Blackmail

Last week it became known that the Obama Administration had backed off publishing a trilogy of legal memoranda which shed light on the Torture Regime created under the Bush Administration.

Scott Horton reports the reason for this is Republican blackmail.

Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward.

This sure seems like a good time for a big o' fuck you -- or at the very least, a well-coordinated and untraceable leak.