(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: As a general view, I think that we should look forward and not backwards. I do worry about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively and it hampers our ability to carry out critical national security operations.

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BRET BAIER, "SPECIAL REPORT" HOST: Well, that's what the president said back in April. Today, as you see, the Justice Department handing out an inspector general's report about interrogations. The attorney general has announced that federal prosecutor John Durham will be appointed to investigate alleged CIA abuses.

Now, they are supposed to be specifically about allegations of interrogations that went south, went wrong, but will it be limited to that or will it expand?

Let's talk about this and the politics behind it a little later. Let's bring in the panel, Steve Hayes senior writer for "The Weekly Standard," Juan Williams, news analyst for National Public Radio, and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Charles, there were thousands of documents released today, and then late in the day we had word that the attorney general was appointing this special prosecutor. What about this decision?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, we just heard the president say that he didn't want something like this because it would hamper our national security operations in the future, and this surely will. Who would want to be an interrogator after what has been happening now?

Look, the cases that are going to be looked at are cases that were looked at by career prosecutors, not political appointees, in the eastern district of Virginia where the CIA is and where these cases are handled.

And they looked at about 20 of these cases of people who allegedly went beyond the four corners of the law, and recommended are in all cases except one no prosecution. The one case was brought to trial. The person was a CIA contractor who attacked a detainee with a metal flashlight, and was found guilty. His case has just been reviewed, appeals court upheld. All the others recommended again.

So what happens? You have a new administration, a new wind in the White House, a president who ran against George Bush and who now decides it's a good time to run against him again. And these interrogators are going to be relooked after by a special prosecutor, which means unlimited license.

And if you think it is going to stop there, it's not. The great white whale here is the lawyers in the White House. These interrogators are going to say "I was just obeying orders." You are going to go to the White House and end up where they want to end up, with Cheney, who is the great white whale of this investigation.

BAIER: Juan, just a few moments after this announcement came out, we had a release from the house Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and the subcommittee chairman Gerald Nadler, both Democrats who said that this is a good first step, but we must go further, and said that this prosecutor should be given a broad mandate to investigate these abuses, follow where the evidence leads, and prosecute where warranted.

Is that what Charles is talking about there, that there is not going to be an end to this?

JUAN WILLIAMS, NEWS ANALYST, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: No, but that political pressure coming from the likes of Conyers is well-known. He has wanted to investigate these things all along. And he's not trying to push Eric Holder.

Even as we hear, you know, Charles and others might say this is ready, it is problematic for people in the intelligence business to have this probe going forward, you have to stop and realize that people on the other end of the spectrum are saying you, no, you must in fact begin an investigation.

It is not just about - all that John Durham has a mandate to do is to look and see whether or not there were crimes committed that would justify such an investigation. He is not in charge of such an investigation yet.

And I think that there are people who say forget that intermediate step, let's just go to the meat of it. That is the Conyers, that's left- wing position here.

BAIER: Steve, what about the argument that this does have a chilling effect on the intelligence community and perhaps even foreign countries that work with the U.S. in intelligence matters?

STEVE HAYES, SENIOR WRITER, "THE WEEKLY STANDARD": I spoke with someone today who works and talks regularly with our interrogators on the front lines of Afghanistan and Iraq.

And he said there is no question that if you are an interrogator now, all you're going to do is read the questions from your card. You're not going to press to get additional information out. You're not going to challenge in any way that could be seen as remotely threatening.

I think this could have a serious chilling effect on the interrogators themselves.

But if you pull back a little bit and look at this in the broader context, here is the problem, I think. You have an administration that is expending tremendous amounts of political capital to have known Al Qaeda operatives, or at least Al Qaeda-trained operatives released.

Bin Jan Mohammed, released in England, a known Al Qaeda operative or someone who has trained in the Al Farouq camp. Now you have then going after the American who are on the front line of the car?

It is one of these moments where you stop and you think am I really seeing this happen?

BAIER: OK, the other part of this release of thousands of documents are two important documents that former Vice President Cheney asked for that they be released.

We are still going through these documents as of this hour. A lot of them have been redacted, but we'll say that there are parts of them that say detainee reporting has helped thwart a specific number of Al Qaeda plots to attack the west and elsewhere, and they've stopped essentially - they've gone after potential targets and learned techniques from this interrogation.

Steve, you have looked at these documents. Anything in your cursory look at them that strikes you?

HAYES: I thought the title of the one "Pivotal reporting from Al Qaeda detainees" tells you everything you need to know.

There is an interesting thing in the Cheney documents. I have not gone through them as exhaustively as I will.

The inspector general document which was supposed to blow a hole in the idea that enhanced interrogation techniques were effective, in fact, I think, makes the opposite point, sometimes rather emphatically, both in the text of the report and in the appendices.

In one appendix, there is a memorandum for the record from July 17, 2003, and it's a person describing his meeting with the inspector general, and said, "I judge the program to be by the quality of information, it's a success."

And then says, "Using the quality of the intelligence as the yardstick," quote, "the program has been an absolute success." And that's pretty categorical. There is not a lot of gray area there.

BAIER: Juan, any thoughts on this?

WILLIAMS: It is not a matter of whether or not you got the information if you were sawing some guy in half. OK, you might have gotten the information. You might have also gotten bad information.

What is known is that oftentimes these Jack Bauer-type techniques do not result in useful information. What

So what you're talking about here is -

BAIER: But Juan, this says that after the techniques they did use, they did get useful information.

WILLIAMS: We don't know when it worked or when it didn't work, Bret.

(CROSSTALK)

WILLIAMS: What it says is in some cases you might have gotten information. By the way, we don't know if, for example, it was a legitimate technique in the army field manual that was used as opposed to something else.

BAIER: Waterboarding wasn't in the field manual.

WILLIAMS: No, it was not. That is something over the line.

So again, it is just not clear. And I think we would like to know some of the redacted information to be very specific. When you went over the line and you were engaged in, let's just be blunt about it, torture, did torture, in fact, advance the U.S. interests?

And I don't think - that's not clear to anybody. In fact, what we have now is the president saying, you know what, let's locate this kind of questioning among an elite group.

BAIER: I think reading this document would tell a different story, but go ahead, Charles.

KRAUTHAMMER: What you are positing is an alternate universe in which we had not done any of this and in which miraculously we also would not have had had a second attack since 9/11.

If you want to conduct such an experiment, go ahead. I prefer the experiment in which it what was done and we didn't have a second attack. And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, after he endured simulated drowning, opened up his rolodex, as people have explained it, and told us about operatives all over the world.

We have had every CIA director since 9/11 testify that these interrogation techniques, the excessive ones you are talking about, yielded extraordinary information that saved Americans.