WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will not prosecute CIA officers who participated in harsh interrogations that critics say crossed the line into torture, CIA Director- nominee Leon Panetta said Friday.
Asked by The Associated Press whether that was official policy, Panetta said, “That is the case.”
It was the clearest statement yet on what Panetta and other Democratic officials had only strongly suggested: CIA officers who acted on legal orders from the Bush administration would not be held responsible for those policies. On Thursday, he told senators that the Obama administration had no intention of seeking prosecutions for that reason.
Panetta, in an interview with AP after a second day of confirmation hearings with the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he arrived at that conclusion even before he began meeting with CIA officials.
“It was my opinion we just can’t operate if people feel, even if they are following the legal opinions of the Justice Department, (they could be in danger of prosecution),” he said.
Panetta demurred on saying whether the Obama administration would take legal action against those who authorized or wrote the legal opinions that, for a time, set an extremely high legal bar for an action to constitute torture. “I’ll leave that for others,” Panetta said.
The former chief of staff in the Clinton administration is expected to be confirmed by a wide margin this week.
Panetta told the committee that the Obama administration will continue to hand foreign detainees over to other countries for questioning only if it is confident the prisoners will not be tortured in the process.
That has long been U.S. policy, but some former prisoners subjected to the process — known as “extraordinary rendition” — during the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism war contend they were tortured. Proving that in court has been difficult because evidence they are trying to use has been protected by the president’s state-secret privilege.
