Torture

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.

A Spanish judge opened an inquiry on the Bush administration's alleged torture of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, pressing ahead Wednesday with a drive that Spain's attorney general has said should be waged in the United States, if at all. Judge Baltasar Garzon, Spain's most prominent investigative magistrate, said he was acting under this country's observance of the principle of universal justice, which allows crimes allegedly committed in other countries to be prosecuted in Spain.

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.

A federal judge who provided the Bush administration with legal advice on what constitutes torture declined to respond Thursday to a letter from the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman calling on him to explain his actions to the American public. Judge Jay S. Bybee, of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, was head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel when he described the intensity of pain that could legally be inflicted.

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.

It was an unusual showdown pitting present and former leaders, live on national television, with President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney dueling in back-to-back speeches Thursday over how to best protect the nation against terrorism. Obama pressed his case for closing the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and for discarding interrogation techniques he described as brutal, while Cheney warned that doing so would endanger the country.

In the bitter debate over the nation's counter-terrorism policies, former Vice President Dick Cheney has introduced an assertion that substantially raises the stakes. Twice in the last two weeks -- including during his speaking duel with President Obama on Thursday -- Cheney has said that the Bush administration's approach may have saved "hundreds of thousands" of lives. It is a claim that goes beyond anything Cheney or former President George W.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney personally oversaw at least four briefings with senior members of Congress about controversial interrogation programs, part of a secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to maintain support for the harsh techniques used against detainees.