Panetta: Obama Admin. Won't Prosecute Interrogators

clipped from rawstory.com The Obama administration will not prosecute CIA officers who participated in harsh interrogations that critics say crossed the line into torture, CIA Director-nominee Leon Panetta said Friday. Asked by The Associated Press if that was official policy, Panetta said, "That is the case." It was the clearest statement yet on what Panetta and other Democratic officials had only strongly suggested: CIA officers who acted on legal orders from the Bush administration would not be held responsible for those policies. On Thursday, he told senators that the Obama administration had no intention of seeking prosecutions for that reason.

I suppose this isn't really a surprise, as disappointing as it it. AP is putting this across as a "Bush admin. let off the hook" story, but I'm not seeing anything here to suggest that. Interrogators are one thing, the people giving the orders to the interrogators is another.

Unless I'm missing something obvious, prosecutions for torture are nowhere near off the table.