Eric Holder announces the end of "the Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism programs carried out under President George W. Bush."

The NYT reports:

The Justice Department did not say publicly which cases had been under investigation. But officials had previously confirmed the identities of the prisoners: Gul Rahman, suspected of being a militant, who died in 2002 after being shackled to a concrete wall in near-freezing temperatures at a secret C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit; and Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in C.I.A. custody in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where his corpse was photographed packed in ice and wrapped in plastic.

Mr. Holder’s announcement might remove a possible target for Republicans during the presidential campaign. But the decision will disappoint liberals who supported President Obama when he ran in 2008 and denounced what he called torture and abuse of prisoners under his predecessor.

It's one thing to run for office, quite another to occupy it. You can criticize and express all manner of outrage from the sidelines, but when you are on the inside, it's different, and by cycling the Democratic Party into power, the American people got to learn something about what the Bush Administration did. Those who don't like Obama should see the value of what we learned.