Obama may be running into trouble over torture memos

US President Barack Obama has said he's "a strong believer that it's important to look forward and not backwards," says Ben Pershing on the Washington Post. But his decision last week to release four memos drafted by lawyers from the George Bush administration that authorised the use of torture techniques, such as waterboarding, to interrogate terror suspects may leave him dealing with the past for longer than he had hoped.

While Obama has stressed that CIA interrogators themselves should not be prosecuted, he hasn't ruled out legal consequences for the officials who drafted the legal opinions in the first place, saying it's an issue for the Attorney General. "If we are truly a nation of laws, a prosecutor needs to be appointed", says Michael Ratner in The New York Times. Otherwise, Obama is complicit in torture too. Indeed, if he doesn't, Obama will "set a precedent of whitewashing White House lawlessness in the name of national security", writes Bruce Fein on the Dailybeast.com.

Nonsense, says Con Coughlin in The Daily Telegraph: "Obama should declare his full support for the professionals running the CIA irrespective of what happened in the past and let them get on with their job of dealing with the bad guys." Otherwise, as Michael Hayden argues in The Wall Street Journal, we will only "incur the utter contempt of our enemies."

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This is "one of those situations that is designed to make no one happy", says Michael Tomasky in The Guardian. At the most basic level it was the right thing to do. "Given the scope of the controversy, and, of the many controversial things the previous administration did, the compelling public interest in publishing these memos is obvious."

But with "a political firestorm already raging" former vice-president Dick Cheney has already complained that memos on "the success of the effort" weren't released the stage is now set for "a nasty, lingering, partisan battle," says Paul Koring in the Toronto Globe and Mail.