Bush team may face torture probe

WASHINGTON, April 22 (UPI) -- U.S. President Barack Obama is caught between a rock and a hard place on the issue of fixing blame for the controversial interrogation policies of the Bush administration and the documented widespread abuse of prisoners that occurred at the Iraqi detention center of Abu Ghraib.

Obama is trying to avoid the prosecution of CIA officers who followed the legal guidelines of the time, and he has worked hard over the past week to assure officers at the agency that they will not be hung out to dry as scapegoats. But he has left open the possibility that legal action may be taken against senior Bush administration officials who formulated those policies.

Whatever Obama decides, he is certain to be attacked by liberal supporters and human-rights activists for not doing enough and by conservatives who allege he is tying the hands of the U.S. armed forces and intelligence agencies in their continuing struggle against al-Qaida and other extreme Islamic groups.

Obama's current position can certainly be defended in moral and legal terms. But he has given the impression that he flip-flopped before coming to it. On Sunday White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said the president was opposed to the prosecution of "those who devised policy."

"This is not a time for retribution; it's a time for reflection. It is not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back in a sense of anger and retribution," Emanuel said.

"What people need to know (is that) this practice and technique, we don't use anymore. We banned it."

Those remarks appeared to rule out any prosecution of former senior Bush administration officials such as Vice President Dick Cheney's former legal counsel David Addington, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and four other policymakers who have all been named in a case being brought in a Spanish court. The case is opposed by the current Spanish government, however. Earlier this month Spanish Attorney General Candido Conde-Pumpido said he was opposed to seeing the case prosecuted in his country.

However, Obama administration spinmeisters moved quickly to say Emanuel was only referring to senior CIA officials, leaving open the possibility that their political overlords could still be prosecuted in U.S. courts or be subjected to an American inquiry. And on Tuesday the president indicated he was allowing Attorney General Eric Holder to explore the possibility of legal proceedings in a U.S. court on the issue.

"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.

Pressure on the president and his administration to act more forcefully on the issue is building. A new report issued by the Democrat-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee concluded that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were indeed the direct result of Bush administration policies. The president has up to now taken the position that a bipartisan commission would be a far better way of investigating the issue than a congressional committee investigation into possible criminal activity.

However, that decision will be up to the current 111th Congress, and so far its leaders, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., have shown no inclination to follow his leadership when pushing through the legislation they want. Still, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., appeared to speak for an influential group of House Democrats when he said that any decision on investigating or prosecuting the political appointees who created the interrogation policies should be removed from partisan politics and left to the decision of the attorney general.

The president visited CIA headquarters Tuesday to show his support for the intelligence officials who work there, and he has consistently taken the position that he opposes prosecuting any CIA agents who carried out aggressive interrogation techniques as these were clearly within the legally approved guidelines given to them by the Bush administration.

However, defenders of those policies argue that they did in fact produce a yield of important intelligence that was vital in foiling terrorist plots against the United States. Obama's critics also argue that even if agency officials and soldiers and officers of the U.S. armed services are not directly prosecuted for what they did during the war on terror of the Bush years, the new guidelines will embolden terror suspects who are being held and tie the hands of the U.S. intelligence services and armed forces, making future major terrorist attacks on the United States far more likely.

If any major terrorist attack occurs on Obama's watch, he will certainly be vulnerable to these allegations. But currently, the president appears to be trying to navigate fully on the issue in a bitterly divided nation that continues to face serious security challenges. As a graduate of Harvard Law School and former editor of its law review, the president knows that hard cases all too often make for bad law.