I don't want Baybee impeached; I want him disbarred. And tried as a criminal. And tarred and feathered on his way to jail (life-long term, w/o parole).

As for Obama's stance... Before I ditch him, I'm hoping that his rationale is to get the entire US involved, via Congress. An executive order is much less satisfactory (and easier to shrug off) than a loud-as-a-bell voice of the elected representatives condemning those un-American practices.

I'm with exlibra. Obama may be being canny here. For one thing he doesn't even has all of his appointees in place. There are still appointments to be made into positions that have bearing on this. So maybe he is getting his troops in place before declaring war. Also an attack by him on Bush officials would be dismissed as partisan. it may well be smarter for him to stand to none side and let the Justice Department do the work.

So I'm not totally without hope.

It's even more infuriating when you know there are thousands and thousands of Americans serving long prison terms for far less heinous crimes than torture. Sooooo, not only is the Obama administration choosing not to do anything about it, they are also letting us know that it's okay to break the law as long as you're the government, and it's especially okay to break the law if you're a white, well-placed Republican.

Sheep. I have no respect for any of them. If you are too stupid to know when a law is wrong and shouldn't be followed then fuck off. All the way down the line there is no justifying this horror...maybe understanding why...but no justifying it. Like women shouldn't vote, blacks shouldn't marry whites, blacks should not be allowed to read etc...these are all non-torture laws. My looking forward stops with murder and torture. All I see are cowardly excuses and abusive complicity. Traumatic hypocrisy rules. The majority no longer runs the country but a small group of murdering raping torturing bastards who bring shame to our founder fathers and their principles. It has poisoned America whose only antidote was accountability. Watch the cancer eradicate any virtues left in our democracy.
If you can accept this rationalization of "looking forward" then you have lost your vision. Obama and Holder have lost all honor and nothing they do will ever replace it.

I agree Hilzoy, I wish they weren't saying this stuff and rather leaving it blank, even if they don't want to go down the road of dicey politics that would come from prosecuting the Bushies.

But I have learned that Obama can be fairly diabolical in approaching these things. And the fact that dems run the whole show, does not preclude the possibility of some coordination going on between him and dems in congress.

I think they have decided, that if anything is done, and I still think something will be done, it will be done through congress. Either by normal congressional committee investigation, or by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

And what would happen if Obama went ahead on his own. It would suck every molecule out of the political atmosphere for years to come, and his administration would be hobbled in pursuing some pretty big initiatives in Health Care and Energy and whatnot. He would also be constantly on the defensive from the right, that he is doing political persecution with the peoples DOJ.

And when the DOJ investigation began, every actor would clam up and lawyer up, and if indictments were handed out, then the nightmare of dealing with discovery of classified info would begin and take years to settle out.

I am glad that Senator Feinstein sent a letter today asking Obama not to make any decisions to prosecute until the Senate Select Intelligence committee investigates. I suspect Leahy will do the same on a Commission. They can review the evidence much faster than a public court and could give Obama some cover, as would a commission. Don't know if it is coordinated or not, but seems like the best course, especially since Obama has to run for re-election in a couple of years.

I'm not making excuses for Obama and all this "looking forward" crap because I don't like it either. But just proposing something to think about that would get us to the truth and maybe some justice, and in a better way.

I do not understand why this "looking forward" bullshit is passing the laugh test. Obama deserves to ridiculed for his foolish insistence that looking forward is reasonable. Gibbs should be raked over the coals.

Obama is treating this like he is dealing with a merely political crime (whatever that is). I suppose it is the old "reasonable people can disagree" crap we have heard for so long as all these atrocities were being fabricated and committed (not necessarily in that order).

But what he is dealing with is a straightforward felony and worse a felony that has international dimensions and worse than that a felony that has constitutional dimensions.

That editorial boards aren't screeching for a special prosecutor just shows how irrelevant news papers are. That Congress isn't screaming for a special prosecutor just shows how corrupt they are.

As citizens we should be bombarding our reps with the question: Do you support a special prosecutor to investigate these crimes of torture? I will work on my own senators - Snowe and Collins.

It would be very interesting to get John McCain's answer to that question.

