T-Shirts are on sale at the Banana Republic!

They have a fun catch-phrase on them as well! It says, "Caution: The Next Administration May Prosecute You"...
Obama set a very precarious precedent today when suggested his openness to prosecution of Bush administration officials for enhanced interrogation. While he claims he doesn't intend to bring criminal charges against the various CIA agents and other operatives who used these methods in the questioning of high-level terrorist operatives, he left an opening for the prosecution of the lawyers and officials who allowed for their use.
What a difference two days makes. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, made the media rounds on Sunday, claiming the administration, much like Oasis, didn't want to look back in anger.
Yet today Obama allows that some legal actions may be taken. Not by him specifically, however, lest he tarnish his messianic image. As with so many of "his" projects, such as the "stimulus" bill which Nancy Pelosi and her greedy minions wrote, he intends to keep his hands clean of this issue as well.
"With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions," said Obama, "I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general, within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that."
So now these memos have been released to the public, which detail the methods and lengths to which the intelligence community may go to obtain information to protect the American people. This information is now available to our enemies. Whatever fear or trepidation terrorists may have had upon capture should be allayed, as they now know what to expect. Which, as it turns out, is not much, as Obama has stated he no longer intends to use these interrogation methods anyway. When your society routinely chops off hands for stealing, how frightening can a stern talking-to be?
Imagine this is the Super Bowl, and the kid who hands out the towels accidentally left the offensive playbook out in the hallway where the other team found it. Our team's not going to do so well.
Another concern is the precedent this sets for legal opinion. How effective can legal counsel to the President be under the fear of being criminally prosecuted by the next administration whenever they offer legal opinions regarding difficult moral or ethical choices and decisions? The decisions that were made regarding these interrogation tools were made in the immediate aftermath of one of our greatest national tragedies, a terrorist attack on our own soil. The times were perilous, the dangers were great, and the solutions were ambiguous.
We have the benefit of hindsight in viewing these issues. National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair circulated a memo to employees in the intelligence community in which he wrote, "Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing... I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given."
Yet the left clamors for heads to roll. An argument commonly made by those critical of President Bush is these interrogation methods are not allowed under the Geneva Convention, which attempts to govern treatment of prisoners of war. These guidelines do not apply to Al Qaeda terrorists, however, as they are not representatives of a country or associated military apparatus.
Attorney General Eric Holder gave an interview with CNN in January 2002. He said, "One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people. It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohamed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not."
These retroactive criminal prosecutions are commonly seen in South American banana republic military dictatorships, not the United States. Let's hope, for the good of our country, that he is able to make the right choice in this case.