An independent AG at last?

Just when I thought all hope was lost, it looks like there will be the possibility of prosecutions after all:

President Obama does not intend to voice his preference for whether anyone is prosecuted from prisoner abuse cases, a White House spokesman said Monday, and will allow Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to make the decision.

And that's as it should be. The question now is whether Holder has the guts to allow the investigation to go up as high as the evidence leads.

EDIT: Maybe I shouldn't have been so optimistic. The crucial thing is whether or not Holder will be leaving the door open for criminal investigations and prosecutions of the OLC lawyers (and, for that matter, Bush and his cabinet). It looks like Holder is implicitly foreclosing on this possibility: you can hardly make the case that the OLC memos were written in bad faith and, therefore, invalid, if you are also treating those memos as the established law of the time in order to prosecute low-level interrogators for breaching them. Sigh.