All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

Former Bush administration counselor and CBS News Analyst Dan Bartlett told The Early Show this morning that Attorney General Eric Holder's investigation into CIA interrogation practices will "pull the rug out from under" CIA agents currently in the field.

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The task force created by President Obama to establish a way forward for the detainees at the U.S.'s military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba issued a preliminary report Monday night and asked the president for another six months in which to complete its work.

The Detention Policy Task Force is co-chaired by the attorney general and the secretary of defense and includes high-level representatives from the State Department, CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security and Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It's essentially charged with deciding whether to transfer the prisoners to countries willing to accept them or to prosecute them, although the Obama administration has complicated matters by proposing alternative pathways of prosecution (U.S. courts for some, military tribunals for others) and has kept open the option of continuing to detain those it doesn't feel it can convict.

White House officials briefed reporters on the developments Monday evening. According to CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller, officials said that of the 240 detainees at Guantanamo as of Jan. 22, "substantially more than 50” decisions have been made to transfer detainees to other countries.

Officials said that a “significant number of decisions” have been made to subject other detainees to prosecution, Knoller reported, but officials would not provide more specific numbers.

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When it comes to needling Democrats in one of their most sensitive places, daughter Liz is proving that the apple doesn't fall far from the Cheney family tree.

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Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy told CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent Bob Schieffer Sunday that nobody in America, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, is "above the law."

Leahy was responding to a report in the New York Times that Cheney ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to withhold information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress.

"If, as the New York Times says, we have the vice president of the United States telling people to break the law, now that's a pretty serious matter," Leahy said on CBS' "Face The Nation." "Either he did, or he didn't. If he did, that's something we ought to know."

He said finding out what happened is important because "usually if something is done wrong by one [administration] and it's exposed, the next one tends to behave themselves."

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Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions said Sunday that he believes it is not necessary to appoint a special criminal prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's interrogation policies.

Though President Obama has spoken against such an investigation, Attorney General Eric Holder is reportedly seriously considering making the appointment.

"We've had probably in my committees, Judiciary and Armed Services, thirty or more hearings on this," Sessions told CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation". "The Intelligence Committee has had great numbers of hearings and written reports on it. The military has done a series of independent reports. And I believe that that's sufficient. I don't believe a special commission is necessary.

"We were facing some real challenges, and our people tried to do the best they could," explained Sessions. "And I don't think I see the evidence yet to justify any prosecutions."

Vermont's Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy told Schieffer that while he prefers a commission of inquiry, he is "not going to interfere with a special prosecutor."

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Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) held a press conference today forcefully pressing for passage of the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act, which would prohibit the release of photographs depicting abuse of detainees by U.S. troops.

"To release the photos is, to me, sheer voyeurism," Lieberman said. "It's a disclosure without a purpose, and it's disclosure that brings great risk."

Lieberman said President Obama "did the right thing" in opposing the release of such photos last month. He said doing so would "lead to people entering the war against the United States."

"In our opinion, the release of these photos -- for no purpose at all, no good purpose -- will lead to the death of Americans, including, particularly, those brave Americans who serve us in the military," said Lieberman.

Graham suggested that the two senators would effectively shut down the Senate via filibuster if Congress does not pass the legislation. "We're not going to do any more business in the Senate," he said. "Nothing's going forward until we get this right."

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A report in London's Daily Telegraph today, citing retired Major Gen. Antonio Taguba, alleges that among the photos President Obama wants to keep from the public are images that show American soldiers raping detainees as well as “sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.”

Both the Pentagon and the White House today disputed the report and criticized the newspaper from which it came. But they stopped short of suggesting that the photographs do not exist.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Telegraph "has completely mischaracterized the images." He added: "None of the photos in question depict the images that are described in that article."

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, meanwhile, attacked the British press.

"If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I'm not entirely sure it'd be the first stack of clips I picked up," he said. Gibbs went on to say that "you're not going to find many of these newspapers and truth within, say, 25 words of each other."

Echoing Whitman, he also said that "none of the photographs in question depict the images described in the article."

But those comments leave some wiggle room.

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Colin Powell told Bob Schieffer he has "no idea" if the enhanced interrogation techniques used during the Bush administration were effective.

"I have no idea," he said on "Face the Nation" Sunday. "I hear that they were. I hear that they weren't. You see people from the FBI who come out and say, 'We got all of that information before any of that was done.' I cannot answer that question. And the problem is, I don't know what I don't know."

He said that he was aware that enhanced methods of interrogation were being considered in the aftermath of 9/11 but said he was "not privy" to the memos of legal documents that were being written.

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Moments after President Obama appealed for the need diverge sharply from Bush era policies with respect to national security, former Vice President Dick Cheney sought to defend the policies he and President George W. Bush enacted -- and to explain why they are still needed.

"When President Obama makes wise decisions, which I believe he has done in some respects... he deserves our support," Cheney said in a speech at the conservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute. "When he faults or mischaracterizes the national security decisions we made in the Bush years, he deserves an answer."

Cheney said he remains a strong proponent of the interrogation programs employed by the CIA against detainees in the war on terror, calling them "legal, essential, justified, and successful, and the right thing to do."

To label enhanced interrogation techniques torture "is to libel the professionals who have saved American lives," Cheney said. He said to consider stopping such methods of interrogation is "unwise in the extreme" and "recklessness cloaked in righteousness."

He said waterboarding was only used on three detainees and that all methods used to interrogate detainees were given careful legal review before they were approved.

"Interrogators had authoritative guidance on the line between toughness and torture, and they knew to stay on the right side of it," he said.

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It's been one week since the dramatic press conference when Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Capitol Hill reporters that the CIA misled her about interrogation methods in 2002. Pelosi has not answered questions from the press since.

Democrats may hope that the story will pass, but with appearances on the Sunday talk shows and a constant spamming of reporter's inboxes with press releases highlighting negative coverage of the speaker, Republicans aren't letting that happen.

House Republicans will offer a resolution on the floor this afternoon to investigate Pelosi's claims that the CIA lied. A senior Republican aide tells CBS News that "the speaker has had a full week now to either produce the evidence or retract and apologize, and she's done neither. There is no choice now. A bipartisan investigation is needed to get to the facts."

Once the resolution is offered, it will be read on the House floor. Democrats must then choose either to hold it over or vote to dispose of the resolution. Democrats have the numbers to kill it easily, but Republicans still win by keeping Pelosi's feet to the fire, and name in the headlines, for another day.

UPDATED at 12:35pm ET: The House voted to table the motion to investigate Pelosi's claims. Every Democrat voting and two Republicans stood by the speaker in the 252 to 172 vote.

Jill Jackson is a CBS News Capitol Hill producer.