WASHINGTON — Congress is unlikely to form an independent panel to study the Bush administration's program of harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects now that President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have voiced opposition to the idea.
Reid (D-Nev.) said he preferred to allow the Senate Intelligence Committee to finish its investigation of the Bush-era practices before taking further action. That could take the rest of the year, he said.
Obama told congressional leaders Thursday that he thought an independent inquiry would create a distraction from his legislative agenda.
Obama's and Reid's stances are at odds with those of several prominent Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and liberal interest groups. Some have long been eager to investigate the Bush-era interrogation program, and possibly to prosecute lawyers and other officials who greenlighted it.
New details of the interrogation methods, which included waterboarding and other techniques some have labeled torture, came to light last week when Obama released legal memos from the Bush Justice Department that laid out some of the techniques and the legal rationale for them.
The new details had seemed to add momentum to the call for an independent commission, similar to the one that Congress created to study the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the government's response to them.
For months, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has called for a so-called truth commission that would investigate the actions of officials in the White House, the Justice Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and other entities involved in the fight against terrorism.
Leahy said this week that such a commission would not target Bush officials for blame. "I'm not out just to hang a lot of scalps on the wall. I want to know exactly what happened so that it won't happen again," he told reporters.
Congressional investigations can carry risks for those who plan them, sometimes leading to unintended consequences. The Democratic Congress' inquiry into the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s elevated Lt. Col. Oliver L. North into a folk hero.
A congressional inquiry might appear to the public as Democrats merely settling scores with the previous administration, said Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., chief counsel to the Brennan Center for Justice, a civil liberties think tank at New York University School of Law.
