In a short sighted and hopefully anomalous lack of judgement, Barack Obama has decided to back track on a promise made by his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, that those who devised the policy of 'harsh interrogation' will not be prosecuted.
The culprits are Jay Bybee the former attorney general and his two assistants who in their memo's to the CIA managed to argue that torture was not actually torture, black is actually white, the sun is actually the moon and so forth.
However, Obama yesterday undermined his Chief of Staff by declaring in a briefing that such a matter is for the Attorney General to decide if those who formulated the decisions could be prosecuted. In his wisdom Obama has stated that those operatives who acted under the guidance of the attorney generals office will not be prosecuted, unfortunately life in the Washington beltway is not as ideal as that.
Case officers and interrogators will recieve subpoena's to attend hearings and criminal cases, quite possibly the legalists of those who formulated the policies of harsh interrogation will attempt to blame the FBI and the CIA for doing what they were asked to do. Inevitably, a precedent of institutional timidity will set in within the CIA and the FBI for fear of being dragged into potential prosecutions should they come across intelligence garnered from tortured/interrogated sources.
Not a very wise move from Obama who seems to have yielded to pressure from the left within his party who are determined to use the whole fiasco of harsh interrogation techniques as a means of damaging the image of the grand old party.
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