Not necessarily. Two differences spring to mind — the qualitative difference between torture and domestic spying as issues (esp. wrt international impact), and the different circumstances of electoral campaign and being in power elected by a handy margin and with stronger majorities in Congress.

Your comments are always instructive and provoke head-nodding 99% of the time, so on the basis of your track record I should probably dial my expectations even lower.

I’m very glad you all are here to help follow along on these matters as the new regime takes hold.

One thing that bothered me hugely in the NPR and PBS coverage is that they never uttered the name ‘Boumediene’, and didn’t make the connection to the Supreme Court decision or note that these are the very subject of that case.

Work with the torture victim is very different but it is only in understanding how deep and lasting the pain of torture- centuries. I believe it becomes part of the cultural core of a tortured people and a torturing people.

Thinking about this whole issue with a wide-open mind. There has to be a new way of thinking in the military.
Shock and Awe is over. The occupying forces in Iraq should be peacekeeping soldiers. The young men and women (usually falsely) recruited into our ground forces should be learning and practising useful skills: new languages, construction trades, agriculture & irrigation, community organizing, etc. Some soldiers find their own way to these activities but the real occupation purpose is fear and intimidation. Most soldiers are unconnected to the any sense of place, (not even the barracks,) bored and scared. That’s how the common soldier becomes a torturer or a murderer.
Boot camp should be more than endurance and propaganda and building unquestioning loyalty to command. Soldiers should have more than a manual with a few pages about what is and isn’t torture, their moral character has to built up so they viserally understand what torture is.
Oh hell. What am I talking about…it’s a don’t ask don’t tell military. There is no hope without people of goodwill and goodwill has been re-defined.
Ondelette, I don’t know how we are going to right all these wrongs…one at a time, with tears and nightmares in the evening

Frankly, I am completely selfish in my concern: torturers have their demons to live with and I want to protect me and mine from them.

But as a daughter of a POW, I learned from him some of the reality of the human crime of the torturer. Certain instances of revenge from individual POWs to their captors taught him things he didn’t want to know. Torture is a crime that keeps on hurting…everyone. When Abu Gharib broke he was enraged and disheartened for the American culture.

For lots of lengthy reasons involving the fact that the alternative is to put the criminality – by often “covert” torturers – into the courts even while DOJ isn’t purusuing criminal prosecutions, and also having to open up files in the litigation that will be problematic for Democrats as well as the Bushies. The fact that Obama was so willing to grant amnesty to telecoms without any requirement for disclosure of the nature, extent, and personnel involved in their criminal acts pretty much highlights how he thinks these matters should be handled. It would be very odd for him to lead the Democrats in capitulation to amnesty and cover up as a Congressman, while doing something different as President.

I’m as un-starry-eyed as they come, but do you really believe that Obama’s AG will/would assert state secrets claims?

The complete silence as to what they have done with the children, not just her’s, but others, like KSM’s (and his wife who disappeared as well) is chilling in and of itself. Anytime they do something that isn’t depraved, they don’t hesitate to trumpet it around (like the recent Mukasey “standing for the rule of law on wiretaps” nyt piece). From time to time I think, too, about the reference to the “young detainee” who was tortured to death with stress positions and hypothermia, then tossed into an unmarked grave – and you wonder just how “young’ they mean by “young.”

There were some articles awhile back about returning soldiers to a Colorado base being involved in several murders back at home and all of it makes you wonder at how far the damage goes.