Actually, I think disbarment of Bybee all by itself does the job. I don't think a disbarred lawyer can remain a federal judge. And what happened here can be characterized (if nothing else) as negligent/dishonest practice of the law. To choose just one thing I have seen cited elsewhere---none of the precedents resulting from the post WWII prosecutions for Nazi and Japanese war crimes was mentioned. Perhaps the legal profession at least will enforce its standards, and render impeachment moot. Or at worst get the ball rolling.

Then there is the question of the medical doctor accessories who violated their oath to "first do no harm. . ."

One more thing. While I am horrified that we systematically tortured in true KGB/Khmer rouge style the suspected Al Qaeda operatives, I fear that that argument will be pooh poohed by the "ends justifies the means" crowd, because KSM et al are clearly villains. But what about the hundreds to thousands of other detainees from Gitmo, Bagram, and who knows where else who were rendered, tortured with sleep deprivation, suspension, hypothermia etc, only to be released when it turned out they were innocent? There were over 400 Gitmo detainees who were just sent home. Note that it is reported that some ~100 detainees died in custody, and even the US military admits that something like 10-12 were murdered outright, the other cases are either under study or back drawered. I worry that all the attention on the waterboarding of the really guilty will drown out the cry for justice for the genuinely innocent.

btw...let all criminals out of prison and forget the past and just look forward now as they were just confused when they broke the law. After all we had laws in place forbidding torture that were ignored.

How do you justify looking into your children's eyes Obama and give a pass to those who committed such heinous acts on other humans. "Your dad let people who did things like this go free? Just like letting those who put Jews in ovens to be exterminated...he said forget about it and just look forward?" How shameful. Now he is complicit in torturing them.

Unlike other unlawful activities committed by government employees...this will never be forgotten or go away.

Hilzoy, once again, you rock, BLog-wise.

I have to wonder if perhaps Obama is simply stepping aside in this matter because, well, maybe it shouldn't be him that decides that criminal charges should be made.

Because, honestly, he does have a conflict of interest. The people under the microscope now are his political adversaries, or at least they're the footsoldiers of his political adversaries.

It's unfortunate that as Obama essentially steps aside, there's nobody left with clear and unambiguous authority to decide whether or not prosecutions should happen.

Except us. Now is the time for citizens to make their voices heard; if the citizens demand action, perhaps congress will hold much needed hearings. If, after those hearings there is a clear demand for prosecution, maybe then Obama will allow them to happen.

I'm sorry, but I just don't buy the "good faith" torture excuse for a moment. The fact that the OLC said it was okay is simply insufficient to excuse the conduct of CIA interrogators who tortured prisoners. It doesn't take a law degree to know that beating the crap out of prisoner is torture and is illegal, and it doesn't matter how many hired guns say it's alright. In the end a person is responsible for recognizing the difference between good and evil. All the OLC did was provide window-dressing to sadistic bastards who wanted to commit war crimes with impunity - these are not nice people and deserve NO benefit of the doubt.

This one's not even close.

Except us. Now is the time for citizens to make their voices heard; if the citizens demand action, perhaps congress will hold much needed hearings. If, after those hearings there is a clear demand for prosecution, maybe then Obama will allow them to happen.

The least we could do, seeing it was the public that elected Bush in 2004, and not Obama.

I am with all of you above calling for "action": I've written my representatives, I've signed the petitions -- what else? How do we get louder together, and more visible?

And thank you all for thinking out loud here; your various responses -- and Hilzoy's original posts -- have helped me sort through my nausea and shame, and helped me be more coherent in talking with others.

But there were signs that he might not be able to avoid a protracted inquiry into the use of interrogation techniques that the president’s top aides and many critics say crossed the line into torture.

If congress makes a report outlining clear violations of law, then he won't be able to not prosecute. And he can say, hey, the People's reps made me do it. Limited blowback and neutered wingnut traction claiming "witch hunt" - Win/Win. Have some faith people. Good Chess is rarely what it seems at first, er.. or some such.

If I had wanted to spend my life angrily fighting to get my government to do the correct thing, I would have voted for McCain and Palin.

At least then, I could have enjoyed some sense of righteous indignation, and retained pride in being a Democrat.

If I had wanted to spend my life angrily fighting to get my government to do the correct thing, I would have voted for McCain and Palin.

At least then, I could have enjoyed some sense of righteous indignation, and retained pride in being a Democrat.

