Regulatory disappearing act

DougJ linked to this NYTimes piece on for-profit colleges yesterday. Read the whole thing, or I’ll just give you my summary: the federal government attempted to regulate for-profit colleges, a huge army of lobbyists descended, and the federal government gutted the regulations.

Arne Duncan isn’t quoted in the piece, but I’ve been reading up on the deregulation and privatization of K-12 public schools since the Issue Two battle in Ohio began, and one of two things is true about Arne Duncan re: K-12 education. He is either unaware of the (unintended!) privatization now underway and made (partly) possible by his deregulatory education agenda in public school districts in Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Illinois, Colorado and Pennsylvania, or he is aware it’s happening but has no problem with the deregulation and (then) privatization of public schools. In other words, I’m not confident the Department of Education fought these for-profit college lobbyists real hard, because Duncan is a knee-jerk cheerleader for deregulation and market-based reforms in K-12 public schools.

On the other hand, I do have respect for Cass Sunstein, and this is what Sunstein said about the lobbying effort:

“The haranguing had zero effect,” said Cass R. Sunstein, the White House official who oversees rule making.

Hmmm. Draw your own conclusions. I don’t know.

I wasn’t surprised that so many big-name Democrats are either working for or onboard with the for-profit college sector because Democrats are well represented in promotion and sales of the for-profit K-12 sector. This is an NBC News product, Education Nation, which was co-sponsored by the University of Phoenix, and is basically a long infomercial trashing traditional public schools and promoting corporate K-12 school reform. Both Arne Duncan and Bill Clinton were featured in several of the exciting episodes that I viewed.

Today, there is a piece in the NYtimes on for-profit, publicly funded K-12 online education:

Kids mean money. Agora is expecting income of $72 million this school year, accounting for more than 10 percent of the total anticipated revenues of K12, the biggest player in the online-school business. The second-largest, Connections Education, with revenues estimated at $190 million, was bought this year by the education and publishing giant Pearson for $400 million.
The business taps into a formidable coalition of private groups and officials promoting nontraditional forms of public education. The growth of for-profit online schools, one of the more overtly commercial segments of the school choice movement, is rooted in the theory that corporate efficiencies combined with the Internet can revolutionize public education, offering high quality at reduced cost.
The New York Times has spent several months examining this idea, focusing on K12 Inc. A look at the company’s operations, based on interviews and a review of school finances and performance records, raises serious questions about whether K12 schools — and full-time online schools in general — benefit children or taxpayers, particularly as state education budgets are being slashed. Instead, a portrait emerges of a company that tries to squeeze profits from public school dollars by raising enrollment, increasing teacher workload and lowering standards.

“Kids mean money”. Read it and weep. Market-based reform.

“What we’re talking about here is the financialization of public education,” said Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education who is affiliated with the education policy center. “These folks are fundamentally trying to do to public education what the banks did with home mortgages.”

This is why I’m madly in love with teachers’ unions although I’m fully aware of the many flaws of unions. Unions are the only thing standing in the way.

The huge lobbying push by school reformers to sell K-12 online for-profit schools is particularly cruel, because school reform was (supposedly) premised on how we needed great teachers, but had lousy teachers, which is why we had to deregulate in the first place. The problem was those lousy teachers, we were told. If we just had great teachers, and we could innovate and get around all these pesky regulations and democratically elected school boards, all our education problems would disappear.

That’s why it’s a tad disconcerting that reformers are now pushing a school model that replaces teachers and schools with an over-priced computer program. The level of deception there just makes my head spin. We were told we needed to deregulate because we needed excellent teachers and schools and now it turns out we don’t really need teachers and schools at all! Instead, we simply need to ship public funding for schools out of our states and districts, and to one of these national education corporations, where it goes to shareholders and executives and…excellence! That was easy. Must be that market-based reform again, working its voodoo market magic.

Finally, I bitch about pundits all the time here, but Gail Collins is the one and only top-tier pundit who’s writing about privatization and the conversion of public schools to for-profits. It’s not polite or fashionable to ask questions about for-profits and school reform (although it’s perfectly okay, and very fashionable, to delve into minute detail when talking about the salaries of unionized teachers) and Collins is asking anyway. I’m grateful to her, because I don’t believe the public were informed they were buying for-profit K-12 education when they were sold school reform. I think they should have been told. And you know what? They’re going to find out. Good. It’s about time. This is why I buy newspapers, for information like this.

