The C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus, who as an Army general had spoken out against brutal interrogations, issued a cautious statement to agency employees about Mr. Holder’s announcement. He thanked C.I.A. officers “who played a role in supporting the Justice Department’s inquiries” and added, “As intelligence officers, our inclination, of course, is to look ahead to the challenges of the future rather than backwards at those of the past.”

Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, welcomed the announcement. “I am pleased that the attorney general’s re-examination of these cases has come to a close and that he recognizes that filing criminal charges in these cases is inappropriate,” he said. “These intelligence officers can now continue to focus on the hard work at hand, protecting our national security.”

Mr. Holder’s decision in 2009 to open a new investigation into the C.I.A. interrogations was sharply criticized by some former intelligence officials and Republicans in Congress. The harsh interrogation methods, including the near-drowning of waterboarding, had been authorized in Justice Department legal opinions, and the deaths in custody had been previously reviewed by prosecutors during Mr. Bush’s presidency.

But after reviewing secret documents describing the treatment of prisoners, most of whom had been held in secret C.I.A. prisons overseas, Mr. Holder directed John Durham, the organized-crime prosecutor already looking into the C.I.A. destruction of video recordings of waterboarding, to broaden his inquiry.

Mr. Holder said interrogators would not be charged if they had acted strictly in accordance with the department’s legal advice, though the legal opinions involved were later withdrawn. The review focused more narrowly on cases in which interrogators exceeded legal guidelines, including instances of prisoners waterboarded more often than permitted and of one prisoner who was threatened with an electric drill.

In November 2010, the Justice Department said there would be no charges in the destruction of the videotapes of C.I.A. interrogations. In June 2011, Mr. Holder said that of more than 100 prisoners whose treatment had been reviewed, only the final two cases remained under investigation.

On his first full day in office in January 2009, Mr. Obama banned coercive interrogation methods and ordered the closing of the C.I.A.’s remaining prisons overseas. But he said that month that while he did not “believe that anybody is above the law,” he preferred “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” and that he did not want C.I.A. employees to “suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.”