This 200 years old French political saying was 1st used in the case of the Duc D'Enghien. The Duc was plotting to assassinate Napoleon, he was caught and executed on Napoleon's orders. The execution had the effect to energize Napoleon's opposition within the French aristocracy.
The case of President Obama refusing to prosecute the CIA agents for torture is drastically different in appearance but has, as a matter of fact, quite a lot of political similarities.
There is a lack of logic to it from a legal stand point, and further it is a political disaster in the making.
First, if you are not going to prosecute the CIA agents arguing that they were just following orders issued by the upper echelon of the Bush administration; then you have to go after the legal architects of the memos, and even further up the Bush administration's "food chain" to whomever gave the instructions to draft the documents in question. This lack of legal logic is troubling from someone as smart as Obama; especially considering that he has a background in constitutional law.
Second, it is a huge political mistake. The intelligence hard liners are up in arms that the memos were released by the Obama administration. On the left, the liberals & libertarians are even more critical over Obama's decision not to prosecute either the CIA operatives or the Bush administration itself. When the torture memos were released last week Obama said:"We have been through a dark and painful chapter of our history". This is completely accurate, but what doesn't make any sense is to basically sweep everything under the rug of history just for the sake of moving on. Today, Rahm Emmanuel was spinning Obama's decision on Sunday's political talk shows circuit by explaining again that we need to turn the page. We need to do the complete opposite to prevent anything like that to ever happen again under any circumstances.
Third, it is a big International " faux pas". The obama administration was making a lot of progress in their handling of foreign relations. Not prosecuting the CIA agents was strongly criticized by a top UN official. He has charged that " Obama violated international law with his decision not to prosecute CIA agents who tortured detainees". It is sending the wrong message all across the world, as if America is above international laws.
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As I said in the post linked below, "Briar Patch Politics:"
Thing is, he IS too smart to know this will play out the way he seems to hope. The release of the full memos, rather than selected excerpts, will tend to add weight to efforts outside of the Washington political context, such as ACLU v. Rumsfield.
Whatever arises from that effort, in terms of legal, or merely political impact, will tend to be blamed on the ACLU - not President Obama, who has to rely on a rather nervous intelligence community. But at some point, it may well be that public pressure will actually "throw him into dat briar patch."
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