The question before the president today is not whether to prosecute his predecessors for war crimes; it is simply whether to release the memos that the Bush administration drew up describing in gruesome detail the torture techniques they authorized - or to cover them up. There are zero national security interests in keeping such information secret. The ICRC report has already detailed what was done to many high value detainees, and the methods are unequivocally war crimes, and known across the world. To directly attach such torture techniques to the specific decisions of the Bush administration merely provides accountability. No more; no less. It provides transparency.
If Obama, for some reason, decides to prevent us from seeing exactly what was done then he will achieve only one thing: he will tell the world that the US has indeed authorized and practised war crimes while simultaneously telling the world that America will not be accountable for it.
He will betray all of us who supported him to restore the rule of law. He will, in fact, merely confirm the worst fears of what was actually done while making himself an accomplice to protecting the war criminals who did it.
Obama owes Andrew Sullivan, who really pushed his candidacy with an important article in The Atlantic before the primaries.
So it is great to see Andrew here hold Obama to account. The United States cannot continue to protect its war criminals. The whole point of supporting Obama will be gone if Obama does not utterly overturn Bush policies.
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