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Republican Anniversary of the Week: Iran-Contra

Now that reports of Iranians storming embassies indicate that our national newspapers of record have been permitted to shake up the normal somnolence of their readers, an optimist might wonder if any aspiring journo would dare to mention the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Iran-Contra scandal. Few Balloon-Juice readers are optimists, but it did surprise me slightly how much the whole disgraceful interlude seems to have passed from the national public memory. Peter Kornbluh, of the National Security Archives, published an excellent precis in Salon:

It has been 25 years since President Ronald Reagan stepped up to the microphone in the White House press room and made the announcement that launched one of the greatest scandals in modern American politics.

Reagan announced that his administration had sent “small amounts of defense weapons and spare parts to Iran” not to trade arms for hostages, but to improve relations and support moderate mullahs. There was “one aspect” of the operation that, the President said, he had been “unaware of.” His attorney general, Edwin Meese, then stepped forward to describe how “private benefactors” had transferred profits from those sales to counterrevolutionary forces, the contras, fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. No U.S. officials were involved, according to Meese, in this “diversion” of funds that linked two seemingly separate covert operations…

The list of the “other… more important ” aspects of the sordid story that became known as “Iran-contra” scandal is a long one but worth recalling 25 years later. The Reagan administration had been negotiating with terrorists (despite Reagan’s repeated public position that he would “never” do so). There were illegal arms transfers to Iran, flagrant lying to Congress, soliciting third country funding to circumvent the Congressional ban on financing the contra war in Nicaragua, White House bribes to various generals in Honduras, illegal propaganda and psychological operations directed by the CIA against the U.S. press and public, collaboration with drug kingpins such as Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, and violating the checks and balances of the constitution.

“If ever the constitutional democracy of the United States is overthrow,” the leading political analyst of the scandal, Theodore Draper wrote at the time, “we now have a better idea of how this is likely to be done.”...

Charles P. Pierce, in Esquire’s Political Blog, nicely summarizes the “lost opportunities of Iran-Contra“:

... Iran-Contra was a straightforward constitutional B&E. The Reagan people wanted to fight a war in Central America. Congress did its constitutional duty and shut off the money. The administration then broke the law by arranging private funding for its pet war. One of the ways it did that was to sell military hardware to the government of Iran, which sponsored not only terrorism, but also the kidnapping of various American citizens abroad. All of this was in service to a private foreign policy, devoid of checks and balances, and based on a fundamental contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law…

Iran-Contra was the moment when the country decided — or, alternatively, when it was decided for the country — that self-government was too damned hard, and that we’re all better off just not knowing. It was the moment when all the checks and balances failed, when our faith in the Constitution was most sorely tested, and when it was found most seriously wanting. Iran-Contra is how all the crimes of the subsequent years became possible. It is when the Constitution became a puppet show.

I was in my mid-20s then, old enough to understand the depths of Republican treason and dishonesty exposed by the Walsh investigation, and young enough to be outraged by the unseemly haste by which both wings of the Permanent Government Party and its media courtiers swept all evidence of global criminality out of the public eye. Mistakes were made! Honorable men—opinions differ! And yet even the truncated clown-show proceedings permitted to enter the official records established, to me, what prosecutors call “a pattern of misconduct”: One October Surprise might be dismissed as the abberation of a paranoid drunk misleading a band of well-meaning innocents, but repeating Nixon’s ‘mastercoup’—putting American lives at risk for nothing more valuable than a presidential campaign—made it clear that the Republican Party was deliberately degenerating from a political party into a criminal junta. I have always been a proud Democrat, but it was the whole sordid, murderous Iran-Contra scandal which convinced me that (to quote Driftglass and the Rude Pundit):

Anyone who votes for a modern Republican is voting for a Bad Person.

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“The Monster Descendants of a Republican Ego”

Last word on the DAR debate goes to Charlie Pierce, who is old like me, and remembers these monsters from their earlier crimes against humanity and the American system of government:

... [W]e must pause right here at the top to commend the Wingnut Undead for their lively presentations last night at the 9,875th of 10,623 scheduled Republican debates. Given the sponsorship of the vampire clans at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, it’s true that the only way you could have kept them out of Constitution Hall would have been to garland the joint with garlic. But, mother of mercy…

Edwin Fking Meese?

