In the LA Times today, the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer argues that Barack Obama should release all the confidential memos churned out over the years by George Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel:
Lawyers for the office — including John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee — churned out dozens of memos on torture, rendition, detention without charge and wiretapping without warrants.
….Some of the memos were plainly intended to insulate Bush administration officials from criminal liability….And, according to the Washington Post and other sources, a yet-to-be-released ethics report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility confirms that lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel intentionally misrepresented or distorted the law to support the Bush administration’s policy goals.
….Limited redactions maybe be necessary in extraordinary cases, but national security should not be used as a pretext for the wholesale suppression of the memos. And there are good reasons to release the memos now. By releasing them, the Obama administration would signal that it truly intends to end an era in which the Justice Department became shamefully complicit in the most egregious crimes. Equally important, it would allow the public to better understand the policies that defined the Bush administration and shaped history, and to understand the role that the Office of Legal Counsel played in developing, justifying and advocating those policies.
Read the whole thing. I suspect this is an area where Obama might need to feel some significant pressure from the left to make him do the right thing.