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President Barack Obama shrugged off a request by seven former
CIA chiefs to end a probe into allegations of prisoner abuse,
saying in an interview released that nobody's above the law.
US Attorney General Eric Holder last month named a prosecutor to
examine whether criminal charges should be filed against Central
Intelligence Agency interrogators or contractors for going beyond
approved interrogation methods.
A letter by the former CIA directors sent to Obama on Friday said
the Justice Department's investigation would hamper operations and
damage the willingness of intelligence officers to take risks to
protect the country.
"I appreciate the former CIA directors wanting to look after an
institution that they helped to build," Obama said in an interview
with the CBS television show Face the Nation.
"But I continue to believe that nobody's above the law. And I want
to make sure that, as president of the United States, that I'm not
asserting in some way that my decisions overrule the decisions of
prosecutors who are there to uphold the law," he said.
In a separate interview on CNN, Obama said, "I don't want to start
getting into the business of squelching, you know, investigations
that are being conducted."
Obama noted he consistently has said he wanted to look forward, not
backward, on problems that occurred under the Bush administration
involving the use of harsh interrogation methods like water
boarding and sleep and food deprivation.
Bush-era officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney,
have defended their actions and said the interrogations yielded
valuable intelligence.
Civil liberties groups have accused the Bush administration of
using torture to coerce information from terrorism suspects in
violation of US and international law.
Obama said on CBS that Holder has to make a judgment about what
happened.
"My understanding is it's not a criminal investigation at this
point. They are simply investigating what took place," he said.
"I don't want witch hunts taking place. I've also said, though,
that the attorney general has a job to uphold the law."
The letter to Obama was signed by three CIA directors under
President George Bush - Michael Hayden, Porter Goss and George
Tenet - as well as by John Deutch, James Woolsey, William Webster
and James Schlesinger, who dates to the Nixon administration.
The interviews were taped on Friday.
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