Obama's Sister Soulja Moment?
President Obama’s decision this week to reconsider release of inflammatory Pentagon interrogation photos may mark a shift in his administration’s handling of politically charged national security issues -- upsetting his allies on the left but making some new friends among conservatives in the military.

Obama has asked Atty. Gen. Eric Holder to review an earlier plan to release 44 Department of Defense photos showing harsh interrogation of detainees abroad, according to a senior military official who was informed about the decision. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said yesterday that Obama had “great concern” about the danger for U.S. troops in releasing the photos but didn’t explain further.

“Folks are listening,” said the senior military official, who was among those at the Pentagon who warned Obama that public dissemination of the photos could put U.S. troops in the field at greater risk because of indignation, particularly in the Muslim world, at graphic evidence of U.S. brutality. Those making this case to the White House are said to have included Bob Gates, the secretary of defense; Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander; Gen. Ray Odierno, the U.S. commender in Iraq; and Gen. David McKiernan, the outgoing U.S. commander in Afghanstian.

Obama seems to have concluded that to achieve the right balance on controversial Bush-era issues such as interrogation -- summed up in the president’s frequent admonition that we need to look forward rather than backward -- he will have to disappoint some liberal supporters. Specifically, his second thoughts about releasing the detainee photos upset the American Civil Liberties Union, which thought it had an administration promise to release the pictures by May 28 in response to an ACLU lawsuit.

Obama had tried to strike that forward-not-backward balance earlier, accompanying last month’s release of CIA interrogation memos with a promise not to pursue a witch hunt against CIA officers who were following Justice Department legal advice. But that blew up in his face, triggering precisely the spasm of backward-looking recrimination and CIA angst that Obama had hoped to avoid.

In releasing the torture memos, Obama had rejected counterarguments from CIA Director Leon Panetta. But he seems to have listened to similar warnings from his military commanders who argued that flooding the Internet with a new batch of photos of Americans engaging in shocking practices would put U.S. soldiers in danger without a commensurate public benefit.

Is this a “Sister Soulja” moment on national security, like bill Clinton’s famous criticism of a controversial rap singer during the 1992 presidential campaign -- which upset some liberal supporters but polished his credentials as a centrist? We’ll have to wait and see, but certainly military officers I spoke with this week were pleased -- even as the ACLU was indignant.