Holder says he ordered the probe in response to a Justice Department recommendation to reopen nearly a dozen prisoner abuse cases that the Bush administration had closed. Holder says he was further influenced by the 2004 CIA report on the prisoners’ torture and abuse, which he released on Monday. The report provides accounts of interrogators threatening to kill and sexually assault a prisoner’s family, staging mock executions, intimidating prisoners with a handgun and a power drill, and blowing smoke on prisoners’ face to make them vomit. One prisoner was grabbed by his carotid artery until he began to faint. In an apparent response to the report’s release, the CIA declassified two memos on apparent intelligence gains from the prisoner interrogations. Former Vice President Dick Cheney had previously claimed the memos would help vindicate the CIA interrogation methods by showing they yielded important intelligence. But the memos don’t describe any specific methods nor assess their results.