WASHINGTON — In a strikingly defensive explanation of his stance on Bush-era anti-terrorism tactics, President Obama on Wednesday acknowledged for the first time that the harsh interrogation techniques he has banned might have yielded useful information, but that he was nonetheless willing to rule them out on moral grounds.
It was a nuanced performance as Obama walked viewers of his prime-time news conference through a policy that has led him to declare tactics such as waterboarding torture but to stop short of advocating prosecution of the architects of the practices.
He conceded that "it may be harder" to get information, but what "makes us, I think, still a beacon to the world is that we are willing to hold true to our ideals, even when it's hard, not just when it's easy."
Coming as Obama confidently assessed his work during his first 100 days in office, his comments on torture underscored a gnawing dilemma: His desire to roll back elements of President Bush's "war on terrorism" could be more complicated than he had envisioned.
Obama is caught between growing public sentiment against igniting a national debate over past interrogation tactics and a still-emerging insistence by his liberal base that is growing more aggressive in its calls for investigations and prosecutions.
In conceding that intelligence was gleaned from the harsh techniques, Obama may be making himself vulnerable to arguments by former Vice President Dick Cheney and other conservatives that he is making the country less secure.
At least one survey this week showed that Cheney's arguments have support and that the shadow of Sept. 11 looms larger in the public mind than Obama might have initially realized.
A majority of Americans, 53%, said they opposed Obama's release of classified memos detailing the Bush administration's legal rationale for the interrogation tactics used on suspected terrorists, while just 40% supported it, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey.
The poll also found that half of Americans opposed Obama's order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison for terrorism suspects, and that a clear majority opposed the idea of criminal investigations of Bush administration figures.
Moreover, even though a majority believes that America used torture, a plurality said that the interrogations "helped by extracting valuable information."
