When cooperating with U.S. antiterror efforts is risky

"Immunity is designed to shield this administration from any accountability for conducting surveillance outside the law," said Senator Leahy in an Oct. 31 statement. "It could make it impossible for Americans whose privacy has been violated illegally to seek meaningful redress."

Meanwhile, by refusing during his Senate confirmation hearings to directly equate waterboarding with illegal torture, Mr. Mukasey may have been trying to lessen the possibility that any Central Intelligence Agency interrogators who used the harsh technique against terror suspects will face criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits in the future.

Such interrogators may have been depending on the past assurances of higher-ups that their conduct was within the bounds of US and international law. If Mukasey had contradicted those assurances, it might have been tantamount to admitting that the US had engaged in war crimes, say legal experts.

In a written response to Senate questions, Mukasey said he would not want to make any "uninformed statement" that might place professional interrogators in the field "in personal legal jeopardy."

Future liability for interrogators?

It's conceivable that interrogators might eventually have to face civil litigation filed by detainees, says Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. But any criminal case would have to be brought by the administration itself – an unlikely proposition, at best.

That calculus might change under a Democratic president. But even a Democratic administration would be unlikely to single out a low-level official, says Mr. Tobias. "The greater concern would be that someone in the White House who authorized waterboarding might be subject to some sort of investigation."

In waterboarding, the one being interrogated is strapped to an inclined bench. Cloth is placed over his mouth, and water is poured onto it, to the point where the liquid overcomes the gag reflex and begins to fill the throat and lungs. The Bush administration has never publicly confirmed use of the technique. According to news reports, the CIA in recent years has employed it three times – most successfully in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, a high-ranking Al Qaeda official captured in Pakistan in 2003.

The fact that immunity is such a live issue also points out the pitfalls of relying on presidential assurances of legality for potentially problematic activities, say legal experts.

The immunity debate shows that the Bush administration "is in partial retreat" from its past assertions that the Constitution grants presidents broad wartime powers that can't be fettered by statute, says Daniel Marcus, former general counsel of the 9/11 Commission.

In his book "The Terror Presidency," Goldsmith describes an administration in which officials knew they were pushing legal limits, and were preoccupied with concern about their own legal futures.

Goldsmith predicts that the US will see cycles, with the CIA and other agencies periodically pulling back for fear of retroactive discipline – until terrorists attack again, and US security personnel are pressured anew to go up to the legal edge.

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