On the other hand, he knows the photos will come out anyway--a fair assumption even absent the information about the Australian News having the photos.

There is a certain Machiavellian tint to this.

I am reminded of the fact that, in 2004, Sy Hersh gave a speech to the ACLU making the charge that children were sodomized in front of women in at least one American prison in Iraq and the Pentagon has video tape of it.  This is the money quote: "Debating about it, ummm... Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay?  Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."   I don't know why he is protecting Bush & Co. from these investigations and prosecutions, but it does seem to be a very high priority for him and if something like what Sy Hersh is talking about exists and is released, it might not be possible for Obama to continue to protect Bush, et al.

Also, Obama may be buying into the Bush-era approach to things even more than we think and this may account for his about-face on torture. Andrew Sullivan suggests that the recent appointment of Gen. McChrystal a leader who can be directly linked to the worst images and incidents of prisoner torture and abuse under Bush: "And one can't help but wonder at the same time: is McChrystal the reason for the sudden volte-face on the abuse photos? Their resurfacing would make hearings very awkward".http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/

Hersh's track record on this makes me think that Obama is worried that once the ACLU and the American people get their hand on this batch, they'll just start asking for the really disgusting stuff next.  I think it would be very hard to shut down the calls for investigations and prosecutions if that sort of thing was released.  Remember, there had been lots of articles and radio reports about prisoner abuse all along but it was the visual images which moved people.  And if Sy Hersh is right, those tapes really would make everything we've seen thus far look like "fraternity hazing" by comparison.

I appreciate that Obama inherited all this stuff from Bush, but it seems to me that on things like torture, civil rights, military policy (including gays), the only thing that seems to have changed is that Obama gives much better speeches.  

The more I follow the course of his administration, the less interested in it I feel.

To the Editor:

When Allied forces liberated the Nazi death camps in World War II, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander, ordered German citizens to walk through the concentration camps to see the victims' bodies. He wanted them to witness what their government had done as proof against denials the Holocaust had occurred.

President Obama should follow Eisenhower's example and let Americans confront the visual evidence of the horrors committed in our name. Verbal accounts are not enough to silence those who will deny or minimize this abuse.

Claude Cookman
Bloomington, Ind., May 14, 2009

The writer, an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Journalism, is a historian of photography who has published on the My Lai atrocity photographs.

It is believed that the pictures being held back by the Obama administration may include some of these shots

Please, Ladies and Gentlemen Mr. Panetta just assigned to the CIA likely has not earned enough to even understand what is on the local cafeteria menu list. Let alone who is who and what is what in the deep CIA files. Like Keith Olberman does suggest more often "WTF" is going on. Please I chuckle more than usual when he says that.

Leon is more likely totally surrounded by Bush hold overs with a gun to their heads to get the job done or else so Bush does not go to the slammer. The job is to place so much uncertainty that nothing can be determined, especially, make Pelosi look guilty on prosecution cable news. Those years of pressure from Cheney's shadow secret police system still could be in motion. Yikes, lock your doors, shutter your widows cover them with sheets. That's likely another funny that will make America and World vomit.

Still on the Internet do a Google to notice a huge breaking article by Dana Priest;

http://www.danapriestfansite.com/articlesondp/twincitiesinterview-danapriest.html

Here we have a huge witness to this stuff and where is she, that was 2005 gosh, what the heck?

Consider this, Pelosi was told, or Pelosi was not told is moot, when one reads this stuff. This stuff was out four years ago, I don't care what Pelosi recalls, how come the current media fails to recall what this Dana Priest did find in her reporting. The understanding this woman received a Pulitzer Prize in reporting these gulags in Western Europe. WOW, Sheesh, as it is true, Leon Panetta is way off course; the CIA had a water board or sodomy show playing all around Europe for years. Yikes.  

It is very well known in my memory that a long difficult systematic pressure was placed on the news media to prevent them from publishing secret gulags operated and paid for by our government, Bush and Company, hailed as totally false at the time by Bush and Company. Why don't we look at this time line, well of course Chris Mathews is pounding away at Pelosi, of course if you scratched his head as Michael Savage suggested we would find Chris Mathews as a possible Marxist. Ha, ha.

The one thing that is certain is the secret pledge those representatives must or need to make that keep National Security Secrets. Though the conversations are getting close to that point as the core to real debate in a Constitutional addressability. What the Journalist on cable and hate radio news fail to do is identify that Constitutional statement which cover this breach of action violates the law as a crime.

"So if the world has already seen them, and a federal appeals court has upheld a trial court's order to produce them to the ACLU, what's Obama's justification?"

Ever consider the possibility that Obama conducted some internal polling on the issue and discovered that his position during the campaign was not a winner among the electorate?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20090506/pl_mcclatchy/3227709