Dan Froomkin has a good overview of why the selection of Leon Panetta and Dawn Johnsen means that Obama is serious about changing America’s moral standing in the world, signaling that the US isn’t going to be torturing people. Obama’s administration is thus not going to be like the criminal thugs1 who are about to slink out of Washington.
It has been like a national nightmare: We are attacked by terrorists and our leaders respond not with courage and a call to our higher natures, but by spreading fear — and turning us into a regime of torturers. Rather than celebrate our Constitution and its enduring values, they use the levers of government to subvert it.
Now the nightmare appears to be almost over.
By choosing two vocal opponents of torture for two key positions — Dawn Johnsen to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and Leon Panetta to head the Central Intelligence Agency — President-elect Barack Obama has indicated that he intends to make the cleanest possible break from Bush administration precedents, end torture and return to traditional interpretations of the Constitution.
[From Dan Froomkin – Waking From a Bad Dream – washingtonpost.com]
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Footnotes:- George Bush and his cronies, in other words [↩]