President Obama Shifts Course on Torture Investigation
BLITZER: To our viewers, you're in THE SITUATION ROOM. Happening now: an invitation to Osama bin Laden to come to Pakistan's Swat Valley. It's now under the Taliban's control, and a spokesman says the world's most wanted terrorist is welcome to settle in the region. The Reverend Jesse Jackson is offering to go to Iran to help free the American journalist Roxana Saberi, recently sentenced to eight years in prison for spying. And a federal judge says Rod Blagojevich cannot go to Costa Rica for the reality TV show "I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!" The judge says the ousted former Illinois governor should stay in the United States to fight charges he tried to sell President Obama's U.S. Senate seat -- all of this, plus the best political team on television. I'm Wolf Blitzer. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM. All right. Let's get back to our top story. The president of the United States makes a major decision today potentially to launch criminal investigation in to some former top Bush administration officials. Let's talk about this with our senior political analyst, Gloria Borger, our CNN political contributor Steve Hayes of "The Weekly Standard," and CNN political analyst Roland Martin. It looks like a major change from only yesterday and the day before, Gloria, because we had heard earlier the president did not want to go after, not only those CIA officers who may have actually engaged in these enhanced interrogation techniques, but the authorities who approved the policy, whether writing legal opinions or others. But today we heard a different message from President Obama.</s>GLORIA BORGER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: We did. And I think it is a real shift, Wolf. And I think the president was hearing from senior Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, like Senator Dianne Feinstein, whom you just interviewed, who are in the middle of their own process of reviewing all of these memos and the question about enhanced interrogation. And they wanted to put the brakes on this and say to the president, don't preclude us from doing anything, because we haven't finished looking at all the evidence here. I think this leaves him, however, with a real problem at the CIA. This could create a morale problem over there. But, again, I think the president did change his mind here.</s>BLITZER: And you just heard Dianne Feinstein say, Steve, the chairman -- the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, it wasn't really CIA officers who did the enhanced interrogation, the water-boarding, and the other techniques. These were CIA contract employees. They were non-government. They worked as contractors for the CIA. And she leaves open the possibility maybe some of them should be criminally investigated, as well.</s>STEPHEN HAYES, SENIOR WRITER "THE WEEKLY STANDARD": Well, they were presumably acting on the same legal advice, however, that -- that anybody else would have been in such a situation. Look, I -- I think this is really outrageous. It seems like President Obama caved to the left here. I mean what you had was MoveOn.org -- a bunch of far left groups that I think were make -- were talking about this, were pushing this for quite a while. But it really was on the fringes of the Democratic Party. And now, I think, just with his comments today, reversing what Rahm Emanuel had said on Sunday and what Robert Gibbs had said yesterday, that he has really opened this up and made what was sort of a fringe argument now a mainstream argument.</s>BLITZER: Did he flip, Roland?</s>ROLAND S. MARTIN, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I think he certainly flipped. And, frankly, I think it's a bad call by the president. Look, you are the president, you make the call. And so it's very difficult all of a sudden to say, well, aides are saying one thing, the president is saying is another thing. You have to be decisive in making this decision. Now, if you have Democrats who, like Feinstein, they were making these various arguments, you can listen those arguments beforehand. But when you say we're not going to move forward with prosecutions, these things are going to be behind us, that's what you do. You don't come back, the day after you went to the CIA, you don't come back to say, well, hey, we're leaving the door open, because now you're putting folks in doubt. This is a bad move out of the president. And again, it makes him look weak when he was looking strong before by saying no prosecutions.</s>BLITZER: All right. One of the -- the former president, George W. Bush's, top aides, the former chief speechwriter, Marc Thiessen, writing in "The Washington Post" today this, Gloria: "President Obama's decision to release these documents is one of the most dangerous and irresponsible acts ever by an American president during a time of war and Americans may die as a result." Wow! That's a pretty serious charge.</s>BORGER: It's pretty strong. I think it's a little bit of hyperbole there, you know, But clearly, there is -- there is that school of thought, Wolf. The White House would argue, and I would actually agree with the White House on this, that a lot of this was already out there -- that we knew generally what kinds of techniques were being used and that nobody should be surprised, really, by -- by what's in these memos, at this point.</s>BLITZER: Did he go too far, Marc Thiessen, Steve?</s>HAYES: Well, I think -- I think the president certainly is irresponsible. I think Marc Thiessen, in the piece, makes another point that I think can't be emphasized enough. People need to understand that what happened here was with the release of this memo, the White House, in coordination with the CIA, blacked out some of the information and released other parts of the information. The information they released was the details about these techniques. What they withheld, what they blacked out was the information that the techniques produced, which the CIA has said itself...</s>BLITZER: Cheney...</s>HAYES: ...was valuable.</s>BLITZER: Cheney wants that information...</s>BORGER: That's what Dick Cheney wants, right?</s>BLITZER: ...released, Roland.</s>MARTIN: Wolf, look, I think what Marc should recognize was irresponsible was for the United States to sit here and say we don't want other countries torturing our folks, but we sit here and torture, as well. So the actions of torture -- that's actually what put us at risk, as opposed to saying releasing the documents. So maybe you deal with A as opposed to B then you recognize what the real problem was.</s>BLITZER: All right. Guys, stand by. Don't go away. We're going to continue this conversation. A foreign policy swipe at President Obama -- the former White House contender, Mitt Romney, calls him a timid advocate of freedom. Is that a new Republican line of attack? I'll ask the best political team on television. Plus, a 13-year-old strip searched because of an over the counter pain reliever. Now the U.S. Supreme Court is taking her case.