Some of this will be familiar to attendees of Marcy’s NN09 panel, but in advance of Monday’s anticipated release of the CIA inspector general torture report from 2004, I put together this piece for the Washington Independent about the message that the civil liberties community is going to deliver to Attorney General Holder and the country at large.

[Some] in human-rights circles are prepared to give Holder room from the outset for the expected inquiry to germinate into something more systemic — provided that Holder doesn’t explicitly rule such a thing out from the outset. “The question for us is not where an investigation begins, but where it ends,” said Jameel Jaffer, the head of the ACLU’s national-security project. “If the attorney general were to grant immunity to senior officials, that’s something we’d react very negatively to. But if the attorney general announces a narrower investigation but not foreclose on a broader one, we’d probably say that’s an important first step, a crucial step, and now [a prosecutor] should be given prosecutorial authority to follow the facts.”

Several in the civil-liberties community argued that an investigation that didn’t explicitly rule out examining the role of senior administration officials and legal advisers would naturally examine their role in torture, since it would be impossible to establish that a low-level interrogator exceeded legal guidance without establishing what that guidance was and what legal legitimacy it enjoyed. “The boundaries are the boundaries of illegitimate memos,” said Jaffer’s colleague Melissa Goodman, a staff attorney with the ACLU.

Vince Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, added that he saw a de facto convergence of interests with the CIA, an agency that the human rights community more often views adversarially. “If investigators are only looking at low-level people, low-level people necessarily have to say, ‘I was just following orders, you have to look at these folks [who gave the orders], without them I wouldn’t have done it,’” Warren said. “There’s an opportunity for people in CIA to agree with idea that looking at these issues just from the point of contact, if you will, is completely missing how this entire torture system operated.”