Soccer Dad

Since you advertise the essay, you qualify for a rebuttal. Obama did not engage in political retribution: He said it would be up to the Justice Department to decide on prosecutions. This is just like saying we won't prosecute, but involves punting to the Justice Department so they can go through the motions and tell the left-wing base that the government doesn't have a case. The only real case is against those who actually carried out the interrogations because they cannot claim ignorance of international law - it's a major part of their training to learn what the proper response is when ordered to commit a war crime. The politicians will claim they were mislead and "proving" they weren't is a lot harder than it might seem. Also, not many pundits are emphasizing that the President simply settled two lawsuits that had basically been lost. His other option was to appeal to the Supreme Court and release the materials when they refused to hear the case and there were no more avenues to appeal the lower courts' decisions. Having run on a platform of transparency and criticizing Bush secrecy, he chose to anger the right (no surprise) and avoid giving fodder to anyone trying to accuse him of breaking promises. The people who are really politicizing the issue are all those who neglect to point out that the court had already ordered the memos and photos released. It's not like he went through the classified-cabinet and picked out things to release which would harm the previous administration.