FIRST, LET'S PROTECT ALL THE LAWYERS...:

Obama Targets Jack Bauer, but Who Takes the Fall?: The closer you read the newly released CIA reports and read into the Justice Department's torture probe, the more you realize nothing much is going to come of them — except more enemies for the inheritor-in-chief (Thomas P.M. Barnett , 8/27/09, Esquire)

With the CIA report's parallels, 24 is now actually a more accurate comparison than ever. And with its fallout, Obama's new torture approach suggests more dangerous paths than even his hedging on Guantanamo, each with their own pitfalls between which he will have to carefully maneuver if he wants to make it past 2012. By launching a Justice Department probe, for starters, Obama is effectively writing GOP campaign ads in the event that Al Qaeda pulls off anything substantial on U.S. soil in the coming years ("He crippled our intelligence agencies, denying them the tools they needed to prevent the [city] attacks of [date], resulting in the sacrifice of [dozens/hundreds/thousands] of innocent American lives!"). But by insisting that Eric Holder's special prosecutor focus on CIA personnel and contractors and not the lawyers who issued the justifications for "enhanced interrogation techniques," the White House risks an outcome as unsatisfying as Abu Ghraib: scapegoat prosecutions of underlings, scot-free consequences for higher-ups, and more restrictions for the investigated parties to, you know, do their jobs. Most precariously, Obama has decided to personally own the problem going forward, announcing that the White House will form and directly supervise (under the direction of the Bauer-esque — though highly qualified — John Brennan) a new interrogation unit led by the FBI, signaling a return to the days when Washington (read: Clintonian Democrats) treated terrorism as a police problem. And that simply won't jive with classifying Afghanistan as a "war of necessity" and ramping up American drone strikes in northwest Pakistan.

So while Obama has the right instincts to avoid criminalizing past policy mistakes even as he corrects them, what may ultimately decide which of these situations turns from danger to reality is who takes the fall in his new windfall of investigation. And putting together the pieces of the newly released documents — the chain of command, the timeline, and what they mean to other, bigger investigations — offers a preview of the country's torture endgame as Jack Bauer goes back in his cage — until we decide we need him again.