The man who was breaking the heads of the civilly disobedient in Berkeley forty-one years before the Cal-Davis cops discovered what fun chemical weapons are? Ronald Reagan’s devoted porn sleuth? (Elsewhere on The Meese Commission was Father Bruce Ritter, the famous priest who ministered to the runaways in Times Square, and the angry prophet against neon-lit sleaze, who later was discovered to have been sharing his penis, as well as the Lord’s grace, with his charges.) The attorney-general who gave the Iran-Contra crooks just enough time to do the shredding? The man who once said that Miranda protects only the guilty, that the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence was a”pro-lesbian” group, and that employers should be able to discriminate against employees with AIDS if the employer decides he’s protecting the public health? I’d even forgotten how very much I disliked this guy, and now here he comes, suddenly appearing in the present, with Fred Kagan, and the chin-impaired sadist Marc Thiessen, and Paul (My War, Your Kids) Wolfowitz, and Meese gets the first question of the night? It was like seeing Bela Lugosi turn up in the newest Twilight film.

Unsurprisingly, Meese, who never met a civil liberty he wouldn’t feed to his fish, asked the assembled candidates to stand up and cheer for the Patriot Act, which Ron Paul declined to do, and about which Jon Huntsman waxed thoughtful before rising about halfway and giving a rhetorical golf-clap… Everybody else reminded us that there are bad people who want to kill us. Meese returned to the coffin full of his native earth and we were off for the rest of the proceedings…

To repeat myself: No matter what your totebagger “thoughtful centrist” aunt may have been told by dishonest hacks like David Frum, David Brooks, and the other spineless contenders for Dean Broder’s Commode of Centrist Thoughtfulness, the Republican Party has not recently been stolen by a batch of half-witted bigots, xenophobes, authoritarians, and garden-variety grifters. They’ve had control of the GOP wheel for more than 40 years, at least since Nixon’s triumphant accession to the Oval Office with the help of many of these same fine Heritage Institute ‘statesmen’. They were bad people when they were interning during Watergate, they were bad people when they used Reagan as a figurehead to start the full-scale authoritarian takeover and banana-republic-style looting of our national treasury, and they remain Bad People in Charge even unto this very day.

Anybody who votes for a modern Republican is voting for a Bad Person (h/t Driftglass).

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Open Thread: The 27% Solution

Charlie Pierce at the Esquire Political Blog recalls another facet of Robert Bork’s career:

If we all live long enough, we may see the end of conservative whining over the hard hand dealt to Robert Bork, who once was denied a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States because his judicial philosophy should be written on a bearskin with a pointed stick dipped in mud. Joe Nocera is only the latest person to fall into the deep, rancid morass of self-pity that has emanated from Bork ever since a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate declined to let him spend the rest of his life playing Chutes and Ladders with the Bill of Rights….

On October 23, 1973, always the good apparatchik, it was Bork who stepped up and fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, after Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy AG William Ruckleshaus refused to do so, on the orders of President Richard M. Nixon, who was at that moment guilty as sin of encouraging acts of burglary and retaliation against all his political enemies, real and imagined, and then covering them up. Call me an old fogie, but I remember the era of what a crooked AG named John Mitchell called “the White House horrors” as being a pretty toxic time for politics inside the old Beltway. And, when it counted, Robert Bork stepped up and did the bidding of a guilty old bag of sins who, if it weren’t for divisive politics, would have been selling lemons from a roadside stand in California.

Given how many of the Cheney Regency’s principal villians (Cheney himself, Baker, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc.) started their political careers under Richard Nixon, I’m more than ever convinced that the great American political error of the late twentieth century was letting Gerald Ford pass off the unwillingness of the bicameral “permanent government party” mandarins to examine the full extent of the Nixon administration’s criminality as “putting the past behind us“. Failure to prosecute “a frail old elder statesman” (who would go on spreading political poison for another twenty years) gave the various schemers, bagmen, thugs, and would-be kingmakers under his protection the chance to move from Watergate to Iran-Contra to the Supreme-Court-enabled theft of the 2000 election and all the yet-unpunished criminality resulting therefrom.

