The Shadow Knows...

From Glenn Greenwald on Salon.com:

It's difficult to react much to Obama's complete reversal today of his own prior decision to release photographs depicting extreme detainee abuse by the United States.  He's left no doubt that this is what he does:  ever since he was inaugurated, Obama has taken one extreme step after the next to keep concealed both the details and the evidence of Bush's crimes, including rendition, torture and warrantless eavesdropping.  The ACLU's Amrit Singh -- who litigated the thus-far-successful FOIA lawsuit to compel disclosure of these photographs -- is exactly right:

     The reversal is another indication of a continuance of the Bush administration policies under the Obama administration.  President Obama's promise of accountability is meaningless, this is inconsistent with his promise of transparency, it violates the government's commitment to the court. People need to examine these abusive photographs, but also the government officials need to be held accountable.

Andrew Sullivan, one of Obama's earliest and most enthusiastic supporters, wrote of today's photograph-concealment decision and yesterday's story of Obama's pressuring Britain to conceal evidence of Binyam Mohamed's torture:

     Slowly but surely, Obama is owning the cover-up of his predecessors' war crimes. But covering up war crimes, refusing to prosecute them, promoting those associated with them, and suppressing evidence of them are themselves violations of Geneva and the UN Convention. So Cheney begins to successfully coopt his successor. . .

     From extending and deepening the war in Afghanistan, to suppressing evidence of rampant and widespread abuse and torture of prisoners under Bush, to thuggishly threatening the British with intelligence cut-off if they reveal the brutal torture inflicted on Binyam Mohamed, Obama now has new cheer-leaders: Bill Kristol, Michael Goldfarb and Max Boot. . . .

     Those of us who held out hope that the Obama administration would not be actively covering up the brutal torture of a Gitmo prisoner who was subject to abuse in several countries must now concede the obvious. They're covering it up - in such a crude and obvious fashion that it is actually a crime in Britain.

There's more here.

I watched George Washington University law professor  Jonathan Turley on The Rachel Maddow Show tonight, and he was apoplectic about the Obama administration's about-face on the release of these photos. Turley did posit that perhaps Obama's "out"--at least politically--was that the ACLU would ultimately prevail in winning the FOIA lawsuit, thus compelling the release of the damning pictures.

The bottom line is that people were tortured and abused in our name, and we need to find out the truth. Who, what, where, when, why and how.

Nothing more, nothing less.