Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy says if Senate Intelligence Committee members who released the controversial "torture report" worked in the private sector, they'd be prosecuted.
"In the private sector, if you did a $50 million exercise you had the audacity to call an investigation, without interviewing any of the key witnesses, you'd be doing heavy duty time for fraud," McCarthy said Tuesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
"The fact they've done this massive investigation without actually doing any real investigation — because you can't do a real investigation without speaking to the core witnesses … who have the relevant information — people ought to be pretty steamed."
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McCarthy — who as assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York prosecuted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — backed the CIA, which the report criticized in its use of torture.
"The moral universe that they inhabit is one in which slapping a high level al-Qaida detainee is morally problematic," he said.
"In a courtroom, you would have to deal first with the fact that torture actually has a definition under federal law and if it was any kind of a competent disciplined proceeding, you wouldn't be allowed to refer to what was going on as torture unless you could prove what happened satisfied the legal definition for torture.
"Vice President [Dick] Cheney pointed out over the weekend, great efforts were made by the American government to make sure that we stayed away from that legal threshold. They keep slipping back into this rhetorical and demagogic use of the word 'torture."'
McCarthy is the author of
"Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama's Impeachment," published by Encounter Books.