It’s as though the conspirators responsible for bringing all the McCarthy paranoia, Bircher race-baiting, and Goldwater fantasies of global domination into the Oval Office—only to be forestalled by their own clumsiness in attempting to hid the evidence of petty malfeasance—had been told: “While the Rule of Law holds in America, you will not be able to get away with this.” So they’ve spent the last 40 years in piecemeal destruction of that Rule of Law, the better to install their desired rule of very small men.

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Over

Twitter informs me that Obama is scheduled to announce a complete withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. What did we accomplish? What did we gain? Other than the removal of Saddam, nothing that I can tell, and I don’t understand how we are better off with Iraq in chaos and more closely aligned with Iran. Anyone who supported this debacle, as I did, should forever have their judgment questioned on everything. Even if you think they are right, remain suspect of their opinions. It’s just that simple. When I look at it now, it was such an easy call, such an easy test of critical thinking skills, and I and others failed it. It’s just that simple.

Which leads me to the most nauseating aspect of this announcement- all the people who were wrong will now be given airtime to do “victory laps” on national tv, complete with Liz Cheney and other dead-enders going on tv claiming this vindicates the previous administration. If I weren’t already bedridden with the flu, it would be enough to make me sick.

Trillions of dollars, untold tens of thousands dead, god knows how many wounded, millions scarred, and for what?

Now let’s GTFO of Afghanistan.

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Better Than a Jail Cell, I Guess

Jonathan Turley is shrill:

While former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been able to escape investigation and prosecution for his role in the torture program, no law firms or ranking law schools wanted to touch him as he sought gainful employment. Gonzales has been struggling to find someone who wants to be represented or taught by an individual ridiculed for politicizing the Justice Department and bringing in hacks who were accused of a variety of criminal and ethical violations. Well, he finally found one school. Belmont University has created an unaccredited law school in Tennessee. Its new Doyle Rogers Distinguished Chair of Law is no one else than Alberto Gonzales.

Presumably, the “Distinguished” refers to the chair rather than the holder.

Belmont College of Law Founding Dean Jeff Kinsler insisted that Gonzales has what it takes to be “an outstanding professor.” So long as he does not waterboard the students.

What is truly scary is is Gonzales’ pledge to help “develop tomorrow’s leaders in the bar, the Nashville community and beyond.” The idea of Gonzales shaping lawyers is enough to force one into a fetal position.

Right about now, I’m thinking the biggest mistake of the Obama administration (above and beyond outfitting the admin with Goldman Sachs boys) was not prosecuting the malfeasance of the previous administration. I understand why they didn’t, but given where we are today, I sure wish they had driven a stake through the monster while they had a chance.

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Thank Goodness For Small Miracles

I hope on the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, there were two men who wanted to make the disaster worse. Osama bin Laden and this guy:

Newly published audio this week reveals that Vice President Dick Cheney’s infamous Sept. 11, 2001 order to shoot down rogue civilian aircraft was ignored by military officials, who instead ordered pilots to only identify suspect aircraft.

That revelation is one of many in newly released audio recordings compiled by investigators for the 9/11 Commission, published this week by The Rutgers Law Review. Featuring voices from employees at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and American Airlines, the newly released multimedia provides a glimpse at the chaos that emerged as the attack progressed.

Most striking of all is the revelation that an order by Vice President Dick Cheney was ignored by the military, which saw his order to shoot down aircraft as outside the chain of command. Instead of acknowledging the order to shoot down civilian aircraft and carrying it out, NORAD ordered fighters to confirm aircraft tail numbers first and report back for further instructions.

Cheney’s order was given at “about 10:15” a.m., according to the former VP’s memoirs, but the 9/11 Commission Report shows United flight 93 going down at 10:06 a.m. Had the military followed Cheney’s order, civilian aircraft scrambling to get out of the sky could have been shot down, exponentially amplifying the day’s tragedy.

It still amazes me this guy is taken seriously on anything.

