On trial for writing an opinion?

Obama remarks on torture memos leave open possibility of prosecution - Los Angeles Times

Like this makes sense:

Although President Obama opposes the prosecution of CIA operatives who carried out the most controversial interrogations of suspected terrorists during the Bush administration, Obama suggested today that he had not ruled out action against Justice Department officials who authorized the tactics....

Obama said that "with respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that. I think that there are a host of very complicated issues involved there."

Update: further interesting details on this in The Guardian version of the story:

The White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said only three days ago that the administration did not favour prosecutions of those who had devised the policy, and Gibbs echoed that on Monday.

Obama's about-turn may reflect the sense of outrage, at least among US liberals, over further details of CIA interrogations that have emerged during the last few days, including the use of waterboarding against one detainee 183 times. Or it could be purely political, a retaliation for sniping against him by Cheney.

In an interview with Fox News on Monday night, Cheney said he was disturbed by the release of the previously classified memos. He called for the declassification of other memos that he said would illustrate the value of intelligence gained from the interrogations.

"I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," he said.

Cheney has a point. Surely most people are surprised by the number of times some detainees were waterboarded. Unless you believe that individual CIA operatives just started doing it for fun (a wildly improbably assumption, given the amount of paperwork that appears to surround these cases), they clearly must have been under the impression that something was to be gained (or was being gained) in the process.

Of course, one of the common arguments against torture is that it does not produce reliable information in any event. But is that necessarily true? The CIA and intelligence services of all countries have a lot of experience in the field: do they like people to know how successful it can be?

There is probably a lot of information out there on the issue, but I don't have time to go looking for it now.

One other point I find curious about this whole matter is that, if the one of the interrogation "benefits" of waterboarding is that the victim thinks they are about to die, surely that aspect of it decreases over time if you've been subjected to it a dozen times and you still haven't died? Or does the psychological impact of it still increase over time, just out of fear of undergoing yet another round of an extremely unpleasant procedure?

Going back to Obama's flying the kite on Justice Department prosecutions, Powerline has this to say (and of course I agree):

The idea of prosecuting a lawyer because a wrote a legal analysis with which the current Attorney General disagrees is so outrageous that I can't believe it would be seriously considered.

UPDATE: some commentary on the issue of whether torture works.

I also tend to agree with Tigerhawk's take on this: if you have caught a terrorist who is prepared to kill thousands of civilians, it is surely helpful for him to at least believe that he is about to be tortured. Obama has effectively removed that fear, and that is not a good thing for the future security of his nation.

UPDATE 2: The New York Times reports that Obama's own intelligence director, Admiral Blair, supports the Dick Cheney position that important information was disclosed from waterboarding (or other techniques authorised by the Bush administration). I think we can assume Cheney was telling the truth.