Keep getting these views out there - the MSM is slowly beginning to realize it's not setting the tone of the debate anymore - and voices like yours are a huge reason why.

The US system of jurisprudence demands better.. I don't care how unpalatable the prospect is to Barack Obama personally, this isn't his decision to make. Barack Obama swore a solemn oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. He needs to make good on that pledge today, right now.

They refuse to admit the torture didn't work as advertised. They refuse to address the fact that pro-torture officials have never accounted for their bizarre pre-9/11 conduct. For example Tenet and Black presiding over a CIA/CTC that withheld information about known al Qaeda operatives inside the US for 20 months! When Hayden was head of the NSA he failed to use FISA to track these same al Qaeda operatives. Why are these officials given so much credibility by the Beltway crowd?

When is the patriotism of the pro-torture crowd (government officials and media) going to be up for review? They sure don't seem to care about US law and values.

Do most Americans still watch Leave it to Beaver with June and Ward Cleaver...The Hugh Beaumont Experience?

Is pretty much indisputably a highly skilled politician. It would appear to me that he would expend a minimum of valuable political capital acquiescing to the "will of the people" with 65-70% (most everyone who isn't a dead ender) calling for prosecution......providing him with cover from the howling shrieks of "witchhunt" from various scumbags.

V V

Given that it was the ACLU that forced Obama's hand when it came to releasing the OLC memos and given that it seems fairly clear that under current treaty obligations the government is legally required to investigate and, if necessary, seek prosecution in this case, does a non-governmental actor such as the ACLU have a legal recourse to force the government to investigate and prosecute if necessary?

I was driving around a lot yesterday in DC and C-SPAN radio was replaying pretty much all the Sunday talk shows. Both the panels and the questioning was by and large a sham; there was hardly anyone pushing for actually following the law and prosecuting those who broke it. The closest I heard was Sam Donaldson as the lone voice in favor of prosecutions on This Week.

Another classic example was the questioning from our friend John King on CNN, who asked Napolitano questions with all the right-wing spin (i.e. "does releasing this information endanger us?") but nothing like, oh, I don't know, "Aren't we we legally compelled to prosecute torture?" or "Won't the next administration just feel they can break the law again if there is no criminal accountability?"

It's maddening to hear the insulation and lack of diverse voices on television... but I suppose I should be used to it by now.

I'm waiting to see where this moves. However, I did drop a note to the President saying that, if investigations and domestic court hearings are not pursued, all while appearing to be a result of obstruction from the Obama administration, he's effectively lost my vote. He won't be getting it if, by the time of re-election, he campaigning on the "rule of law" again. He simply won't have the option.

I understand where you are coming from, Glenn, in regards to it being Holder's call and duty. However, given the dancing of the previous Attorney Generals as a result of politics, I have no reason to truly believe Holder is going to be any different, particularly when he's saying things that basically reflect what Obama and Emanuel have said on this matter. I really don't see him sticking his neck out there to do it against Obama's wishes. I'll be happy to be shown wrong in the future.

Sadly, I'm not sure what else can be done aside from truly hammer home that this is a re-election destroyer for Obama. There's practically 4 years to keep this on the forefront. I've no problem with seeing the ghost of a Nader dark horse return very early on to send a message. I was already insulted by the FISA vote. This stance on torture, however, now has me feeling like we've all been lied to again by another politician. Since politicians only seem to understand donors and organized groups that make a lot of consistent noise, I've got a feeling we're going to need both on this one to make it very noticable through their pollsters' math that this issue may cost the Obama administration a re-election if they drop the ball on this issue while only offering speeches about the rule of law, only to ignore it in application.

We cannot permit anyone to "equate" the suggestion that CIA torturers may not be prosecuted with any suggestion that this view also applies to those who created the United States' torture regime. Rahm Emanuel is wrong and prosecution of those directing or justifying illegal torture must proceed.

The President's stated reason for wanting to exempt "line level" CIA agents who followed orders to torture is that those agents "in good faith" followed orders that they were told by their superiors were legal. There is certainly plenty of room to argue that this is itself a perversion of the rule of law and that such a "good faith" assertion is to be raised in mitigation, not exoneration; certainly that is the import of the Nuremburg Articles, which specifically address this "I vas only following ze orders" defense by saying this is not a defense against a criminal charge but may be considered in sentencing.

But even if one accepts, arguendo, as an exercise of "prosecutorial discretion" a decision that those who "followed orders" must be presumed to have done so in "good faith" [oh, and as has been pointed out, in many respects the torture activities described in these recent memos reflect line level actions in excess even of those "authorized" by the secret legal memos, where is the "good faith" in that?] that principle absolutely cannot be applied to those fashioning, justifying and giving those orders. Period.

The memos in question were SECRET. They were developed in secret and, as is now plain, the legal reasoning was egregiously flawed (Rumsfeld himself "rescinded" some of them even before he was fired and the Bush DOJ itself repudiated the remainder in January of this year), to the point of Bush's own DOJ staff recommending referral of the lawyers involved to State Bar ethics committees. It is equally clear, as Dick Cheney himself has proudly announced to Fox News, that when the Bush Administration sat down with "congressional leaders" to discuss the legality of the torture program, the congressional leaders were not even allowed to have their lawyers in the room and the legal memoranda were not even displayed to the congresspersons -- just, apparently, Cheney and Addington telling Pelosi not to worry her pretty little head about it. Congress bought into that, apparently, but that doesn't make the deception itself "good faith".

The "debate" is not, as Michael Hayden tried to spin it on Fox yesterday, whether "the torture worked". Why don't people like Hayden get the fact that there are laws in existence by which the United States has assured the civilized world that we agree that torture is illegal and is to be punished by law? Why do people like Hayden think they get to go on TV and justify their actions as "seemed like a good idea at the time" when the law ALREADY says they can't do that? Hayden pristinely admitted to governmental conduct constituting war crimes on TV, that's what the significant news from this press conference is.

Whether the people who fabricated a set of secret legal opinions and bullied underlings into treating them as "law" were acting in "good faith" is a wholly different question from whether a line-level employee followed directions.

There must be prosecutions of those involved in the formulation of these "policies" and their conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution by their secret manipulations and falsehoods. They say they "relied upon legal opinions?" Fine. That's a waiver of attorney-client privilege, not to mention the clear applicability of the "crime or fraud exception" to the attorney-client privilege. Yoo, Bybee, Addington, all plainly are war criminals and the substance of their malevolent legal analyses is so bereft of competence and adherence to establish Constitutional doctrine as to constitute treason, let alone lesser crimes, and they did it at somebody's direction.... Muskasey's harboring of these secret opinions was direct participation in the illegal scheme of the Bush Administration (the release of these latest memos would appear to answer the question "what was Mukasey shown between his confirmation hearings and his first official press conference -- but they don't provide a justification for why he felt obligated to abandon a career of integrity and commitment to the Constitution once he became Attorney General). Cheney and Bush -- and Ashcroft and Rice, among others -- are at risk as well.

There is plainly no way at all that the "presumption of good faith" which the President is suggesting he affords line torturers can be applied to those who formulated this program in secret and manipulated in a pathetically obvious effort to avoid its detection and exposure. Neither America nor the civilized world deserve to be demeaned by a refusal to prosecute these crimes.

It's not about "retribution". It's about "vindication". Whether Obama and Holder can be made to recognize this is critical to the integrity of the Constitution and the place of this country in the world.