The subject of torture is suddenly unavoidable.  I suspect this is a deliberate effort to distract from poor economic news and the recent tea party backlash against big government.  Be that as it may, the narrative needs to be addressed.

America, and Americans by and large, do not believe in torture.  This has always been true, and it’s no more true today than it was in the Bush administration.  Any government that seeks to avoid torture must, by necessity, define just what torture is.  The Bush administration sought to do this.  Now the Obama administration, not happy with the prior definition, seeks to adopt its own.  It’s to be expected that, when a new party comes into power, issues such as this will be readdressed and new positions taken.  But Obama is going one step further.  Not only does he find the Bush definition wrong, he wants to label it criminal.

This is a frightening development for anyone who supports our democratic system.  The United States has enjoyed a long track record of peaceful transitions that most of the world can only dream about.  A large part of the reason for this is that we do not seek to criminalize political differences.  When your average Latin American military junta assumes power, the first order of action is to jail everyone in power previously.  The United States is better than that. It used to be, anyway.

Barack Obama is willing to leave open the possibility that Bush administration officials may be tried for drawing a line in a slightly different place than Obama draws it.  Not, mind you, for wantonly and maliciously running torture dungeons where any and all practices were acceptable, but for approving a single tactic which Obama did not like, and which is routinely conducted on our own soldiers for training.  Peaceful democracies are not supposed to handle complicated legal and moral issues by jailing those who take opposing positions.  If Obama wants to elevate the game to that level, he should keep in mind that his entire economic agenda is flagrantly unconstitutional; whereas if he has his way on waterboarding, we might just have to start calling it criminal as well.