Obama Reverses Position on Release of Photos of Detainee Abuse

President Obama will oppose the release of several dozen photos depicting abuse of detainees held in U.S. military custody abroad, reversing his previous position on the grounds that the pictures could inflame anti-American sentiment and endanger U.S. troops.

The WaPo makes it sound like it was someone’s idea to release the photos,

The administration said today that Obama met last week with White House lawyers and informed them that he did not “feel comfortable” releasing the photos because of the reaction they could cause against U.S. troops and because “he believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court.”

The administration said today that Obama met last week with White House lawyers and informed them that he did not “feel comfortable” releasing the photos because of the reaction they could cause against U.S. troops and because “he believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court.”

It may well have been the case: Andrew McCarthy looks into that at length:

It’s worth asking: Has it dawned (pardon the pun) on people yet that it’s a huge problem to have a Justice Department stocked with lawyers who have spent (or whose firms have spent) the last eight years volunteering their services to America’s enemies? We’ve already seen the premature announcement of the closure of Guantánamo Bay when there was clearly no plan for what to do about the detainees; the outright release of Binyam Mohammed, who plotted with “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla to attack American cities; the purging of the terms “enemy combatant” and “war”; the release of the CIA memos over the strenuous objection of the intelligence community – and in a shamefully dishonest manner that revealed interrogation tactics but suppressed from public view the life-saving information that the tactics yielded; the announcement of an investigation of Bush administration lawyers and the leaking of information from the related ethics probe; Holder’s under-the-radar suggestion that he’d cooperate with Spain’s investigation of Bush administration officials;the sweetheart plea deal for Ali al-Marri (a terrorist who, like Binyam Mohammed, was planning to conduct a post-9/11 second-wave of mass-murder attacks in the U.S.); the plan to release trained terrorists in the United States; and, now, the decision to release the prisoner abuse photos that the president, hopefully, will rescind.That’s quite a track record in just a hundred days.

Meanwhile, what was Chuck Schumer saying about torture five years ago?

Inner compass? What inner compass?