OBAMA: I'M OPEN TO PROSECUTING BUSH OFFICIALS

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama left the door open Tuesday to prosecuting Bush administration officials who devised the legal authority for gruesome terror-suspect interrogations, saying the United States lost "our moral bearings" with use of the tactics.
The question of whether to bring charges against those who devised justification for the methods "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. The president discussed the continuing issue of terrorism-era interrogation tactics with reporters as he finished an Oval Office meeting with visiting King Abdullah II of Jordan.
Obama also said he could support a congressional investigation into the Bush-era terrorist detainee program, but only under certain conditions, such as if it were done on a bipartisan basis. He said he worries about the impact that high-intensity, politicized hearings in Congress could have on the government's efforts to cope with terrorism.
The president had said earlier that he didn't want to see prosecutions of the CIA agents and interrogators who took part in waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, so long as they acted within parameters spelled out by government superiors who held that such practices were legal at the time.
But the administration's stance on Bush administration lawyers who actually wrote the memos approving these tactics has been less clear and Obama declined to make it so. "There are a host of very complicated issues involved," Obama said. LinkHere

Accountability for Torture

On Thursday, President Obama released memos that describe, in horrific detail, the torture techniques authorized by the Bush administration.
So far there's been no accountability for the architects of Bush's torture program. We need a full investigation and real consequences for those responsible - it's the only way to keep this from happening again.
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Feingold Unloads On Peggy Noonan: "Never Heard Anything Quite As Disturbing"
Senator Russ Feingold, one of the harshest critics of the Bush administration's nation security policies, says he can not bring himself to support President Obama's apparent decision not to investigate or prosecute illegalities from those years.
"Part of what troubles me are the lawyers -- we should see their law school degrees -- who consciously wrote these memos justifying and explaining full well those outrageous arguments," the Wisconsin Democrat said on Tuesday in reference to the Bush-era torture memos released last week. "I cannot join the president, or his spokesman, or [chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel, who said we aren't going [to prosecute these people]. I can't. I just disagree with them."
Later, the Senator took a swipe at some of the rationalizations for avoiding prosecution that have been voiced by Washington lawmakers and pundits.
"If you want to see just how outrageous this is, I refer you to the remarks made by Peggy Noonan this Sunday," he said, referring to the longtime conservative columnist's appearance on ABC's This Week. "I frankly have never heard anything quite as disturbing as her remark that was something to the affect of: 'well sometimes you just have to move on.'"
"Some things in life need to be mysterious," Noonan said on Sunday about the release of the torture memos. "Sometimes you need to just keep walking. ... It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that."

GIBBS FACES THE COMMITTEE TO POLITICIZE TORTURE

Press Reduce Torture Investigations Into Partisan Warfare

News that President Obama is open to having an independent commission investigate the use of torture during the Bush years is undoubtedly the story of the day, with implications extending back to the previous administration and far into the future.
In the aftermath of the president's statement, however, the preponderance of attention has been spent on political minutia as opposed to the policy details. The media, in particular, has focused almost exclusively on two specific angles: had Obama cowered to those liberal proponents of prosecuting Bush officials, and had he contradicted his own administration in expressing openness in doing so?
In the process, the issue of launching an investigation -- which would have to be bipartisan in nature for Obama to support it -- was reduced into an overtly partisan and cynical frame. Issues of justice and morality boiled down into "the left's" influence compared to "the right."