Alberto Gonzales (Getty Images)

Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Thursday clarified his recent comments about Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to probe possible CIA interrogation abuses, saying he supports Holder’s authority to investigation but does not support the investigation itself, The Washington Times reported.

On Tuesday, Reuters and Main Justice reported that Gonzales supported Holder’s decision to investigate. His comments came during an interview with The Washington Times’ “America’s Morning News” radio show. During the interview, Gonzales said if people go beyond the established parameters for interrogations,  “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. ”

On Thursday, in a follow-up interview with The Times, Gonzales offered the clarification. “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.

Eric Holder (DOJ)

Regarding his earlier comments, Gonzales said he was not endorsing the investigations, but rather Holder’s right to conduct the probe. He said, “It’s an endorsement of his right to exercise his discretion,” adding, “I’m just saying I would have exercised my discretion in a different manner, given the information I have.”

Gonzales would not say what evidence was uncovered during the Bush administration that led him to deem Holder’s probe unnecessary. “This has been looked at, and I agree with President Obama that we ought to be looking forward,” he said Thursday.

Click here to read the transcript of the interview.

This post has been updated.

Alberto Gonzales (DOJ)

Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday said he supports U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to probe possible CIA interrogation abuses, Reuters reported.

Gonzales’ comments came during an interview with The Washington Times’ “America’s Morning News” radio show. He said the Bush administration ”worked very hard to establish ground rules and parameters about how to deal with terrorists,” 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. ”

“I’ve talked to friends of mine in the CIA, and there is a great deal of concern,” Gonzales said, adding, “People are scared about taking actions that might be legal but in any way controversial. They’re just not going to do it.” Read The Times’ article here.

Eric Holder (DOJ)

He added the possible offenses should be investigated despite the potential “chilling effect” the probe could have on future CIA interrogation sessions, Reuters reported. Gonzales said he believes Holder is only concerned about investigating officials who went beyond approved techniques.

Holder has come under fire from former Vice President Dick Cheney and other conservatives for re-opening an investigation that has been closed by the Bush administration. Some liberals, meantime, have also complained that Holder’s focus on CIA interrogators doesn’t hold accountable the Bush administration  officials who authorized brutal techniques such as waterboarding, which Holder and Obama have both called torture.

Cheney on Sunday said President Obama should be calling the shots on the interrogation matter and not leave the decision to a “political appointee” such as Holder. Click here to read our previous report.

But Gonzales, who resigned amid criticism he wasn’t independent enough of the Bush White House, endorsed Holder’s authority.  ”As chief prosecutor of the United States, he should make the decision on his own, based on the facts, then inform the White House,”  Gonzales said, according to Reuters. Gonzeles didn’t head the DOJ at the time the interrogation methods were authorized and the original CIA probe closed, but he was privvy to information about the methods as White House counsel.

Gonzales also said Holder appears concerned with the “one percent of actors” who went beyond Department of Justice guidelines, The Times reported. He added that the other 99 percent “are heroes and should be treated like heroes for the most part, not criminals.”

Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has strongly defended waterboarding as an interrogation tactic, was informed of and condoned its repeated use on a suspected terrorists, according to a report released Monday.

John Ashcroft

The 2004 report, by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General, found that CIA officers “used the waterboard on [Khalid Shaikh Mohammed] in a manner inconsistent” with special training endured by military personnel and a Justice Department legal memorandum blessing its application in detainee interrogations. The latter use of the technique evolved from the former, a survival training program known as SERE.

According the report (as well as a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum declassified in April), KSM, the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003. Ashcroft ”was informed the waterboard had been used 119 times on a single individual,” according to the report.

CIA investigators said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than permitted by a 2002 Justice Department legal memorandum. It was previously known that Ashcroft and other high-ranking Bush administration officials were briefed on the enhanced interrogation techniques, some as early as 2002, but the report describes in fuller detail what CIA officials disclosed and what Ashcroft consented to.

The report goes on:

According to the General Counsel, the Attorney General acknowledged he is fully aware of the repetitive use of the waterboard and that the CIA is well within the scope of the DOJ opinion and the authority given to CIA by that opinion.

The report returns to Ashcroft in near the end (pg. 100). In July 2003, George Tenet, then director of Central Intelligence, and the general counsel of the CIA briefed senior administration officials on the expanded use of enhanced interrogation techniques.

“At the time, the Attorney General affirmed that the Agency’s conduct remained well within the scope of the 1 August 2002 DOJ legal opinion,” the report says.

After the Justice Department reviewed the report in 2004, Jack Goldsmith, then-assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, wrote a letter to the CIA inspector general, taking issue with some of the language used to characterize Ashcroft’s positions. The letter and the report were released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU.

To clarify, Goldsmith suggested, the report’s authors should state:

The Attorney General expressed the view that the legal principles reflected in DOJ’s specific original advice could appropriately be extended to allow use of the same approved techniques (under the same conditions and subject to the same safeguards) to other individuals besides the subject of DOJ’s specific original advice. The Attorney General also expressed the view that, while appropriate caution should be exercised in the number of times the waterboard was administered, the repetitions described did not contravene the principles underlying DOJ’s August 2002 opinion.

The CIA IG never adopted the language.

This post has been updated.

“There has to be a distance between me and the president,” now Attorney General Eric Holder said in his confirmation hearings. “I will be an independent attorney general and the people’s lawyer.”

That’s not the picture you got if you listened to Michael Isikoff’s interview on The Rachel Maddow Show last night, detailing an off-the-record meeting with leading human rights and civil liberties groups held in the White House yesterday.

Isikoff said that the meeting came on the heels of scathing criticism over President Obama’s announcement re-instating military commissions.  Fun fact: while Obama was listening to these activists complain about how he was allowing Bush policies to become his own, the Senate was voting to withold the funds to close Guantanamo Bay.  Bonus fun fact: Obama didn’t appreciate the Bush comparison, at all.

When the discussion turned to the proposed “truth commission,” Obama had an interesting explanation for why he was against it.  He said that all the Congressional investigations and the litigation that is going on are too distracting to his staff.  

He then turned to stare directly at Holder and once again noted that too much time was being taken up by this issue.

Someone raised the idea of a “trophy” criminal prosecution as a symbol, but Obama curtly dismissed it.

Isikoff says that Holder just sat and listened, not saying a word.  Not exactly the “independent attorney general” we were promised.

OR MAYBE… Holder just knew that this story would get out and figured he’d have more clout with Obama in future negotiations if he was portrayed in the media as letting Obama compromise his independence.  

Click here to read our earlier piece on Holder’s political maneuvering skills.

Also, you can watch Isikoff’s news-making interview in full below: