No one likely to be prosecuted from CIA ‘torture’ allegations

In many ways, the two sides were talking past each other Tuesday with the release of the CIA interrogation report.

Democrats, and those like Republican Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who don’t support the harsh tactics of the Bush administration CIA, made moral arguments. Conservatives who support them or were involved continued to come back to a legal defense.

McCain, a victim of torture while a prisoner of war in Vietnam, repeatedly came back to the idea of American “values.” He accused the purveyors of the policy and agents who carried them out of “compromising our values.”

“[T]hey stained our national honor, did much harm and little practical good,” McCain said in a powerful speech from the Senate floor Tuesday.

But calling the Senate report “hooey” yesterday, former Vice President Dick Cheney came back to this in an interview with the New York Times: “The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.”

On the NewsHour Tuesday night, the moral versus legal difference was also highlighted between Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Robert Grenier, the former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center from 2004 to 2006.

With the release of this report, Feinstein said, “We say to the world this is not what we stand for.”

Grenier, on the other hand, argued, “I can assure you that we didn’t do anything unless we had full assurances that everything that we were doing was fully legal. … So let’s just — let’s table that.”

The Obama administration has discontinued the harsh interrogation practices, what many are calling torture, and the Obama Justice Department has declined to pursue charges against the policy makers or the agents for carrying out “torture.”

That’s something some on the legal left want the administration to reconsider. Amnesty International pushed for prosecution Tuesday.

“Torture is a crime and those responsible for crimes must be brought to justice,” Amnesty International USA’s executive director, Steven W. Hawkins, said in a statement.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Irvine Law School, makes a similar argument.

“Torture is a federal crime, and those who authorized it and engaged in it must be criminally prosecuted,” he writes, adding that President Obama “obviously felt that investigations and criminal proceedings would be divisive and wanted the nation to move forward. He felt that his repudiation of torture would be enough. That was a questionable choice at the time, but now it is clearly unacceptable.”

But that is not likely to happen.

Senior administration officials were asked about it again Tuesday on a conference call with reporters. They deferred to the Justice Department, but acknowledged problems with the program.

“[T]he key point here is whether or not individuals were acting consistent with the guidance, including the legal analysis that had been done, related to the program,” said one official. “That’s why it was ended as a matter of policy by President Obama so that our policy would change, and we would resolve to be not utilizing these specific enhanced interrogation techniques, to be treating detainees humanely in accordance with a variety of international conventions. So that’s what’s guided our approach to how we deal with personnel.”

In another answer, an official said, “There were serious mistakes that were made, and in the implementation of the program. And where those occurred, those are things that there should be accountability for. And that’s something that we have a number of processes — short of the criminal piece — but there have been referrals to the [Inspector General] and so on. And I think that is something that systemically, we’ve seen some issues that we’ve been essentially in the process of correcting.”