Obama needs to appoint a special prosecutor and be done with it.

Neither he nor AG Holder can be trusted to not do what is politically expedient. Holder's dropping of the charges against Stevens shows us that. And what hasn't Obama done that hasn't been about political expedience?

I can't see lifting a finger to help get this administration reelected in 2012.

It sounds like many of the CIA folks went far beyond what the torture memos purported to justify. Maybe they'll be tried as well.

I'm curious about the Abu Ghraib "bad apples" though. Remember when their attorneys were barred from following the torture memos up the chain of command? It's probably time for an appeal based on a lack of due process, as it now seems clear that the Bush Administration felt that the crime committed at Abu Ghraib was in letting the pictures get out.

The part that I found remarkable was when Gibbs said that stopping torture was an "extraordinary" step.

What was he thinking?

I didn't have a problem with President Obama's announcement that he wasn't going to prosecute CIA officers who relied on the guidance they got from the Office of Legal Counsel. I'm uneasy about prosecuting people who rely on the OLC, which they ought to be able to rely on. (I think that relying on legal interpretations offered by the people charged with interpreting the law for the executive branch is very different from "just following orders.")

When the rest of your post is so right on, I hate to focus on the first paragraph. But how does this differ in practice from the "just following orders" defense? I seem to remember that concentration camp guards and Nazi torturers were told that that what they did was legal and ethical. The Nazis were obsessed with certain types of legality. I'm sorry, but an interrogator in a CIA prison ought to know that subjecting someone to controlled drowning six times a day is wrong. And that locking someone with a fear of bugs in a small box with a stinging insect is wrong. And that at best a claim that these things are legal means someone has found a loophole to let them get away with wrong things. So no, I don't think when it comes to stuff like this that a CIA employee should be able to rely on claims from higher ups that their orders are legal.

Also, here is another practical point. Historically one way you get the higher ups, is that lower levels snitch in return for lighter sentences. That is only possible if the lower level people face sentences to begin with. I wonder, if some of the Iranian-Americans who are being tried on bogus charges are tortured, will you excuse the torturers if it in turns their higher ups gave them memos ensuring the legality of their actions?

I, too, am focused on looking forward...to the prosecutions of all the criminal Bush officials for all the crimes they committed in pursuit of their permanent fascist Republican majority.

Bottom line is this is not Obama's call. It's the DOJ's call and Congress's call. Either can investigate. The DOJ can prosecute them. The Congress can impeach.

At least then, I could have enjoyed some sense of righteous indignation, and retained pride in being a Democrat.

Of course pride and righteous indignation is what's important. Geesh.

If I had wanted to spend my life angrily fighting to get my government to do the correct thing, I would have voted for McCain and Palin.

Sorry that you had to join the rest of us in the real world, but many of us knew going in that Obama would have to be pushed to do what we want because he is not, in fact, a wild-eyed lefty radical, no matter how many times the Republicans tried to claim that he is. He's a careful centrist and if we don't scream and yell and jump up and down, Obama's going to think that the David Broders of the world really do reflect the opinions of ordinary Americans.

Frankly, I'm happy that we finally have a president who will pay attention when we yell and scream and jump up and down, one who has already changed policy when we did so (like releasing the torture memos almost completely unredacted). Clinton made a major point of ignoring the left when we complained about his policies, so it's nice to have someone who actually pays attention for a change.

Great blog..no quarrel with the like minded readers here.

"I was just following orders" wasn't a good enough defense once upon a time, but now it is. Probably pretty good politics, because no one (in this country) seriously believes (except for those jokers in Spain) the real perpetrators behind this national disgrace are going to be held accountable. So why pick on the little people who did their master's bidding? Other than the little people are supposed to know the difference between right and wrong and speak out against it and refuse to enact it and eventually have a movie about them as the heroes they surely would have been, if not now, then in a more appreciative future. But not this time. Not in America.

And knowing this, what do we see? We see no moral soul in Obama's world, no line in the sand. Just another account to balance. A deal to be made. The same feeling as when watching him snuggle up with the banking bastards to ask them how many billions they needed without really stopping to ask about holding anyone or any institution accountable.

