Barack Obama walks across the South Lawn to board Marine One at the White House Thursday. | REUTERS Obama: Memo release weighty decision

White House senior adviser David Axelrod says President Barack Obama spent about a month pondering whether to release Bush-era memos about CIA interrogation techniques Thursday and considered it "a weighty decision."

"He thought very long and hard about it, consulted widely, because there were two principles at stake," Axelrod said . "One is the sanctity of covert operations and keeping faith with the people who do them, and the impact on national security, on the one hand. And the other was the law and his belief in transparency."


The president consulted officials from the Justice Department, the CIA, the director of National Intelligence and the Homeland Security Department, according to his adviser.

"It was a weighty decision," Axelrod said. "As with so many issues, there are competing points of view that flow from very genuine interests and concerns that are to be respected. And then the president has to synthesize all of it and make a decision that's in the broad national interest. He's been thinking about this for four weeks, really."

In releasing the documents, Obama also pledged not to prosecute CIA employees who carried out the aggressive interrogation practices critics decried as torture - but which were approved by top legal officials in the Bush administration.

Obama said that a full public accounting of U.S. actions in the post-Sept. 11 era should take priority over prosecuting or punishing individuals who acted in the name of the government.

However, even as he did so, he indicated he shared grave concerns about some of the interrogation methods - some of which, like the use of a "confinement box," were described in detail for the first time.

"This is a time for reflection not retribution," Obama said. "We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."

While Obama all but condemned the use of the interrogation techniques, a statement from Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair struck a starkly different tone. "It is important to remember the context of these past events. All of us remember the horror of 9/11," Blair wrote, adding that the CIA feared further attacks and sought permission for the aggressive techniques after struggling to get information from terror suspects.

"Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing," Blair wrote. "We will not use those techniques in the future. But we will absolutely defend those relied on these memos."

A former intelligence official said top CIA personnel opposed the disclosure because of concerns it would feed calls for investigation and prosecution.

"It's...do we rake the leaves of the past and where will that lead?" the ex-official said. "Should you do something that will arrive at demonizing a whole generation of case officers?....They weren't running as some wild bulls out there."

A former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush called the publication of the memos "unbelievable."

"It's damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama's action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are," the official said. "We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary. . Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again - even in a ticking-time- bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake."

"I don't believe Obama would intentionally endanger the nation, so it must be that he thinks either one, the previous administration, including the CIA professionals who have defended this program, is lying about its importance and effectiveness, or 2. he believes we are no longer really at war and no longer face the kind of grave threat to our national security this program has protected against."

And in fact, the memos also contain a lengthy defense of the techniques, with one 2005 memo noting they are similar to techniques used to train U.S. troops to withstand interrogation and therefore "are not categorically beyond the pale."

Obama also drew fire from liberal critics of Bush. "President Obama's assertion that there should not be prosecutions of government officials who may have committed crimes before a thorough investigation has been carried out is simply untenable," said Anthony Romero, the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the suit that led to the memos release.

Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) said the release of the documents would lend momentum to his proposal for a blue-ribbon commission to examine war-on-terror excesses - an idea Obama hasn't embraced. "We need to understand how these policies were formed if we are to ensure that this can never happen again," Leahy said.

The memos' sterile but unusually graphic descriptions of specific interrogation techniques approved for use against top al-Qaida detainees seem certain to trigger another wave of global condemnation of the United States. "The CIA used the waterboard extensively in the interrogations" of two al-Qaida principals, Abu Zubaydah and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, said one 2005 memo, referring to a technique that simulates drowning.

An August 2002 memo gave legal blessing not only to waterboarding Zubaydah, but to nine other techniques, some of which have not been widely discussed in the long-running debate over alleged torture. The practices included confining him in small spaces, including one where he could not stand up; placing him in a "cramped confinement box" with an insect he might consider dangerous; and dramatically throwing him against a "flexible false wall."

A Justice Department statement said Attorney General Eric Holder had concluded that "intelligence community officials who acted reasonably and relied in good faith on authoritative legal advice from the Justice Department that their conduct was lawful, and conformed their conduct to that advice, would not face federal prosecutions for that conduct."

The new pledges do not foreclose entirely the possibility of prosecutions of CIA or military intelligence officials for aggressive interrogations. If interrogators went further than authorized by the Justice Department, their actions could still lead to prosecution. In addition, the pledges from Holder and Obama did not cover Justice Department officials who issued the legal memoranda.

Furthermore, the promises did not go far beyond observations many legal experts have offered about the difficulties in prosecuting interrogators who had unequivocal advice that their actions were legal. In discussions with lawmakers during his confirmation process earlier this year, Holder said he shared that view; Thursday's pledge was clearly intended to assuage the concerns of CIA officials who had opposed released of the memos in part out of fears it would trigger calls for prosecution.

"The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world," Obama said. "We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs."

The Justice Department also made a series of other promises intended to calm the waters at CIA. Employees there were explicitly assured they would be represented by government lawyers at no charge in any cases brought over war-on-terror conduct approved of by official legal opinions. In addition, Holder appeared to rule out cooperation and to prescribe a policy of confrontation in dealing with foreign legal proceedings against American officials, such as the continuing effort in Spain to prosecute alleged war crimes at Guantanamo Bay. Justice also said the government would pay any damage award that might be rendered in a lawsuit over authorized interrogations.

While Obama said three times in his statement that the law left him no choice but to release the memos, the administration likely could have fought disclosure of the records for years, if not indefinitely. Most courts are extremely deferential to executive branch claims of national security and almost never overturn intelligence officials' claims that documents need to remain classified.

Even as he asserted that his hands were effectively tied, Obama also bent over backwards to indicate that disclosure of this kind of intelligence-related material was a rare, and perhaps unique, exception. "It is my strong belief that the United States has a solemn duty to vigorously maintain the classified nature of certain activities and information related to national security," he said. "The exceptional circumstances surrounding these memos should not be viewed as an erosion of the strong legal basis for maintaining the classified nature of secret activities."

Some sections of the memos offer fodder for those, like former vice president Dick Cheney, who have defended use of the aggressive questioning techniques. A 2005 memo says the CIA claimed that use of waterboarding and other "enhanced" practices on KSM exposed a plot "'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." Information from KSM also led to the arrest of al-Qaeda's top operative in southeast Asia, Hambali.

The same memo says that after Zubaydah was exposed to the aggressive techniques he "provided significant information on two operatives," including Jose Padilla, who was publicly accused of, but never legally charged with plotting to set off a radiation-laced bomb in the U.S. Almost a full page of information about other intelligence gleaned from such interrogations was blacked out. Some intelligence officials have disputed the value of the information from the interrogations, and critics have noted that there is no way to be sure whether the same information could have been obtained through the use of less physical or confrontational techniques.

The statements from Obama and Holder also were worded with extraordinary care. For instance, Holder said, "The President has halted the use of the interrogation techniques described in these opinions, and this administration has made clear from day one that it will not condone torture." At first glance, Holder seemed to be conceding that the techniques were torture; and in fact, he has said that waterboarding is torture. However, his statement Thursday never conceded that any past interrogation practice amounted to torture, which violates federal criminal law and international treaties.

The memos were sought by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit it filed for documents pertaining to abuse of war-on-terror prisoners held in U.S. custody. The Justice Department faced a legal deadline Thursday to turn over the documents or justify withholding them.