That's the message from President Obama today:
".... the OLC memos that were released reflected, in my view, us losing our moral bearings. That's why I've discontinued those enhanced interrogation programs.
For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it's appropriate for them to be prosecuted.
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. I think that there are a host of very complicated issues involved there."
Remember, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating these memos and their authors. The OPR's investigation could lead to a range of recommendations, from nothing to disbarment to prosecution. And Obama's saying that Attorney General Eric Holder, not the White House, will make that decision. I initially thought that Obama was contradicting his chief of staff, who seemed to rule out prosecuting the lawyers on Sunday -- i..e, "those who devised the policy" -- but a White House official says that Rahm Emanuel was referring to policy-makers at the CIA.
What about policy-makers at the White House? If they're immune -- why blame (legally blame) the lawyers who carried out their decisions? That'd be like prosecuting Enron's lawyers but allowing Ken Lay or Jeff Skilling to escape?
Pursuing the lawyers is going to be an extremely difficult task UNLESS they can find specific case law to support that the lawyers were in violation when giving their opinions. As OGLiberal and others have pointed out in the past, these opinions were carefully written and detailed. I believe it would be near impossible to state that there was a violation in providing the opinions they did. Whether we are "losing our moral compass" is irrelevant to potential prosecution.
One thing that Cheney has said is right....right now all we see are the memos. Wouldn't it be beneficial to know if the interrogation techniques worked? Were lives saved? Right now we only see one side of the picture.
Do we see one side of the picture? No, in the memos we still see the Bush/Cheney/Addington/Yoo/Bybee/Bradbury side. Cheney is a skilled manipulator and obfuscator who is proven to have selectively leaked only those parts of classified memos through Scooter Libby which supported his viewpoint. I am sure that he got some other one sided/biased/incomplete memos written which justify his world view and hides that which does not, and he wants those memos revealed now.
I am all for investigating this issue and getting to the bottom of this issue. But I fear that there is so much spin and so much classified data that it would be impossible to know if the techniques worked. Those who used the techniques have a vested interest in showing that they worked. And it is impossible to go in the "what if" world where we would not have used torture and to compare results.
But as far as possible we do need to understand what went on at that time, why the memos were written, what the history was, who played what role, etc.
There have been published reports in the past that KSM was waterboarded once and that it yielded a treasure of information. Now we learn that it was 183, so someone was definitely lying. And who would benefit from that lying?
Despite the use of torture OBL was not captured. And the Bush administration has exaggerated the usefulness of torture, but even they have not been able to point to a single operational plot being foiled from the use of torture.