I'm uneasy about prosecuting people who rely on the OLC, which they ought to be able to rely on. (I think that relying on legal interpretations offered by the people charged with interpreting the law for the executive branch is very different from "just following orders.") And I feel much, much more strongly about holding the people who devised this policy accountable than about the people who implemented it (if they did so according to what they took to be the law.)

While I generally agree that this is the probably the best approach, from a pragmatic "truth and reconciliation" standpoint, let's not kid ourselves about what we are doing here.

At the risk of offending Godwin, it needs to be pointed out that the Nazis at Nuremberg were not simply "just following orders" -- they were also "relying on legal interpretations offered by the people charged with interpreting the law". Hitler was a stickler for doing things legally.

While this is an ugly, ugly mess we have here, one which, quite frankly, hurts to look at, let's not pretend that the "prison guards" did nothing wrong. At the very, very least, they should be "asked" to resign their positions.

Btw, it's nice to see *someone* on this blog trying to hold Obama's feet to the fire. I'm growing weary of laughing at the antics of the wingnuts; oh sure it's fun for awhile, but if we want to clean up the mess left us by GWB, we have to start engaging the people currently in charge.

Along those lines, someone needs to start complaining loudly about the Obama admin's decision that cell phone records are not subject to 4th Amendment protection.

I think you're all dead wrong and not thinking this situation through at all. You really believe that a President should sweep into office and immediately prosecute his predecessor? If we're going to go after the underlings, we have to be willing to follow it all the way to the top, which is where we all know it leads. So the outcome could be prison for the former President and Vice-President. While that might be viscerally satisfying for some, it would make us more like a banana republic than not.

Attempting to prosecute this in courts of law would destroy this country. The divisiveness and anger that is ripping us apart now would increase 100-fold. It would be pure insanity to go forward in the current atmosphere.

And what if they were to lose?

Let it be dealt with legislatively and in the court of public opinion. This country cannot take a protracted series of trials of their former highest officials - there's no stomach for it.

Obama is absolutely right on this one.

There was a time--and may be yet a time--when people like Bybee would be shunned out of their profession and out of public life. "A stench in the nostrils of honest men" was the old-fashioned phrase.
But now he'll be on the board of the Bush Library, or a Dean at Pepperdine, before the toner cools on his disbarment papers.
But I repeat myself.

I wouldn't close the book on this. There's still an opening big enuogh to drive a truck through- O doesn't have all his pieces in play yet and any action may cause snapback by Bush loyalists still in Congress and hurt his appointments. He's gonna ring a howitzer to this knife fight, that's the Chicago way, lols.

One factual comment and some musings on pragmatism.

IANA (military) L, but I think we should keep in mind when discussing the "just following orders" defense that the current military standard for insubordination is failure to follow a lawful order. This is very different from "just following orders," in that a subordinate may not only question the lawfulness of the order at the time but, even if s/he is presented with some kind of legal cover and still refuses to follow it, and s/he is prosecuted for insubordination, there is still the possibility of exoneration, since the legality of the order -- including its cover -- can be contested at trial.

Also, I think we need to be practical when thinking about prosecutions. There are good reasons for not trying too hard to encourage subordinates to question orders. It's obvious from the record that the CIA hierarchy worked hard -- against elements of the WH and Justice -- to get legal opinions AND top political authorization concerning the use of what we now know pretty clearly to be torture (i.e., the parallels with Hitler's legalisms are not at all exact). The question thus would come down to how "willing" or "enthusiastic" the actual torturers were, i.e., what was their state of mind, which would be VERY difficult to prove, and extremely disruptive to try. And in the end, it would be no better than the railroading of Lynndie England for what happened at Abu Ghraib.

We need to focus on the people who encouraged and authorized the use of these techniques -- the very thing that Tenet worked to make the issue. The crime is at a political level, and it's those people who should be prosecuted, and whose prosecution will provide the most effective deterrent to future such behavior.

Hilzoy writes as if deterrence was all about the future, but we are already living in the nightmare she imagines. The lesson of Watergate was that if the President does it, and there's no smoking gun, then it's legal. Bush Sr.'s pardon of the Iran-Contra conspiracy confirmed that precedent. Bush Jr.'s White House featured a convicted felon, Eliot Abrams, who was an alumnus of that pardon. The reason Republicans are outraged at the idea of investigation and prosecution, and that Democrats are fearful and timid, is that the feeling that it would be unfair to those who relied on that precedent has seeped into the water.

