Ex-Bush officials slam release of torture memos

American spies may feel "timidity and fear" over torture memos

WASHINGTON (Agencies)

Amid calls for torture prosecutions, former Bush administration officials Friday slammed President Barack Obama's release of terror interrogation memos, warning the move would fuel "timidity and fear" among American spies.

Unhappy with Obama's promise not to prosecute CIA officials, human rights groups demanded criminal investigations of officials who approved or used the interrogation techniques chillingly detailed in the Justice Department memos.

But in an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, former CIA director Michael Hayden and former attorney general Michael Mukasey charged that disclosure of the memos "was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy."

CIA director Hayden and former attorney general Mukasey

"Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on Sept. 11, 2001."

"A weighty decision"

White House senior adviser David Axelrod countered that Obama's decision to release the memos written by top legal officials in George W. Bush's administration was "a weighty decision."

Obama "thought very long and hard about it, consulted widely, because there were two principles at stake," Axelrod told the Politico news website.

Obama consulted officials from the Justice Department, the CIA, the Homeland Security Department and the director of national intelligence, he said.

In releasing the four partially blacked-out memos, Obama said Thursday that the interrogation tactics, which were widely denounced as torture, "undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer."

Criminal cases

Anthony Romero

Obama also pledged not to prosecute operatives who carried out the interrogations because they acted with the approval of the Justice Department and were defending their country.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit that forced the release of the memos, said Obama's position against prosecutions was "untenable."

"There can be no more excuses for putting off criminal investigations of officials who authorized torture, lawyers who justified it and interrogators who broke the law," said Anthony Romero, the ACLU's executive director.

The Center for Constitutional Rights noted that it tried to bring criminal cases in Europe against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA director George Tenet, and former attorney general Alberto Gonzalez.

Disclosing interrogation techniques

Hayden and Mukasey, who both served during Bush's second term, said the release "assures that terrorists are now aware of the absolute limit of what the U.S. government could do to extract information from them, and can supplement their training accordingly and thus diminish the effectiveness of these techniques."

They also argued that the disclosure meant that Obama was making permanent the suspension of the interrogation techniques.

The former officials defended the use of the techniques, noting that some detainees, including top al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah, had voluntarily disclosed information after being submitted to CIA interrogations.

However the New York Times on Sunday cited former intelligence officials of saying that the use of brutal tactics against Abu Zubaydah, was ordered by CIA headquarters officials based on an inflated assessment of his significance.

One former official with direct knowledge of the details of the case said Abu Zubaydah had provided valuable information under less severe treatment and that the harsher measures brought no breakthroughs, the Times reported.

During his second day in office, Obama signed an executive order banning the use of torture and ordering the closure of all CIA detention centers.