By Dan Froomkin
2:33 PM ET, 01/21/2009 Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times on Saturday that the acknowledgment by attorney general-designee Eric H. Holder Jr. that waterboarding is torture amounts "to an admission that the United States may have committed war crimes" and "opens the door to an unpredictable train of legal and political consequences. It could potentially require a full-scale legal investigation, complicate prosecutions of individuals suspected of committing terrorism and mire the new administration in just the kind of backward look that Mr. Obama has said he would like to avoid."