The UN Convention Against Torture imposes an affirmative obligation on its signatories to promptly and vigorously investigate credible allegations of torture. Instead of "urging" President Obama to do so, it should be stressed again and again that if he fails to do that, HE IS HIMSELF AN INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL, IN VIOLATION OF THE UN CONVENTION AGAINST TORTURE, AND IN VIOLATION OF US LAW BECAUSE IT SUBSUMES THOSE TREATY COMMITMENTS. Much more than this (which is, ultimately, just a legal nicety) failure to pursue accountability makes the Obama administration morally responsible for future abuses.

Since when is it OK for the President to torpedo criminal investigations that he thinks are politically unhelpful? Statements by Rahm Emmanuel and Barack Obama that there will be no prosecutions look like executive branch interference in a criminal investigation. How is this different from the Bush administration's decision to torpedo DOJ's investigation into Jane Harman based on its desire to maintain her support for warrantless electronic surveillance?

Our government is legally obligated to investigate and prosecute torture. The White House shouldn't be obstructing any steps the Justice Department takes in that direction.

It depends on what the meaning of "devised" is.

Isikoff & Evan Thomas of Newsweek are also reporting that the issue of investigations/prosecutions may not be over at DOJ -- Holder's comment that "It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department" notwithstanding. And Jerry Nadler, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee & heads a subcommittee that could initiate impeachment proceedings, has said he thinks Bybee should be impeached.

So there's hope. But it's up to the public to keep pushing for investigations. Steve's point is perfectly put.

The Constant Weader at www.RealityChex.com

Here is what Obama needs to prosecute these criminals....pressure FROM US! That's right, it won't happen without it. He probably knows that it needs to happen, he is crafty and scary smart, he knows what needs to be done, but he also knows, as iconoclast states above, that he would be smeared an painted as purely partisan by the MSM, that "Attempting to prosecute this in courts of law would destroy this country. The divisiveness and anger that is ripping us apart now would increase 100-fold. It would be pure insanity to go forward in the current atmosphere..." But if we DEMAND IT, he will have the backing of the People, and the reason to take such political risks. He must know that we can not let 'alleged' criminals walk, but he needs us to give him the street cred to make it happen. Believe me, it won't happen otherwise. For him to move on this w/out loud public outcry, in a country as polarized as we have become over the last 8 years, would be political suicide, and he knows it. So, lets's help him do what's right. Call, write letters to the editor, support, volunteer, get involved....or just sit here and blog about it. It's our choice.

He told the CIA that he released the memos because there was a lawsuit, and it would be very difficult to defend against the lawsuit, so he had to release the documents.

In the Bush era, this fight would have gone all the way to the Supreme Court. Once the final date with justice approached, maybe a deal would be worked out and a heavily redacted version of the documents would be released. Or maybe with a Republican congress, a new law would have directed the FISC to take a look at the matter first. Years would have passed.

But now, due to Obama's own FOIA and Executive Privilege rollback executive orders, he personally must decide to hold back this type of information. But first, either his Attorney General or his WH Council must determine that the president should exert executive privilege and present the case to the president for a prompt (30 days) decision.

So Obama has established that if information is withheld, it is because he decided to withhold it, and that decision is at the beginning of any legal fight.

It is almost like he is accepting responsibility for any secrecy on an accelerated timescale, the exact opposite of Bush/Cheney.

Now remember that Obama wants an independent DOJ. Does that mean he has to focus on what the DOJ should do, must do? Far from it! He should focus on the future, and let the DOJ, Congress and the courts focus on past behavior. And you focus on the future by not investing any political capital in arguments you will eventually lose, you let the DOJ do their job, let Congress do theirs, you let The People take advantage of FOIA and you turn over whatever documents the other branches of government, and The People want which are not needed to maintain national security.

Our government works when everyone does their own job. It really isn't Obama's job to investigate Bush/Cheney, and it isn't a good precedent to set where prosecutions and investigations are political and are sustained by the executive branch: this is the people's business, not the presidents.

I see Obama as simply getting out of the way.

