Rachel Maddow (MSNBC photo).

In an interview with Main Justice on Thursday, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said she has mixed feelings about the first year of the Justice Department under President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.

“I think that Eric Holder was a strong choice for Attorney General and I think that the president’s overt declarations about the independence of Eric Holder’s decision-making, his prosecutorial decision making — the pains that the president has taken to make clear that Justice is not a political agency, that Justice is independent and needs to be insulated from political concerns — I think is good for the country and I’m glad that the president has done that.”

Maddow, the liberal host of a five-day a week political news and commentary show on cable television,  was in D.C. and stopped by the Conservative Political Action Conference, which runs through Saturday.

“In terms of decisions made on justice matters since the president was inaugurated, I mean there are definitely things that I disagree with: I disagree with indefinite detention, I disagree with this weird idea that there’s this fifth category of detainees that’s extra-constitutional. I think that’s a continuation, and even in some ways, an expansion, of the Bush doctrine about detainees that I have a lot of problems with,” said Maddow.

“I’m also troubled by the decision to allow torture to go unprosecuted because I think that we have treaty obligations that require us to treat that otherwise.”

“So there have been things about which I’ve been disappointed, but the overall depoliticization of the Justice Department, stopping treating the Civil Rights Division, the Voting [section] as arms of the partisan Republican Party as they were doing during the Bush administration are steps in the right direction. I’m glad they didn’t decide, for example, to make them Democratic-crusading voting rights and Civil Right divisions but rather to bring them back to the proper position of neutrality that we all benefit from,” said Maddow.

“I think they could have rolled that out in a politically better way. I think the decision to try KSM in civilian court is the obvious decision, I think in security terms or in legal terms. I think in terms of handling the political roll-out of it, they should have anticipated that opponents of the president would try to make an issue out of it, and they should have been better at it.”

“The OPR [Office of Professional Responsibility] report [on the actions of former Justice Department lawyers who wrote the so-called "torture memos"], we keep anticipating, it’s supposed to come out, we keep expecting — even internally on my show we’ve had a number of times pre-produced segments on it, been ready to book guests, and had people on standby, and it still hasn’t come out. So I’m sort of reserving judgment until we actually see it. I think that if John Yoo is left as a lawyer in this country in good standing after what he demonstrably did about torture, and if Jay Bybee is left on the bench, it’s a troubling conclusion,” said Maddow.

Main Justice previously wrote about liberal dissatisfaction with the Justice Department.

It has become clear that enhanced interrogation techniques were used on Abu Zubaydah before the first legal memos authorizing their use had been written by the Office of Legal Counsel.  Zubaydah entered U.S. custody on March 28, 2002.  The Justice Department issued its first memo on torture on Aug. 1, over 4 months later.

In April and May, which fall between the capture of Zubaydah and the Bybee memo, “contractors had to keep requesting authorization to use harsher and harsher methods.”  That quote is from former FBI agent Ali Soufan’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary administrative oversight and the courts subcommittee last week.  Soufan testified that many of the techniques authorized by the Bybee memo were used during this period, including nudity, sleep deprivation, loud noise and extreme temperatures during interrogations.

Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff received an e-mail last month from a CIA spokesperson saying that:

The Aug. 1, 2002, memo from the Department of Justice wasn’t the first piece of legal guidance for the [interrogation] program.

So where was the CIA getting this legal guidance?

Well, Ari Shapiro at NPR reports that:

One source with knowledge of Zubaydah’s interrogations agreed to describe the legal guidance process, on the condition of anonymity.

The source says nearly every day, [psychologist James] Mitchell [the aforementioned CIA contractor] would sit at his computer and write a top-secret cable to the CIA’s counterterrorism center. Each day, Mitchell would request permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah. The source says the CIA would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique. That would provide the administration’s legal blessing for Mitchell to increase the pressure on Zubaydah in the next interrogation.

A new document is consistent with the source’s account.

The CIA sent the ACLU a spreadsheet late Tuesday as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The log shows the number of top-secret cables that went from Zubaydah’s black site prison to CIA headquarters each day. Through the spring and summer of 2002, the log shows, someone sent headquarters several cables a day.

“At the very least, it’s clear that CIA headquarters was choreographing what was going on at the black site,” says Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU lawyer who sued to get the document. “But there’s still this question about the relationship between CIA headquarters and the White House and the Justice Department and the question of which senior officials were driving this process.”

Gonzales did not respond to a request for comment through his lawyer.

It’s important to note that Gonzales was not Attorney General at this time, he was White House counsel to President George W. Bush.

You can watch Shapiro’s interview on The Rachel Maddow Show last night below:

We recently reported on how Attorney General Eric Holder’s has articulated his stance on the “ticking time-bomb scenario.”  During his confirmation hearing, he would not engage the premise behind the scenario, that torture was the only way to get the information necessary to stop the bomb.  Then on Tuesday, he told Gwen Ifill that “I can’t imagine a scenario where we would authorize torture, even in the ticking time-bomb scenario.”  At Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary hearing on torture, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) cited a news report that Abu Zubaydah had been ‘broken’ in 35 seconds as a result of waterboarding, only to be rebuffed by the fact that the report had been revoked.   Now, former master instructor and chief of training at the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Evasion school Malcolm Nance has provided Holder with another high-profile voice to support his decision, making the false confession argument.  Here’s a partial transcript from his interview on The Rachel Maddow Show (video below):

MADDOW: In the case of an actual ticking time bomb scenario, which is a faulty premise because things don’t work out this way in the real world, would you do SERE, these techniques on a prisoner in that scenario?

NANCE: Of course not.

MADDOW: Any of them?

NANCE: No of course not, because one, it defeats the ticking time bomb scenario, in that all the prisoner has to do is not answer the question or, better yet, the prisoner will lie. And once the prisoner lies, especially with al Qaeda members. Let me tell you something, their ideology — they have a concept within their ideology called “al-warrah al-barrah” and that is absolute devotion to their god, but absolute disavowal and hatred of anything that’s not their god.

Therefore, anything that they do to foil you is well within their plan, and they take great pride in that.