Rahm is wrong (and not Rahm alone)

Not about releasing the memos: that was right.

He's wrong when he says: "It's not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back" out of "any sense of anger and retribution," as he did on ABC's "This Week." (source)

He's wrong unless he means that we should go after them out of something other than a "sense of anger and retribution", at any rate. But he doesn't. He - and presumably his boss - are trying to have it both ways. The Bush administration was wrong, but so what? That's in the past. Let the dead bury their dead. Oh, and we're going to keep secrets too, so we don't want to start raking up all that old stuff. Let's just stay cool and look ahead.

Sure, those who get stuck in the past get, well, stuck there. But those who pretend the past never happened get blindsided by it - as Dmitri Volkogonov once said, "The past is not a shadow theatre. What rules there is not the ephemeral, but the irreversible."

And more importantly, Obama ran on setting wrongs right. We can't absolve those who tortured in our name because they're no longer in charge. There's a huge difference between not "looking back" and refusing to see; refusing to deal with the egregious crimes of the Bush administration will not serve any good ends. Rahm and Obama may want to go forward, but sometimes you can't go on until you've gone back and put right what was made wrong. Going on from the wrong place just gets you more wrong.