[JURIST] Former US vice president Dick Cheney [JURIST news archive] accused President Barack Obama [official website] of backtracking on his promise to not prosecute Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [official website] agents for alleged abuses of suspected terrorist detainees under the Bush administration during an interview [transcript] with Fox News Sunday, calling it a political move. Cheney's statements come after Attorney General Eric Holder [official profile] announced [JURIST report] last week that the Department of Justice (DOJ) [official website] will "open a preliminary review" into allegations of prisoner abuse by CIA interrogators during the Bush administration. Cheney accused the Obama administration of setting bad precedent if they should move forward with the investigations. When asked whether he believed the "preliminary review" would become a criminal investigation he responded:

I have no idea whether it will or not, but it shouldn't. The fact of the matter is the lawyers in the Justice Department who gave us those opinions had every right to give us the opinions they did. Now you get a new administration and they say, well, we didn't like those opinions, we're going to go investigate those lawyers and perhaps have them disbarred. I just think it's an outrageous precedent to set, to have this kind of, I think, intensely partisan, politicized look back at the prior administration ... I just think it's an outrageous political act that will do great damage long term to our capacity to be able to have people take on difficult jobs, make difficult decisions, without having to worry about what the next administration is going to say.