Central Intelligence Agency

The Obama administration opposes any effort to prosecute those in the Justice Department who drafted legal memos authorizing harsh interrogations at secret CIA prisons, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday. Some analysts and lawmakers have called for investigations and possible prosecution of those involved because they say four of the memos, disclosed last week by President Obama, illegally authorized torture.

After banning and then publicizing the most controversial interrogation practices employed by the CIA, President Obama called on the agency Monday to live up to its mission under its new marching orders. Obama called the CIA "an indispensable tool, the tip of the spear" in national security as he addressed its employees while standing before a marble wall with 89 stars representing, anonymously, agents who have died in the line of duty.

A U.S. military agency that trains troops to resist and survive torture offered crucial help in developing harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA, according to a Senate report to be released today. The military expertise also was used by the Justice Department to develop controversial legal justifications for abusive interrogation methods, the report by the Senate Armed Services Committee said. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.

Despite the growing demands to bring criminal charges against the authors of the so-called torture memos, even critics of the Bush administration see problems with seeking to prosecute lawyers such as John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee or Steven G. Bradbury. First, the lawyers would have to be shown to have deliberately misinterpreted the law against torture. "It would be a real stretch.

On a Saturday night in May last year, Jay S. Bybee hosted dinner for 35 at a Las Vegas restaurant. The young people seated around him had all served as his law clerks in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the post Bybee assumed after two turbulent years at the Justice Department, where as head of the Office of Legal Counsel he signed the legal justifications that have become known as the "torture memos."

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.

A leading Democratic senator said Sunday that independent investigators should determine whether Bush administration officials ought to face charges over the harsh interrogation techniques used against suspected terrorists. The White House had hoped to let the attorney general make that call. Other liberal Democratic lawmakers appearing on the Sunday news shows joined Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) in pressuring the Obama administration to pursue investigations into the interrogation policies.

The two spies were allies and kindred spirits. Robert Seldon Lady, the CIA station chief in Milan, and Col. Stefano D'Ambrosio, the local head of the SISMI, Italy's intelligence agency, shared pride in their fight against terrorism and disdain for self-serving bosses. On a fall day in 2002, the American made an explosive revelation. He told D'Ambrosio that, over his objections, a CIA team was in Milan doing reconnaissance for the "rendition" of an Egyptian extremist ideologue.

In a bid to defuse political skirmishing over the Bush administration's interrogation methods, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta urged Congress on Monday not to allow the debate to become a distraction from the security threats facing the country. "We are a nation at war," Panetta said at a Los Angeles forum. "We have to confront that reality every day.

CIA Director Leon Panetta told a federal judge Monday that releasing documents about the agency's terrorism interrogations would harm national security. Panetta sent an affidavit to New York federal judge Alvin Hellerstein, arguing that release of agency cables describing tough interrogation methods used on Al Qaeda suspects would tell the enemy too much. The CIA director filed the papers in a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.