Department of Justice

U.S. President Barack Obama acknowledged Tuesday that officials in the administration of his predecessor, George W. Bush, could potentially face prosecution for writing legal memos authorizing the CIA to use harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects.

Speaking for the first time since ordering the release of the secret legal briefs last week, Obama said the United States lost its "moral bearings" with use of the controversial tactics, which have been widely condemned by human rights groups and legal observers as torture.

With the release of the memos, the president ruled out prosecuting CIA officials who performed the harsh interrogations, provided they followed the guidelines set by government superiors who held that such practices were legal at the time.

The newly-published Bush administration memos show a chilling, Orwellian abuse of language to justify torture

David Cole

"Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing." So Dennis Blair, President Obama's director of national intelligence, stated as he sought to minimize the significance of four previously secret Justice Department memos that employed tortured legal reasoning to authorise CIA agents to use cruel and abusive tactics to interrogate suspects inside secret prisons.

Detainees being held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan cannot use US courts to challenge their detention, the US says.

The justice department ruled that some 600 so-called enemy combatants at Bagram have no constitutional rights.

Most have been arrested in Afghanistan on suspicion of waging a terrorist war against the US.

The move has disappointed human rights lawyers who had hoped the Obama administration would take a different line to that of George W Bush.

Prof Barbara Olshansky, the lead counsel in a legal challenge on behalf of four Bagram detainees, told the BBC the justice department's decision not to reform the rules was both surprising and "enormously disappointing".

By Lynnley Browning Published: February 19, 2009

In the hush-hush world of Swiss banking, the unthinkable is happening: secrets are spilling into the open.

UBS, the largest bank in Switzerland, agreed on Wednesday to divulge the names of well-heeled Americans whom the authorities suspect of using offshore accounts at the bank to evade taxes. The bank admitted conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and agreed to pay $780 million to settle a sweeping U.S. government investigation into its activities.

It is unclear how many of its clients' names UBS will divulge. U.S. government prosecutors have been examining about 19,000 accounts at the bank, but UBS ultimately may disclose the identities of only a few hundred customers.