"If criminal investigations closed by career prosecutors during one administration can so easily be reopened at the direction of political appointees in the next, declinations of prosecution will be rendered meaningless. Those men and women who undertake difficult intelligence assignments in the aftermath of an attack such as September 11 must believe there is permanence in the legal rules that govern their actions .... [T]his approach will seriously damage the willingness of many other intelligence officers to take risks to protect the country. In our judgment such risk-taking is vital to success in the long and difficult fight against the terrorists who continue to threaten us."

The Justice Department has put out this statement in response:

The Attorney General works closely with the men and the women of intelligence community to keep the American people safe and he does not believe their commitment to conduct that important work will waver in any way.

Given the recommendation from the Office of Professional Responsibility as well as other available information, he believed the appropriate course of action was to ask John Durham to conduct a preliminary review. That review will be narrowly-focused and will be conducted by a career prosecutor who has shown an ability to handle cases involving classified information. Durham has not been appointed as a special prosecutor; he will be supervised by senior managers at the Department.

The Attorney General’s decision to order a preliminary review into this matter was made in line with his duty to examine the facts and to follow the law. As he has made clear, the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees.

The full letter is available in PDF form here.

On Thursday, in a new interview with the Times, the former attorney general was singing a different tune.

"Contrary to press reporting and based on the information that's available to me, I don't support the investigation by the department because this is a matter that has already been reviewed thoroughly and because I believe that another investigation is going to harm our intelligence gathering capabilities and that's a concern that's shared by career intelligence officials and so for those reasons I respectfully disagree with the decision," Gonzales said. "I respect the right of the attorney general to make this decision based upon his judgement of the facts, but again based upon what I know I disagree with the decision."

When a reporter for the Times read his original quote back to him, Gonzales replied, "[I]t's an endorsement of [Holder's] right to exercise his discretion. I'm just saying I would have exercised my discretion in a different manner, given the information I have .... So when I talk about how we expect people to abide by a certain set of rules, and if they don't they ought to be looked into, it's been looked into."

"We worked very hard to establish ground rules and parameters about how to deal with terrorists," Gonzales said in an interview with a Washington Times radio program. "And if people go beyond that, I think it is legitimate to question and examine that conduct to ensure people are held accountable for their actions, even if it’s action in prosecuting the war on terror."

Among other things, Gonzales' comments are notable for their accurate description of what's going to happen with this investigation. Many on the right have portrayed the inquiry as much broader than it actually is; in fact, it's going to focus on a limited number of cases of interrogators who crossed the lines the Bush administration laid out for them, and it won't necessarily lead to prosecutions. If this investigation ends with a conclusion that there's reason to proceed, then there'll be a fuller investigation and that will lead to the actual decision on whether or not to prosecute.

In addition, the report includes a 2002 psychological evaluation of al-Qaida suspect Abu Zubaydah, forwarded to John Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel and now renowned for providing much of the Bush administration's legal justification for torture. The evaluation says that Abu Zubaydah is mentally stable and a powerful figure within al-Qaida. Both assertions are diametrically opposed to the characterization of Abu Zubaydah in Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine," an authoritative account of the Bush administration's counterterrorism efforts.

Here's a look at what prominent voices on the left and the right are saying about the report prior to its release and how they're responding to the news that the Justice Department may reopen some prisoner-abuse cases.

Marcy Wheeler, aka "emptywheel," Firedoglake: "But notice what is not on this list? ... The Office of Public Responsibility report, which has been due out all summer, and last we heard was at the CIA being reviewed to protect (presumably) John Rizzo's role in crafting OLC memos that claimed to authorize torture ... If it is, indeed, DOJ's plan to release all the other torture documents save the OPR report, it will have the effect of distracting the media with horrible descriptions of threats with power drills and waterboarding, away from the equally horrible description of lawyers willfully twisting the law to 'authorize' some of those actions. It will shift focus away from those that set up a regime of torture and towards those who free-lanced within that regime in spectacularly horrible ways. It will hide the degree to which torture was a conscious plan, and the degree to which the oral authorizations for torture may well have authorized some of what we'll see in the IG Report tomorrow ... If it is, indeed, DOJ's plan to release the IG Report and announce an investigation without, at the same time, releasing the OPR report, it will serve the goal of exposing the Lynndie England's of the torture regime while still protecting those who instituted that regime.

