Needless to say, many folks here and elsewhere have been calling for the Obama Administration to release all of the classified memos relating to the establishment and use of torture as policy by the Bush Administration.
The stakes in this are obviously high, politically, legally, and morally. The response from the right and from former Bush Administration officials is not surprising. Presumably it is as much to defend themselves and their friends legally and politically as it is to defend the policy.
The pressure for full blown investigation is mounting, both in Congress and it seems that AG Holder is thinking about flexxig his Constitutional independence.
So why have only a small number of the relevant memos been declassified so far?
At the risk of sounding like I am a disciple of the Obama School of Political Jujitsu, one obvious possibility is that the number of memos is simply too large and the issue far to complex and fraught with political issues for all of them to be released at once.
A Friday evening dump of scores or hundreds or thousands of relevant documents would certainly make a splash, but the impact would be lessened by the shear volume of information. The critical pieces could easily take too long to find and process relative to the length of the media's attention span for the issue and the all too predictable pearl necklace clutching and bed wetting by the right.
So my suggestion is that the Obama Administration is deliberatly releasing the memos in installments for maximum pressure and effect. Each batch can be processed, digested, and discussed before the next batch comes out. This gives the added advantage that Cheney and others will mouth off at each step and saw a little further through the legal and moral branch the end of which they long ago reached.
The principal effect of this approach is that the slow release will allow the moral outrage and political and legal pressure to build gradually until the decision to pursue legal action against at least the architects, if not even some of the lower level participants, is unstoppable.
Perhaps this is just wishful thinking on my part. But as it becomes clear that the policy was fixed early on with the goal of linking al Qaeda to Saddam and thus justifying the war, we really do begin to reach the Grand Unified Theory of Bush Administration Foreign Policy. And what better way to repudiate it and deal with the inevitable political resistance from the right and potentially from within the government than to allow the pressure to build until no other course of action but full investigation and prosecution.
My prediction is that we will see a few more releases of small numbers of damning memos over the coming days and weeks. Maybe I am wrong, but seems a sensible strategy.