US President Barack Obama has rejected a request by several former heads of the country’s intelligence community to end investigations into the alleged torture of terror suspects post 9/11. Obama’s polite reply – “The law is the law.”

The US president is defending Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to launch an investigation into CIA torture practices under the Bush administration.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to investigate CIA torture of detainees at Guantanamo and other secret prisons under the Bush administration is controversial.

Those opposed to the investigation call it a witch-hunt that will only hamstring the CIA.

“Any discussion that would further put our intelligence services, the CIA and others, on a defensive posture, put them on their heels, such that they don’t have the institutional desire to be taking the legal chances that they should to be collecting information in a lawful way is bad, because less intelligence means less defense and more vulnerability,” said Charles Stimson, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs.

On the other hand, human rights groups have attacked the president – a former constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago – for not doing enough.

“It’s not out of vengeance, but to make sure that people in the future now that there is a price to be paid, there are laws against this, and part of breaking those laws is to pay the price for that. It’s a message to the future that this is forever unacceptable and shouldn’t be done,” said Christopher Anders, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

President Obama has called the use of water-boarding and other torture by the CIA a dark and painful chapter in America’s human rights record. But turning the page on the previous administration’s policies has not been easy.

A politically divisive issue, the investigation of the CIA has become yet another distraction for Obama, who faces a leadership test this week, as he struggles to get his health care plan passed by Congress and hosts the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh.

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