Obama can't keep torture under wraps (Gude / The Guardian)

[struggle4progress]

Withholding photos of prisoner abuse won't end the torture debate. We need a formal investigation of Bush's policies

No matter how badly the Obama administration wants it to, torture is not going to go away. News just continues to roll out, from a front line interrogator dismissing torture as the tool of the ignorant to the return of one of the architects of the Bush administration torture regime. Still only half over, the Obama administration supplied the big news this week by reversing its earlier decision to accept a court ruling and release photographs depicting torture and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan ...

Wednesday's Senate judiciary committee hearing brought into the open US government officials vehemently opposed to torture who had worked to stop the Bush administration's policies from behind the scenes and on the front lines ...

One of the objects of Zelikow's scorn, former office of legal counsel attorney John Yoo, returned to prominence this week with the announcement that he has been hired as a regular columnist by the Philadelphia Inquirer. Just as with John Bolton's continued frequent publications, I have never understood how these guys keep getting hired. Haven't these newspaper editors been paying attention the last seven years? No wonder the industry is in terminal decline. I look forward to Yoo's monthly recitation on how the US constitution actually is a manual for presidential dictatorship ...

... the Obama administration set the expectations by agreeing to release the photos in the first place, and it faces an uphill battle to now convince the court that this material should be properly withheld from public disclosure when only a month ago it had said the opposite ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/may/14/obama-torture-photos-soufan-zelikow-yoo

[FiveGoodMen]

1. And he shouldn't