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When It Comes to Love I Want a Slow Hand

Apparently Dick Cheney has emerged from his undisclosed location/hyperbaric chamber and is still wowing the usual suspects with his wit and charm and gravitas:

Why are they still interviewing this guy? Why is he on my tv every night? He’s a disgrace. Someone mentioned this delightful post in the comments the other day, and I think it is relevant when discussing Tricky Dick Two, Electrocardiograph Boogie:

Fibbers’ forecasts are worthless. Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend to make innacurate projections about the possible outcomes of that project, but about the futility of attempts to “shade” downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can’t use their forecasts at all. Not even as a “starting point”.

Stop interviewing him. Putting aside the fact that he is completely irrelevant, he presided over the worst eight years of governance this country has ever seen. On top of it all, he’s a liar. What exactly does someone have to do before they are disgraced enough that the bobbleheads will ignore them?

Personally, I don’t want to hear Dick Cheney’s name ever again, unless the words “obituary” or “war crimes tribunal” are in the same sentence. And I don’t care if that gives Sullivan or any of the other beltway boys the vapors (MOORE AWARD! MOORE AWARD!)

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Open Thread: Darth Cheney, Redux

(Don Wright via GoComics.com)

I can’t help myself; I was born to a tribe that cherishes a good grievance as an heirloom to be passed down for generations.

Apart from football, what’s on the agenda for The Last Official Summer Weekend?

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Open Thread: Darth Cheney, Puppy-Kicker

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)

Srsly:

“From our first encounter,” writes Dick Cheney, “when I woke him up by stepping on him, Cyrano and I became close friends.” Cyrano is—sorry, was—a beloved family dog, a basset hound, accepted by the family when Cheney was working at President Richard Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity… “I think that Cyrano and I had an understanding.”

The last time a retired vice president wrote a memoir, when Dan Quayle gifted the airport book-buyer with Standing Firm, the goal was to prove he was serious. That’s not Cheney’s problem. The purpose of Cheney’s memoir, In My Time, is to prove he is human.

So the reader of In My Time gets a few stories about dogs. He gets snapshots of Cheney and his mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, having wacky adventures… These little stories are meant to humanize Cheney, which is necessary, because no one else is going to accept that mission…

You read it here first: Willard “Let me tell you a heartwarming story about strapping the family dog to the roof rack, and how it greatly reduces the annoying noise level from the kids in the back seat, too” Romney is going to solicit Mr. Cheney’s endorsement… big time.

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Open Thread: Darth Cheney, Fictioneer

(Jim Morin via GoComics.com)

Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic has a pretty good thumbnail summary Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney: the Iraq war, torture, Halliburton, Ahmed Chalabi, unlimited detention of the innocent, his radical view of executive power, etc. Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, sniffs about Cheney’s “cheap shots”:

“I think he’s just trying to, one, assert himself so he’s not in some subsequent time period tried for war crimes and, second, so that he somehow vindicates himself because he feels like he needs vindication. That in itself tells you something about him,” Wilkerson told ABC News, explaining that Cheney may have “angst” because of receiving deferments instead of serving in the Vietnam War like Wilkerson and others in the administration.

“He’s developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal so he uses such terminology as ‘exploding heads all over Washington’ because that’s the way someone who’s decided he’s not going to be prosecuted acts: boldly, let’s get out in front of everybody, let’s act like we are not concerned and so forth when in fact they are covering up their own fear that somebody will Pinochet him,” Wilkerson said alluding to the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested for war crimes.

(via)

But IMO the most significant review so far is Dahlia Lithwick at Slate dissecting Cheney Getting Away With Torture:

This week Dick Cheney invites us all to join him again in a game he likes to play against the rest of us called Tedious Torture Standoff. He continues to assert—this time in his memoir, In My Time—that he has “no regrets” about developing the U.S. torture program, and he continues to argue—as he did this morning on the Today Show—that torturing prisoners is “safe, legal, and effective.” He continues to assert that he would “strongly support” water-boarding if actionable information could be elicited from a prisoner. He even says that different standards apply to torturing Americans and foreigners. Cheney is trying, in short, to draw us back into the same tiresome debate over the efficacy of torture, which is about as compelling as a debate about the efficacy of slavery or Jim Crow laws. Only fools debate whether patently illegal programs “work”—only fools or those who have been legally implicated in designing the programs in the first place…
More »

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I Like This Version Better

This is Jamison Foser’s edit of the Perry/Obama comparison picture (click to embiggen). I like it better than the one Libby Spencer made. It would be perfect if the title was something like “Let’s Not Get Fooled Again”. I realize that it’s less high-minded and more backward-looking, but it encapsulates the extremely simple, winning message that will beat Perry: he’s just another Bush. Sometimes politics is very simple, and this is one of those times.

