Whatever else may unfold, though, one can’t reasonably argue that Obama is to the right of Bush on civil liberties. That’s faint praise, I suppose, but it’s better than I’d expected a week ago.

On the “nobody involved ought to be prosecuted” bit:

Marc Ambinder has been parsing through it a lot today. Read in order (he starts laying out his assumptions, then after they get posted he has anonymous White House sources (and he has pretty good sources) telling him his assumptions are correct):

1
2
3.

Worth reading. The current best guess is that Obama is personally opposed to prosecutions, but he may broadly defer to Holder (who is not so opposed). The loophole here is “followed” and “good faith”. As in, they aren’t interested in the people who “followed” the policy (presuming they did follow the policy, and many went beyond it, i.e. would be prosecutable even with the most stringent reading), but they might be in those who created it. And they aren’t interested in people who honestly thought what they were doing was legal. But they might be for those “bad faith” folks whose interpretations of law were negligent or outside the bounds of reasonable, or the people that guessed they were full of shit but went ahead anyway.

Point being, thumbs down indeed for the signaling, and I still don’t get what Obama thinks is the angle here. However, there’s nothing in there that precludes prosecution for the people who need to be prosecuted.

My own guess is that the Obama folks will get out of the way of any Truth Commission efforts, and that Holder might indeed appoint a special prosecutor if lobbied. Whether Obama himself does anything more than “express reservations” depends entirely, I think, on pressure—whether he feels “limited capital” type political pressure to try to divert Justice from this issue, or whether he feels public pressure to stay out of the way and let the wheels of justice turn as they will. Greenwald makes a good point on that: ultimately, it’s up to us.

My interview with the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below. Jameel (a) calls for a Special Prosectuor on behalf of the ACLU and (b) emphasizes that nothing said by Obama or Holder today should be understood to foreclose criminal prosecutions. For all the reasons Jameel describes, I agree with that assessment, and Marc Ambinder reports that senior Obama officials told him (anonymously, of course) that nothing Obama or Eric Holder said today was intended to foreclose prosecutions. Russ Feingold made a similar point.

Needless to say, I vehemently disagree with anyone — including Obama — who believes that prosecutions are unwarranted. These memos describe grotesque war crimes — legalized by classic banality-of-evil criminals and ordered by pure criminals — that must be prosecuted if the rule of law is to have any meaning. But the decision of whether to prosecute is not Obama’s to make; ultimately, it is Holder’s and/or a Special Prosectuor’s. More importantly, Obama can only do so much by himself. The Obama administration should, on its own, initiate criminal proceedings, but the citizenry also has responsibilities here. These acts were carried out by our Government, and if we are really as repulsed by them as we claim, then the burden is on us to demand that something be done.

More than 250,000 Americans attended protests yesterday (ostensibly) over taxes and budget issues. If these torture revelations are met with nothing but apathy, then it will certainly be reasonable to blame Holder and Obama if they fail to act, but the responsibility will also lie with a citizenry that responded with indifference.

Thumbs down on accompanying it with a statement that nobody involved ought to be prosecuted.

A net win for the President.

Well done Obama, though it was your damn job to do this in the first place, but since political figures doing right isn’t as common as it should be, you get a pat on the back.

Poorly done Bush, CIA, Congress, the press and all of us in general for the fact that I get to read in clear terms that my country lost it’s collective head and behaved like barbarians.