All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

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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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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UPDATED Previously unseen images* showing what appears to be prisoner abuse on the part of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been revealed by an Australian television station, which reportedly acquired them following the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2006.

A slideshow of fifteen of the photos is here. Though portions are blocked out, they are extremely graphic.

Among the shots: A picture of a soldier and four nearly naked detainees, one of whom has the words "I'M A RAPEIST" written on his buttocks; a picture of a prisoner cowering while surrounded by dogs and soldiers with guns; a picture of a naked man with an unidentified white liquid coming out of his mouth; a shot of a naked detainee with eight large red welts slightly above his buttocks; a photo of a smiling soldier kneeling next to a detainee strapped down near the floor; a photo of a naked prisoner hanging upside down from the top of a bunk bed; a picture of a soldier who appears poised to punch a shackled detainee; and pictures of what appear to be the corpses of prisoners.

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Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who ran Iraq prisons in 2003, including the notorious Abu Ghraib prison was insistent that all orders on interrogation practices came from the top down during the Bush administration on CBS News’ The Early Show this morning.

“These soldiers didn't design these techniques on their own…we were following orders,” Karpinski told Harry Smith. “We were bringing this to our chain of command and they were saying whatever the military intelligence tells you to do out there you are authorized to do."

A new Senate Armed Services Committee report finds that early roots of U.S. interrogation practices were being circulated through the CIA and the Pentagon as early as 2002.

The report also ties the interrogation policies of the Bush administration to abuse cases at Abu Ghraib prison as well as to interrogations at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

After the scandal involving Abu Ghraib’s torture practices, Karpinski was demoted to colonel and has since retired.

Karpinski argued that there was a “clear” line between the techniques condoned by top level administration officials and the practices condemned in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.

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