Release The Photos

by Patrick Appel

The White House is still stalling on those torture photographs Obama promised to release in April and subsequently flipped on:

[T]he administration faces a dilemma. When it released the Office of Legal Counsel memos written by the now-infamous John Yoo authorizing the administration to torture prisoners abroad, it wasn’t prepared for the media firestorm that erupted and the growing public pressure to prosecute. Reluctant to face that again, Obama and senior officials in his administration are trying hard now not to stoke the fires. (Even if they can go along with a limited prosecution along the lines of what Holder has described, they certainly don’t want to face calls for prosecuting senior Bush officials.) But it looks like they can’t legally stop this release. Sill, they can delay it. Supreme Court review could delay the case months or even years, depending on what the court decides to do.