Update: Reader Chris sends his own version.

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Monday Morning Open Thread

Maureen Dowd, self-appointed Queen Bee Mean Girl of the Villagers’ lunchroom, is the perfect reviewer for Darth Cheney’s new book:

Vice’s new memoir, “In My Time,” veers unpleasantly between spin, insisting he was always right, and score-settling, insisting that anyone who opposed him was wrong.

His knife-in-her-teeth daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, helped write the book. The second most famous Liz & Dick combo do such an excellent job of cherry-picking the facts, it makes the cherry-picking on the Iraq war intelligence seem picayune…

Vice gleefully predicted that his memoir would have “heads exploding all over Washington.” But his book is a bore. He doesn’t even mention how in high school he used to hold the water buckets to douse the fiery batons of his girlfriend Lynne, champion twirler.

At least Rummy’s memoir showed some temperament. And George Tenet’s was the primal scream of a bootlicker caught out.

Cheney takes himself so seriously, flogging his cherished self-image as a rugged outdoorsman from Wyoming (even though he shot his Texas hunting partner in the face) and a vice president who was the only thing standing between America and its enemies.

He acts like he is America. But America didn’t like Dick Cheney.

Say what you will about Joe Biden, at least he has an ethos a pulse.

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Extremism in the Defense of Corporate Interests is No Vice

Rick Perry says a lot of crazy shit, but the most interesting piece of Perry stupidity that I’ve seen is what he tried to do with the HPV vaccine in Texas. Perry mandated that all sixth grade girls in Texas be vaccinated with Merck’s Gardasil vaccine in 2007, a decision that he’s only now walking back.

Providing HPV vaccine for those who can’t afford it, and educating parents and children about the benefits of the vaccine are both positive, progressive policy steps. Mandating vaccination for a disease that can only be sexually transmitted is certainly something any real conservative wouldn’t support. But when Perry’s friends at Merck told him to jump, he jumped as high as he possibly could, and was only stopped when the state legislature voted overwhelmingly to overturn his executive order.

This, rather than the aw-shucks, gun-toting bullshit, is the real similarity between Bush and Perry. Perry’s HPV vaccine extremism is of a piece with Bush’s Medicare Part D extremism. Providing a drug benefit to the elderly is something liberal and moderate policymakers could support. Doing it by creating a market with hundreds of different, confusing plans, and not using government buying power to buy drugs more cheaply in volume were just another kiss for big pharma. The cherry on top was that there was no plan in place to pay for Part D—Bush and the Republicans completely abandoned any pretense of fiscal discipline when they rammed Part D through during a midnight, arm-twisting vote.

Just as with Bush, the raw evidence of anti-conservative corporatism will be ignored by true believers and the DC mancrush media because Perry talks a good game, looks good in a suit, and occasionally shoots a gun.

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And So If I Seem Broken And Blue

Looks like we are going to take the advice of Nooners when it comes to torture prosecutions:

A special prosecutor has recommended a criminal probe into the deaths of two prisoners in CIA custody but cleared U.S. interrogators of wrongdoing in 99 others, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.

“I have accepted his recommendation to conduct a full criminal investigation regarding the death in custody of two individuals,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement issued Thursday afternoon. “Those investigations are ongoing. The department has determined that an expanded criminal investigation of the remaining matters is not warranted.”

The special prosecutor, John Durham, examined the treatment of 101 prisoners in U.S. custody, not all of whom were held by the CIA. In a message to employees, outgoing CIA chief Leon Panetta said the agency will “cooperate fully” in the remaining cases—but said they already had been reviewed by career prosecutors who did not pursue charges.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said one of the cases is the 2003 death of the “ice man,” Manadel al-Jamadi, an inmate who died after being interrogated in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Among the photos at the heart of the 2004 scandal over the abuse of Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib were snapshots of U.S. soldiers posing over al-Jamadi’s remains, which had been packed on ice.

Some things in life need to be kept mysterious.

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