Obama’s Cheney Or the Tiger

As Bit rambled:

Ignored his advisors: About everyone, including his current CIA director begged Obama not to release those interrogation memos. Guess Soros trumps all that.

From R. Jeffrey Smith, Michael D. Shear and Walter Pincus Washington Post:

The aides also said they hope the memos’ release will focus public attention on the coldness and sterility of the legal justifications for abusive techniques, with Obama telling reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that the documents demonstrate that the nation lost its “moral bearings” in the Bush years.

A source familiar with White House views said Obama’s advisers are further convinced that letting the public know exactly what the past administration sanctioned will undermine what they see as former vice president Richard B. Cheney’s effort to “box Obama in” by claiming that the executive order heightened the risk of a terrorist attack.

In other words, the debate inside the Obama administration was intense and purely political.   The Obamatards are more worried about Dick Cheney than they are al Qaida.

It is interesting that while Cheney hunted quail with a scattergun and didn’t appear to have particularly good aim, he now changed to snipper and has two very specific documents in mind,Josh Gerstien, Politico, via :

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is asking the Obama administration to declassify two documents on intelligence obtained from the so-called enhanced interrogation program that critics have decried as torture, according to a copy of his request obtained by POLITICO.

The form filed with the National Archives’ Presidential Libraries section on March 31 of this year shows that Cheney asked for declassification review of the two items from a folder called “detainees” within “OVP Cheney immediate office files.” The titles of the memoranda or reports were blacked out for classification reasons, however, one memo sought was dated July 13, 2004, and totaled eight pages, and another dated June 1, 2005, totals 13 pages.

More, Allah Pundit, Hot Air:

[T]he only prominent Democrat left who wants to delve further into this subject is Pelosi, and after the beating she took yesterday for her “lame excuse,” expect her to have a change of heart too. Presumably the plan going forward is to let the matter drop and then, when Cheney gets his docs, to accuse him of trying to refight old battles from which the country’s moved on. Savor the irony.

Cheney is gotten inside of Obama’s OODA loop.    Obama can either release the two documents Cheney requested, proving Cheney right, or not release them, showing Cheney to beright.