"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal..."

Justice Louis Brandeis - Olmstead v. United States (1928)

"Confronted with a new enemy and their own intelligence failure, [Bush] and Cheney turned to some familiar conservative nostrums that had preoccupied the far right wing of the Republican Party since the Watergate era: There was too much international law, too many civil liberties, too many constraints on the President's war powers, too many rights for defendants and too many rules against lethal covert actions. There was also too much openness and too much meddling by Congress and the press.

Jane Mayer - The Dark Side (2008)

"He who does battle with monsters needs to beware lest he in the process becomes a monster himself. And if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare right back at you."

Fredrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil

Glenn - Whenever I read Lieberman's name I always recall your comments (from Great American Hypocrites) and that memorable Jeffery Goldberg anecdote:

"Lieberman's cheap warmongering is directly the by-product of his complete lack of connection to any real wars. Like most of his fellow war-cheerleading neo-conservatives, Lieberman was of prime fighting age during the Vietnam War yet steadfastly avoided service. As a result, Lieberman -like most of the right wing pro-war contingent in America- views war the way an adolescent does. As Jeffery Goldberg recounted in his 2007 New Yorker profile:

Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Joe Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was Behind Enemy Lines, in which Owen Wilson plays a US pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said "Yeah!" and "All right!"

There's something so excruciatingly vivid and telling in that anecdote that I literally can't ever think of Lieberman without remembering it.

While I'm not particularly surprised by Obama's failure to live up to his campaign rhetoric (the road to electoral success is, after all, traditionally littered with lofty broken promises) I'm genuinely mystified by his zeal to conceal the crimes of the previous administration.

Given the Bush Torture Team's hasty, ongoing willingness to accuse him of betraying and endangering America, Obama's after-the-fact complicity in hiding the criminal evidence implicating precisely those who are actively, currently trying to blame him for the festering mess that they left, seems positively incomprehensible. Obama isn't, after all, attempting to conceal crimes committed by HIS administration. While there might be a degree of senior, shameful, Democratic acquiesence/ complicity in what happened, the overwhelming responsibility for the crimes he's bending over backwards to hide are those committed by his most rabidly partisan political opponents.

Honestly, why is President Obama doing this? Is it to protect the complicit, powerful national security and intelligence bureaucracies? That makes a vague kind of sense. But if it's out of some bizarre, elite Beltway courtesy to protect the ruling cliques from exposure/prosecution, it seems like a laughably one-way street. Despite frantic transition al Qeda warnings, the Bush team couldn't wait to blame 9/11 on Clinton era security fecklessness.

Is there some strange, reflexive, default Democratic position, some misbegotten noblesse oblige that explains their willingness to actively conceal grotesque Republican criminality? In Australia, politics are played as brutal hardball. The (Labour) Left never misses an opportunity to expose the previous (Liberal) Right administration's ineptitude, malfeasance and crimes, and vice versa. Despite its flaws this ferociously adversarial concept of a Government and an Opposition serves to keep both major parties nervously honest.

Why is President Obama so willing to debase the integrity and optimism of his political brand by concealing the crimes of precisely those who would destroy him, and it, if they can?

Everyone who took part in torture, regardless of rank should stand trial for their crimes with convictions (however unlikely) and penalties (however inadequate) to be determined by a court of law. Clearly, that's now not going to happen, at least for the relatively lowly CIA operatives who were the actors, though not the authors, for these crimes. That's obviously wrong. But what would be far worse is for this lamentable failure to prosecute the least powerful and least culpable actors distracted further investigation, prosecutorial attention and justified public outrage from those most responsible for what happened. In that regard I vehemently share the Spanish court's (now deferred) focus on prosecuting those including (but not limited to) Bybee, Yoo, Haynes, Feith, Gonzales, Rizzo, Addington, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush.

"The lawyers advising the Administration played a decisive role in subverting the system of international rules thst should have protected all detainees from cruel and degrading treatment, a system the US has done so much to put in place. This was no accident or mere oversight. Nor was it a case of responding to a legitimate request that came up from the ground level interrogators at Gunatanamo, as the Bush Administration would have us believe. September 11 gave rise to a conscious decision to set aside international laws constraining interrogations. That decision was motivated by by a combination of factors including fear and ideology and an almost visceral disdain for international obligations. The decision was never subjected to critical scrutiny: if anyone asked what the incidental consequences might be, the answers were ignored." Philipe Sands - Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law.

It is widely acknowledged that Obama encountered and overcame considerable, extremely powerful and entrenched opposition to releasing these memos, particularly in their essentially unredacted form. If the pragmatic political and institutional cost for this crucial release was immunity from prosecution for those least culpable, that seems, IMHO, a fair price to pay for a thorough investigation and fearless prosecution of those who are, inarguably, most culpable.