Release of torture memos defended

WASHINGTON - President Obama does not intend to prosecute Bush administration officials who devised the policies that led to the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said yesterday.

Emanuel and other presidential aides also pushed back against a GOP contention that national security was undermined by the release of memos detailing controversial interrogation methods approved under President George W. Bush.

In a statement accompanying his release of the Bush-era memos, Obama said, "It is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice, that they will not be subject to prosecution."

The president did not specifically address the policymakers.

Asked yesterday on ABC's This Week about the fate of those officials, Emanuel said the president believes they "should not be prosecuted either and that's not the place that we go."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Fox News Sunday the idea of "criminalizing legal advice after one administration is out of the office is a very bad precedent."

As for Republican allegations that national security had been hurt by revealing the memos, senior presidential adviser David Axelrod said on CBS's Face the Nation:

"We are absolutely confident that we have the tools necessary to get the information we need to keep this country safe. And we don't believe, and the president of the United States does not believe, that this is a contest between our values and our security. He thinks we can honor both and execute both. And that's what he's going to do."

Michael Hayden, who led the CIA under Bush, said the public release of the memos would make it harder to get useful information from suspected terrorists being detained by the United States.

"I think that teaching our enemies our outer limits, by taking techniques off the table, we have made it more difficult in a whole host of circumstances I can imagine, more difficult for CIA officers to defend the nation," Hayden said on Fox News Sunday.

Emanuel said information in the memos already was in the public realm and that releasing details about interrogation techniques gave no new edge to terrorist groups.

The decision not to seek charges against the interrogators has been criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union and called a violation of international law by the U.N.'s top torture investigator.

In his statement last week, the president said: "This is a time for reflection, not retribution."

As a result of Obama's decision, Emanuel said, "we've enhanced America's image abroad. These were tools used by terrorists, propaganda tools, to recruit new terrorists. And the fact is, having changed America's image does have an impact on our security and safety and makes us stronger."

But Hayden said many who opposed the harsh techniques used by interrogations "want to be able to say, 'I don't want my nation doing this,' which is a purely honorable position, 'and they didn't work anyway.' That back half of the sentence isn't true. The facts of the case are that the use of these techniques against these terrorists made us safer. It really did work."