President Barack Obama, facing pressure from within his own party, signaled Tuesday he may support prosecution of Bush administration officials who greenlighted harsh interrogation techniques for suspected terrorists.
“With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general, within the parameters of various laws, and I don’t want to prejudge that,” Obama said during an Oval Office meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan.
The president has previously said he would not support prosecution of those who followed Bush administration-era policies. His latest remarks indicate he makes a distinction between interrogators and those who proscribed the tactics.
“I do worry about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively and it hampers our ability to carry out critical national security operations,” he said. The issue, a hot-button one for many Democrats, surged to the fore last week with the administration’s decision to release Justice Department documents from the Bush administration detailing the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation practices for detainees.
During his campaign for president, Obama sharply criticized waterboarding and other tactics authorized by the Bush administration. As president, he faces pressure from liberal members of his own party to retroactively address the issue.
Obama said one possibility for getting closure would be through a bipartisan congressional probe.
Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat and prominent critic of Bush-era interrogation practices, praised the president for leaving the door open for prosecution.
“Horrible abuses were committed in the name of the American people, and we cannot look the other way or just ‘move on,’ ” Feingold said. “The final decision will be up to the attorney general and the president, but I urge the Justice Department to take this matter very seriously.”
Geoffrey Corn, a former judge advocate and expert who teaches national security law at the South Texas College of Law, said a likely scenario would be the appointment of a special prosecutor by the Justice Department to determine what laws may have been broken.
But, Corn added, extricating any interrogation method probe from politics may be impossible. “How can there not be politics involved in this?” Corn asked. “Suggesting that former, senior-level government lawyers from your predecessor’s administration might be subject to criminal investigation — it’s inherently political.”
One prominent critic of Obama’s efforts to shift detainee policy is former Vice President Dick Cheney, who told Fox News the government gained crucial information from the interrogation of terrorism suspects.
Cheney said he has asked the CIA to declassify the memos he said highlighted useful information obtained from detainees.
“There are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity,” Cheney said. “I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.”
