By: Gene Lyons
Source: salon.com
Anybody with an active conscience can understand why President Barack Obama ordered the Bush administration’s “terror memos” released, overruling his own CIA director. No intelligence secrets were revealed. Much of the information in the documents had previously been widely reported. They weren’t classified “Top Secret” to protect national security, but the craven careerists who wrote them, and the White House officials who ordered it done.
To a one-time constitutional-law professor like Obama, the memos’ legalistic rationalization of methods indistinguishable from those of the Soviet KGB or South African secret police must have been sickening. Besides shaming themselves and their country, their authors have sullied their profession.