Spencer Ackerman, Washington Independent: "But pay attention as well to what might not get released today: another long awaited report, this time from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility about the propriety of legally sanctioning the interrogation program by the Office of Legal Counsel ... But without the OPR inquiry on the Office of Legal Counsel — which Holder has pledged to declassify — the CIA inspector general report will present stories outside of the context that gave rise to them ... Without that context, it won’t be possible to understand what drove interrogators to enter those interrogation chambers, even if the torture they applied was more severe than what the department’s lawyers specified was acceptable."

Atrios: "Threatened execution isn't torture because it doesn't actually destroy any organs."

Digby: "The article goes on to say that Jay Bybee ok'd these tactics so long as they weren't intended to cause lasting mental harm, so Holder's (potential) inquiry will necessarily skip looking at these events. If someone is going to be prosecuted for torture, it has to be for something other than threatening to use an electric drill on someone or partially drowning them. That would only be considered torture if some faceless bureaucrat hadn't written a memo authorizing them. Oh well."

Daphne Eviatar, Washington Independent: "As Newsweek reported Friday evening, the CIA inspector general report expected to be released on Monday reveals that the CIA staged mock executions to terrify terror suspects into talking. Regardless of whether interrogators got the information they were looking for, these actions were clearly against the law. It is a violation of both the federal anti-torture statute, and of international law, to threaten a suspect with imminent death. Yet there was no other possible purpose for staging a mock execution in a room next to a detainee — complete with gunfire to suggest a prisoner had been killed — other than to terrify the detainee into believing that he would be next."

Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, Newsweek: "At the same time the administration releases the inspector general's report, it is also expected to release other CIA documents that assert the agency collected valuable intelligence through the interrogation program. For months, former vice president Dick Cheney has called for these documents to be released. However, a person familiar with the contents of the documents says that they contain material that both opponents and supporters of Bush administration tactics can use to bolster their case. The Senate Committee on Intelligence is now conducting what is supposed to be a thorough investigation of the CIA's detention-and-interrogation program. The probe is intended not only to document everything that happened but also to assess whether on balance the program produced major breakthroughs or a deluge of false leads."

David Johnston, New York Times: "Mr. [Eric] Holder [Attorney General] was said to have reacted with disgust earlier this year when he first read accounts of abusive treatment of detainees in a classified version of the inspector general’s report and other materials."

Tom A. Peter, Christian Science Monitor: "The incidents described in the report are among the most extreme examples of 'enhanced interrogation' techniques used by CIA interrogators. While waterboarding and sleep deprivation were approved in legal memos from the Justice Department, other methods, such as using a power drill appear to have been improvised methods not specifically mentioned by the Justice Department. One former US official described some of these practices ... as being done 'almost in juvenile detective mode.'"

Bobby Ghosh, Time: "Five Questions for the CIA IG's Interrogation Report ... 1. Who was really behind the interrogation regime? ... 2. Did the interrogations work? ... 3. What did the interrogators really do? ... 3. What did the interrogators really do? ... 5. What happened before August of 2002?"

Kathryn Jean Lopez, the National Review: On the possibility of reopening some prisoner-abuse cases: "This seems potentially shamefully dangerous."

Jeffrey H. Smith, general counsel of the CIA from 1995 to 1996, Washington Post: "If media reports are accurate, the conduct detailed in the inspector general's report was contrary to our values. It caused harm to our nation and cannot be repeated. But prosecuting those who actually carried out that behavior has consequences that could further harm our nation. Even if the attorney general concludes that a criminal charge could be brought, other factors must be considered. Sometimes broader national objectives must be given greater weight."