"...the current military standard for insubordination is failure to follow a lawful order." ~ Posted by: bleh on April 21, 2009 at 8:13 AM

Thank You. This was drummed into us ALL in BCT before/during Viet Nam - you are in fact obligated not to follow an illegal order (and contravention of Geneva makes it clearly illegal, which was also pointed out very succinctly). Further, if you do follow it without protest, you can expect to be held accountable if caught - remember the My Lai mess?

In General ...

What we are faced with here (IMHO), is a weak, misguided, prior executive (Jr.), manipulated by amoral, sociopathic, holdovers from the Watergate/Iran-Contra crimes era (Cheney, Rummy, et. al.), in concert with a corrupt DOJ (Ashcroft etc.), breaking US Law, Geneva, and Convention Against Torture (as has been repeatedly pointed out here). Congress further abetted the criminality by (once again) failing to properly oversee and investigate as is its duty, and now we are left with the mess. Of course DC is quaking in their collective boots. Why else are the R's stirring up the masses and trying to squelch it all with pseudo-outrage etc. There are too many potential greedy "heads to roll" in all of this, and the question is where to draw the line? How low do we dip in prosecuting the myriad ongoing failures that have occurred? They're playing "CYA" in spades.

This isn't some "conspiracy theory," it's simply the way corruption & decay spreads and permeates a "system" given the right "leadership" and incentive ($$/power/etc.). Watergate & Iran-Contra proved that these folks at the top have no regard for Laws, and they got (essentially) a "Pass" on their malfeasance. Did we expect them to stop doing what they do and magically "see the light"?

This did not begin with Bush Jr. It began with Nixon, and the parallels are stunning (as are the interconnections). Our failure then, to prosecute all of the players & supporters/facilitators involved, has led us to this moment. Cheney & Rummy and the "neocon/AEI" gang have been at this stuff since the Nixon WH days, and because they were NOT properly smacked down then, we still have them afoot in DC playing their same old games. It isn't just Abrams. The key players all date back to the Nixon WH, and here they are again (with a little new talent added along the way). That's what happens when we fail to act.

As for this matter "tearing the country apart?" Nonsense. Having gone through the entire Viet Nam era from Eisenhower onward, this thing is peanuts by comparison. Sure the wingnuts are going to act out. So what? Their "Tea Parties" tell us what their "strength in numbers" truly is. "Locked & Loaded?" "Secession?" So what? We have Laws to deal with those eventualities, as well as a well trained Militia (National Guard), and I'm sure we will/can deal with the wingers who are deranged enough to give it a try quite effectively. Are we so fearful of those few morally bankrupt individuals that we will fail once again to do what our Laws and Honor demand of us? Pathetic. I believe such an inaction is the very definition of moral cowardice. Have we learned nothing?

We dropped the ball by not dealing with the Nixon WH, and that failure has now come back to haunt us in spades. Will the Obama admin. etc. repeat that tragic mistake? Will Congress continue to abet this travesty? We shall see ... "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke

If we (collectively) don't get behind Pres. Obama, and keep pushing this issue, we ourselves draw another "fail." I believe he's capable, if we give him the support he must have to weather the storm. The answer lies in the mirror before each of us every morning. During the Viet Nam mess, we were in the streets en masse, writing letters to congress, the works. What are we doing now? MLK taught us something. Do we remember what it was?

[/rant] ;-)

Children understand that what the lawyers argued was crap, and those who implemented Cheney-Bush abominable policies were not children. They knew better, no matter what the law "said." Waterboarding someone every four hours for a solid month? Gimme a break! Either we are a nation of laws that went off the rails or we are a dictatorship primarily ruled by benevolent dictators.

I strongly disagree in letting the actual perpetrators of the torture off the hook. How is this any different then Germany, oh I know, the CIA officers may have been fired for refusal (but I doubt it), the German officers might have been killed, yet we decided German officers did some bad stuff (that I am guessing was legal, or could have been made legal with a pen stroke) and they needed to stand trial for it.

But here we are deciding if the idiots who tortured people should be held accountable. The guys/girls that tried to simulate drowning, stressed people's minds to the point of insanity, these people get a pass, fuck that, not in my America. I don't need a lawyer to tell me what torture is and neither did the CIA officers or the doctors they kept around to keep people from being tortured to death (which didn't always work out).

I think Obama needs to hand this one off to some sort of International Tribunal and let them decided who is and who isn't guilty. It is not his decision to make.

