He is what he is and (it appears to me) it’s a lot non-partisan pragmatism.

By the way, there was no torture or quit ultimatum. CIA employees could and did opt out of the torture regime. Maybe it hurt their career, but most of them are well-educated, knowledge of the agency’s past history, and familiar enough with the Geneva Conventions to know that the torture and detention regime was legally suspect and morally untenable.

I did not know that. Very interesting. How would we know whether their careers ended or suffered?

As for those acts before the memos were written, did the participants KNOW the memos hadn’t yet been written? Maybe they were told the memos already existed.

at Nuremberg, “following orders” was no excuse.

Maybe they got that wrong. Nuremberg, like many courts, is just made up of well-intentioned people. They’re still human and in that situation the emotional tension must have been incredibly high. They would have been prone to reflect the attitudes of that time and not ours of today.

What I’d like to know is whether there were any in the CIA who refused these orders and, if so, what happened to them.

Will whistleblower #1 please step forward (carefully, so as to not be in the crosshairs of Bushies)?

Can you imagine being in that kind of position and wondering whether you should speak up or just lay low? It would be a very tough situation.

They didn’t order the interrogations/torturing.
They didn’t carry out the interrogations/torturing.

They just violated their oath of office to uphold the Constitution. How do you charge them for violating that when they are already out of office.?

[ I feel idiotic asking. I guess it’s something very obvious. ]

This also brought to mind Abu Ghraib.

SO, I know this is not QUITE exactly the same, but there are a few low ranking military personnel serving time for “just following orders” and I notice that their “superiors” were not held accountable… you know the old “a few bad apples” thing… So how do these CIA folks get to walk, and these junior military personnel were tossed in the slammer?

I think Abu Ghraib is a perfect example of what we want to avoid. Look the normal way you do public corruption cases is you start with the little fish and work you way up the food chain. that’s when you don’t really know what happened.

In this case, we have a pretty good idea what really happened and we may very well end up immunizing the people at the bottom of the food chain in order to secure their testimony for the big fish.

It is the big fish that we want, no? Or do we want a crappy result like Abu Ghraib where the people who bear THE MOST guilt, got off scott free?

Me, I am much more interested in going after teh MOST guilty. And NO, I am not suggesting that everybody else get pass.

I’m merely trying to figure out WHY he might think the way he does, not excuse a wrong conclusion

By refusing to prosecute, Mr. Obama has basically implicated every CIA employee in crimes against humanity. The message is that there are not just a few bad apples involved–everyone’s hands are bloody…
At some point, I expect that an American president will have to disband the CIA as a result of this. It will have finally become too notorious to be effective. International criminal sanctions will be too much for the country to bear. And the Agency will have become a danger to the presidency itself.

Your point is well taken, and amply supported by the CIA’s well-documented history of criminal abduction and assassination. I would fully support Obama’s pledge to forego retribution against individual agents in exchange for the permanent termination of the organization which harbored them.