Barack Obama, & Detainees

OBAMA FOR USA. In April, the Justice Department made public detailed memos describing brutal interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Bush administration. In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail -- like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears.

Some senior Obama administration officials, including Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., have labeled one of the 14 approved techniques, waterboarding, illegal torture. The United States prosecuted some Japanese interrogators at war crimes trials after World War II for waterboarding and other methods detailed in the memos. C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

The memos give an extraordinarily detailed account of the C.I.A.'s methods and the Justice Department's long struggle, in the face of graphic descriptions of brutal tactics, to square them with international and domestic law. Passages describing forced nudity, the slamming of detainees into walls, prolonged sleep deprivation and the dousing of detainees with water as cold as 41 degrees alternate with elaborate legal arguments concerning the international Convention Against Torture.

After the release of the documents, pressure mounted on President Obama for more thorough investigation into the harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects, even as he tried to reassure the Central Intelligence Agency that it would not be blamed for following legal advice. Mr. Obama said it was time to admit "mistakes" and "move forward." He later left the door open to creating a bipartisan that would investigate interrogations, and he did not rule out action by the Justice Department against those who fashioned the legal rationale for those techniques. But on April 23, Senate Democratic leaders, joining forces with the Obama White House, said they would resist efforts by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats to create a special commission.

Senior Bush administration officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, are fighting a rear-guard action in defense of their record. Only by using the harshest methods, they insist, did the intelligence agency get the information it needed to round up Qaeda killers and save thousands of American lives. Mr. Obama and most of his top aides have argued that the use of those methods betrayed American values - and produced unreliable information.

Two days after taking office, Mr. Obama announced that he planned to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But figuring out what to do with the 240 or more detainees still being held there is a complicated challenge for his administration, and the White House has begun negotiations with European countries that it hopes will accept some of the prisoners. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has voiced concerns about the plan. Meanwhile, the Obama administration's effort to return the largest group of Guantánamo detainees to Yemen, their home country, has stalled, creating a major new hurdle for the president's plan to close the prison camp by next January.

President Obama said on May 13 that he would fight to prevent the release of photographs documenting abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan by United States military personnel, reversing his position on the issue after commanders warned that the images could set off a deadly backlash against American troops. The administration said in April that it would not oppose the release of the pictures, but Mr. Obama changed his mind after seeing the photographs and getting warnings from top Pentagon officials that the images, taken from the early years of the wars, would ''further inflame anti-American opinion'' and endanger troops in two war zones.

President Obama said on May 15 that he has decided to keep the military commission system that the Bush administration created to try suspected terrorists but will ask Congress to expand the rights of defendants to contest the charges against them. On May 20, he told human rights advocates at the White House that he was mulling the need for a "preventive detention" system that would establish a legal basis for the United States to incarcerate terrorism suspects who are deemed a threat to national security but cannot be tried. Also on May 20, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to cut from a war spending bill the $80 million requested by President Obama to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center, and to bar the transfer of detainees to the United States and its territories.

In a speech on May 21, though, Mr. Obama said that his administration wants to transfer some detainees from Guantánamo to highly secure prisons in the United States, and that doing so will in no way endanger American security. Reiterating his determination to close the prison at Guantánamo, in the face of growing Congressional pressure to keep it open, the president said that what has gone on there for the past eight years has undermined rather than strengthened America's safety, and that moving its most dangerous inmates to the United States is both practical and in keeping with the country's cherished ideals.

So far, President Obama has managed to curb Congressional calls for a national commission to investigate Bush administration detention policies. But Mr. Obama cannot control the courts, and lawsuits are turning out to be the force driving disclosures about brutal interrogations.

Mr. Obama's decision to release the legal opinions from the Bush administration on interrogation has opened the door to the disclosure of other documents. That poses a problem for the Central Intelligence Agency as it tries to comply with Mr. Obama's proclaimed policy of openness while preserving the secrecy that agency officials view as the foundation of intelligence collection.

In new responses to lawsuits, the C.I.A. has agreed to release information from two previously secret sources: statements by high-level members of Al Qaeda who say they have been mistreated, and a 2004 report by the agency's inspector general questioning both the legality and the effectiveness of coercive interrogations.