The right in all of it's bolstering and fake outrage has more then once thwarted prosecutions because the country was afraid of the fallout and each time the stakes were raised. I am getting tired of criminals being let off because our leaders are too afraid of the political fallout.

This non-sense about the rippling effect throughout the CIA is dumb at best, what about the rippling effect of people who don't want to torture as part of their job ? How were those people feeling when the memos came out ? Someone had to say 'I pass' or 'fuck this, I am a human being'. Those are the people we need to prop up and tell them they did a great job, that the country appreciates people with morals bigger then their mortgages.

Y'know, I'm beginning to see a certain pattern with Obama's approach to policy issues. It's new, interesting, and kind of refreshing.

You'll remember how Republicans tended to stake out positions on the extreme far right then "compromise" to the position that they really wanted all along?

Well, Obama's kind of doing the opposite. He starts with a position that could be described as "Washington pundit centrism" -- pretty much the local conventional wisdom then shifts toward the progressive position after a while.

If you think about it, this makes sense. While most Americans see the wisdom in sending the torturers to jail, the Broders of the press corpse do not. So, by starting with the Broder position Obama forces the progressives to make the case, loudly, for the progressive position. This gets the discussion going, generates a lot of articles and polls, and means that as new revelations are released or leaked (and you'll notice that the new revelations on torture have been quite steady since January 20th) they feed the story and shift the discussion.

In the end, as with the release of the mostly NOT redacted CIA memos, the progressive position wins out.

If this is indeed Obama's plan it's a brilliant one. If he got into office and dumped all the dirt about the Bush administration on January 21 then the press reaction would be to first scream that he was playing politics, and then to bury the story. But by addressing the Bush crimes in dribs and drabs, and by officially taking the Washington pundit position and letting others tear that position down, Obama is able to slowly build a public case for just how horrible the Cheney administration really was. All the while, he's lulled the Republicans by pretending to say he'll shield them from prosecutions.

If that is his plan, then brilliant.

You'll see a similar pattern on the bailouts. I would not be surprised to soon see either bank nationalizations OR see the banks that are stable and don't need the TARP money repaying it to avoid the nationalizations. But that policy position would not have flown in February.

You also saw this with the stimulus. They took the surprising position of starting small and letting congress fight to make it bigger, but in the end got pretty much exactly what they wanted at the start.

Let's hope this continues. If I'm right, by November 2010 the American public will have learned, and been enraged about, all the dirty secrets of the Bush administration -- from domestic spying to torture to the blatant lying about WMDs in order to grab them thar oil fields. And the Republicans will find out what the term "permanent majority" really means.

Cool, all well and good, but in the case of the stimulus, his position was not agressive enough. Obama didn't ask for enough to really stimulate the economy and the tax cut portion of the stimulus is not necessarily stimulative. If he had started more agressively, we could have a better stimulus bill.

I do think that congress should take the lead on investigating and appointing special prosecutors, etc. so Obama doesn't spend his political capital on this. If he can seem above the fray, more of his other priorities might get enacted.

For all those threatening to abandon support for Obama for the 2012 election . . . do you really want to see the likes of W, Vice and their henchmen (which means Sarah Palin or worse) get back in power, together with the "lawyers" who brought us the present torture mess? Looking back, are you real happy about how the narcissistic Nader candidacy in 2000 helped put the Bush bandits in power? There was a difference between Gore and Bush, and there is an ever bigger difference between Obama and anyone the Republican Confederate Party is likely to put up in 2012.

I think Cool has it right about O's strategy. It's another version of rope-a-dope, this version being the one you play from a position of strength. It can also be described as leading-from-behind, letting his base work out the common position, then carrying it forward. A talented young black colleague pointed out that this is the leadership style that works in contemporary minority communities, who are deeply suspicious of the Man-on-Horse leader. And I bet it is a style that O learned in his time as "merely" a community organizer. I'd add that the GOPers and the Broders still don't understand what they are dealing with.

For all those threatening to abandon support for Obama for the 2012 election....

Won't happen of course. First, as you point out, the alternative will be a right wing extremist. The Republicans are setting themselves up for a Goldwater or McGovern style defeat. But second, Obama's team is, as always, thinking long term. By 2012 so many of these issues that upset the left now will have been resolved in the left's favor.