Thoughts on the Obama administration's decision not to prosecute former officials for 'enhanced interrogation' under the previous administration (made in response to others):

See original thread here:
http://www.facebook.com/ryan.doxtader/posts/10151259999197228?comment_id=26395925&notif_t=like

Me:
Obama's not 'okay with torture.' Prosecuting US intelligence agents for past actions authorized from above would lose him the national security vote, guaranteed. But he did put in place sensible legal procedures at least aimed at striking a balance between the rights of (quasi)war detainees and national security. He also no longer claims that the executive can do basically anything in war-time because of vast security powers, no matter what Congress and the courts say about it, which is a pretty important philosophical/policy difference.
Obama has disappointed on many fronts, but the alternative is so insanely bad (Romney's foreign policy advisers seem to be all junior Neocon ass-hats, people like Dan Senor, who served with W) that you should vote for him anyway.
Remember how many people in 2000 claimed that there was no real difference between Gore and Bush, and so therefore one shouldn't vote, or should vote for Nader? How'd that work out for them?

K the destroyer:"and i think we can all agree that there is no ethical responsibility to punish government-approved torture, especially if it will lose you the national security vote:"

(Cave Bear's response):

Politics is a field full of conflicting ethical responsibilities--as well as being the art of the possible. You have to weigh the benefits of such a move against the fact that such a move would almost certainly lose the President the 2012 election(polls and elections show that middle Americans tend to care more about security than civil liberties, and have been particularly skeptical of Democrats in this regard since 1972), which would bring on a GOP presidency whose national security policy would (as asserted above) most likely resemble W's much more closely, and explicitly include further 'enhanced interrogation.' Has Obama no responsibility to prevent such a thing, if we can?

All that's not to mention all the unrelated ethical and policy issues at stake on the domestic front that Obama would sacrifice, over which Obama would be ceding control to an out-of-touch plutocrat terrified of his own right flank, as well as probability such action would indirectly cause permanent change to the US social contract, shifting it to the right and causing more of America's least powerful and most in need to be abandoned to the chaos of nature without material support from their fellow citizens for the forseeable future, a future which would also include a more unequal (and unjust) distribution of wealth and a banking system more likely to destroy the entire world's economy. Preventing all this is far, far more important than prosecuting 23 CIA agents from a previous administration. One must weigh one consequence and policy against another, but here the choice is very clear.

(For what it's worth, I think there are areas in which Obama could probably move left on civil liberties, if he wanted to, without losing substantial political capital. This isn't one of them.)
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It's worth reading the original thread in its entirety, but I shall attempt to excerpt portions of it in a coherent manner over the next few days, for the immense benefit of the larger public.