Obama open to prosecution, probe of interrogations

WASHINGTON -- President Obama said Tuesday that he would not "prejudge" whether Bush administration lawyers should be prosecuted for approving harsh interrogation methods used on terrorism suspects and signaled to Congress that he would not oppose an independent probe into the matter.

Obama has said he does not want the CIA operatives who used the approved techniques charged with any crimes. He repeated his preference for moving on from an era in which, he said, the nation "lost our moral bearings" with respect to the treatment of terrorism suspects.

"As a general deal, I think we should be looking forward and not backwards," Obama said.

For the first time, however, Obama left the door open to the possibility that his administration would prosecute lawyers in the George W. Bush administration who developed the legal justification for CIA operatives to use methods such as waterboarding, which simulates drowning. Obama banned these techniques when he took office.

"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," he said.

The methods were approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Bush administration officials, including former vice president Dick Cheney, have said these interrogations elicited key information that prevented acts of terrorism.

A Harvard Law School graduate and onetime constitutional law professor, Obama said that "there are a host of very complicated issues involved there" with respect to prosecutions.

The president's comments came five days after he ordered the Justice Department to release previously classified Bush administration memos describing the CIA's interrogation tactics.

Although White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and spokesman Robert Gibbs have suggested recently that prosecutions of Bush lawyers were off the table, Gibbs said Tuesday that Obama's latest comments do not represent a policy shift.