memo, Justice Department lawyers argued that it was okay for CIA interrogators to keep terror suspects awake for seven and a half days straight — because “even very extended sleep deprivation does not cause physical pain.” They relied for that claim on the work of university researchers who found that people who were deprived of sleep for just one night had an increased sensitivity to certain types of pain. Justice Department memos dated May 10, 2005 cited this study to support the conclusion that severe sleep deprivation of up to 180 consecutive hours might cause some increased pain but not “severe physical pain” — even when used together with slaps, stress positions, water dousing and “walling” — slamming a detainee’s head repeatedly against a flexible wall.

“Because sleep deprivation appears to cause at most only relatively moderate decreases in pain tolerance, the use of these techniques in combination with extended sleep deprivation would not be expected to cause severe physical pain,” wrote Steven Bradbury, a principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, who signed the memos. (Bradbury has since left the department and works at a private law firm in Washington. He did not return calls for comment.)

But those same academic researchers have since called the Justice Department’s use of their work “nonsense.” “To claim that 180 hours [of sleep deprivation] is safe in these respects, is nonsense.” Dr. James Horne, with the Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre, told the blog Obsidian Wings. “Prolonged stress with sleep deprivation will lead to a physiological exhaustion of the body’s defense mechanisms, physical collapse, and with the potential for various ensuing illnesses.”

In their studies, the doctors explained, the subjects were well-fed and could play video games and watch television. Detainees under interrogation, on the other hand, were often semi-starved and chained into place, not even allowed to go to the bathroom.

“In a manner, it’s like giving a drug to a patient: if you administer it in small doses for therapeutic reasons, it helps them. If you give it in huge volumes, it becomes toxic — and can even kill them,” another of the researchers cited, Dr. S. Hakki Onen, sleep specialist and geriatrician, told Time Magazine.

Although the Justice Department lawyers wrote that “extended sleep deprivation cannot be expected to cause ‘severe mental pain or suffering,’” the doctors vigorously disagree.

After several days, “the mental pain would be all too evident, and arguably worse than physical pain,” Dr. Horne said to Obsidian Wings.

Notably, a combination of techniques similar to those used by the CIA has been ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights. In the case Ireland v. U.K., the court held that a combination of sleep deprivation, hooding, wall-standing, continuous white noise, sleep deprivation and “the bread and water diet” violated international humanitarian law.

What’s odd, say former interrogators, is that the military knew this and for the most part, resisted using these techniques. The CIA, however, relying on inexperienced contractors who developed its interrogation strategies based on the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) training, seems to have completely ignored common knowledge.

“The point is you realize when you’re going through that [SERE] training, they tell you this isn’t about trying to get useful intelligence out of you, it’s about getting propoganda,” said Matthew Alexander, a 14-year veteran of the air force and leader of an elite interrogations team in Iraq and author of “How to Break a Terrorist.” (Matthew Alexander, seen here on The Daily Show, uses a pseudonym.) Sleep deprivation may be used for no longer than 48 hours in SERE training, according to the inspector general report. “They’re just trying to break down your will.”

“I think people misinterpreted that,” Alexander added. “Mitchell and Jessen, the psychologists, they took that learned helplessness theory, but they’d never done an interrogation. They were so off base.”

Greg Miller and Josh Meyer of The Los Angeles Times on Sunday confirmed earlier reports that Holder has reluctantly come around to thinking that he can’t avoid the fact that torture occurred at the hands of U.S. officials, and that U.S. and international law requires an investigation. Holder is reportedly only considering cases where CIA interrogators went beyond the rules established by the Bush administration’s lawyers, rather than investigating the legality of those rules themselves. But as I’ve written before, it’s not clear where such an inquiry would logically end. Investigating CIA functionaries low on the totem pole — which would involve re-opening cases previously dismissed by the Bush administration — would ultimately require looking into the orders they received from their superiors.

Previous proposals to create commissions to undertake broader inquiries — from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) — have so far failed to win majority support in Congress.

According to The LA Times, CIA officials are already nervous about Holder’s impending probe, with some even putting off their retirement or plans to leave the agency so they can maintain access to classified information they might need for their defense, or argue that as government officials they’re immune from suit.

“Once you’re out, it gets a lot harder,” a retired CIA official told The Times.