Obama: I Might Put Bush Administration People on Trial for Torture

Via Republicratocracy, an interesting promise that Barack Obama has made in response to a question from a hard leftist.

Obama would ask his AG to “immediately review” potential of crimes in Bush White House

Tonight I had an opportunity to ask Barack Obama a question that is on the minds of many Americans, yet rarely rises to the surface in the great ruckus of the 2008 presidential race -- and that is whether an Obama administration would seek to prosecute officials of a former Bush administration on the revelations that they greenlighted torture, or for other potential crimes that took place in the White House.

Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to “immediately review the information that’s already there” and determine if an inquiry is warranted -- but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as “a partisan witch hunt.” However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because “nobody is above the law.”

And further:

The bottom line is that: Obama sent a clear signal that -- unlike impeachment, which he’s ruled out and which now seems a practical impossibility -- he is at the least open to the possibility of investigating potential high crimes in the Bush White House. To many, the information that waterboarding -- which the United States has considered torture and a violation of law in the past -- was openly planned out in the seat of American government is evidence enough to at least start asking some tough questions in January 2009.

It’s nice to say that we want a candidate who will “bring us together.”

But the problem is that Bush haters don’t want to be “brought together.” They want revenge. And Obama, in this case, has chosen to pander to them -- or at least hold out hope that they will have their revenge.