The United States does not torture, Barack Obama has proclaimed on numerous occasions since he arrived at the White House and almost immediately signed an executive order banning controversial interrogation techniques. The lingering, perhaps trickier, question is what to do about prisoner abuse that may have occurred in the seven years before Mr Obama was elected president.

That question was partially answered when Eric Holder, Mr Obama’s attorney general, launched an investigation into the interrogation of detainees held by the Central Intelligence Agency during the administration of George Bush. Called a “preliminary review”, the limited probe gives a second look at specific interrogations that may have overstepped even the more lenient legal guidance of Bush-administration lawyers. The review will determine if a full investigation is warranted.

Despite the narrowness of its stated scope, the investigation has drawn passionate criticism from Republicans, notably Dick Cheney, the former vice president, who says the probe is outrageous and will make the country less safe.

“It’s clearly a political move,” Mr Cheney told Fox News last Sunday, adding that he believes the review will expand beyond the individual interrogators involved. “There’s no other rationale for why they’re doing this.”

Mr Cheney said he stands by interrogations conducted while he was in office – even those that went beyond what the legal interpretations at that time allowed. “Enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States,” he said. “It was good policy.”

These arguments have reignited debate over torture and caused some liberals, such as Jarold Nadler, a Democratic congressman from New York, to call for an expansion of the new probe to include Mr Cheney himself.

“Former vice president Cheney is essentially saying that any acts performed by members of the CIA – no matter how illegal or abhorrent – are OK, and must never be the subject of a criminal investigation,” Mr Nadler said in a statement issued this week. “This is outrageous, and violates just about every traditional American concept of liberty and justice.”

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, dismissed Mr Cheney’s claim that the review will devastate the morale of the intelligence community: “I’m not entirely sure that Dick Cheney’s predictions on foreign policy have borne a whole lot of fruit over the last eight years in a way that has been either positive or, to the best of my recollection, very correct,” he said on Monday.

The Democratic National Committee later in the week released an anti-Cheney television ad, which shows the former vice president making statements that turned out to be incorrect, such as, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction”. Weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq. Mr Cheney’s final statement in the commercial was taken from the Sunday interview in which he supported “enhanced interrogation techniques” – a stance the ad says is also wrong.

The US public is hardly of one mind on the issue of torture. An Gallup poll in April found 51 per cent of Americans wanted an investigation into the harsh interrogation techniques used on suspected terrorists during the Bush administration, while 42 per cent opposed such a probe.

Mr Holder announced his preliminary review in late August, on the same day the government, under a long-delayed court order, declassified parts of a 2004 CIA report with fresh details of harsh interrogations, including a mock execution, suggestions that a detainee’s mother would be sexually assaulted in front of him and intimidation with a power drill and a handgun. It is unclear if the probe covers these incidents or is limited to cases that have not been made public.

Mr Holder added the new cases to the mandate of John Durham, a widely respected career prosecutor who was appointed by Michael Mukasey, a Bush-era attorney general, to look into another matter involving the CIA. Mr Holder said his decision to initiate the limited investigation was based on information in the unredacted version of the 2004 CIA report, the recommendations of a separate justice department review and “other relevant information”. He described the review as “the only responsible course of action for me to take”.

Charles Stimson, a justice department official under Mr Bush and senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, said the investigation makes sense if new information has come to light that was not available to or uncovered by the lawyers who previously reviewed the cases.

“Typically prosecutors don’t look back over other career prosecutors’ work, but it does happen,” he said. “But it’s an awkward and potentially dangerous precedent to go back and review decisions by a career prosecutor on a sensitive and controversial issue. If there’s no additional information, then it is a raw political act.”

Mr Obama has so far avoided directly answering questions about prosecuting Bush-era officials – particularly lawyers who backed questionable techniques, such as waterboarding, with problematic legal opinions. “We should be looking forward and not backwards,” he has said on numerous occasions.

Reports have suggested Mr Holder was acting on his own in launching the probe that appears to buck the wishes of his boss, though critics, such as Mr Cheney, charge that the administration is faking any disagreement between the White House and the justice department to help the president distance himself from the contentious issue.

Ken Gude, a national security analyst at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think-tank, thinks Mr Holder’s difficult decision to launch the investigation was “the opposite of politics”.

“The politically expedient choice would have been to follow what the president wants,” he said. “Certainly there are a number of Democrats who are uneasy with investigating the CIA. The political choice would have been to do nothing.”

The already unwieldy debate over US healthcare reform grew stranger and darker this week, drawing in the British physicist Stephen Hawking, “death panels”, gun-toting protesters and Nazi Germany.

Although Barack Obama was elected to the US presidency less than a year ago on promises he would fundamentally reform healthcare and “move beyond the divisive politics of Washington”, this week he, along with Democratic congressmen, struggled to refocus the conversation on factual healthcare concerns and distinguish it from a bouquet of fears about government powers that have some conservatives so riled.

Chief among protesters’ concerns are that the government would ration care and determine who gets treatment for what ailments.

Mr Obama, and other Democrats, have been trying to counter opposition to the US$1 trillion overhaul by holding a series of town hall meetings across the country, including one yesterday and another today. But their message, that the reforms are necessary to ensure that the 45 million Americans currently without health insurance are covered, has often been overshadowed by the emotive protests at town halls and stubborn rumours.

Reform advocates say corporations with financial interest in the status quo and politically motivated personalities have incited the outrage.

Sarah Palin, the former candidate for US vice president, has accused Mr Obama of wanting to set up “death panels”. In a recent Facebook note she described a hypothetical scenario in which her parents or her baby with Down syndrome would have to stand before “Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’, whether they are worthy of health care”.

Mr Obama has repeatedly denied his health proposals include a “death panel”, but the phrase has stuck, and, like rumours that dogged him during the presidential campaign – that he was a Muslim and not born in the United States – has gained a momentum of its own.

Some opponents have likened the “death panels” to Nazi Germany, where children and adults with disabilities were executed, and Mr Obama to Hitler.

Critics have also railed against Britain’s “Orwellian” National Health System (NHS), which they claim is the template for Mr Obama’s healthcare reforms. They say the service allows elderly people to die untreated and puts a value on human life.

A recent editorial in the Investor’s Business Daily, a US-based newspaper, which decried “horrors” of British healthcare, said that Stephen Hawking, the wheelchair-bound scientist, “wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless”.

Mr Hawking, in Washington this week to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honour, for his contributions to science, defended the health service.

In an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, he said he “wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS”.

The Investor’s Business Daily later issued a correction, acknowledging that Mr Hawking did indeed survive the British system, but said he did so only because of his renown.

The scientist’s comments, however, had already spurred a flurry of support on Twitter, the online service that lets users post 140-character “microblogs.” The topic #welovetheNHS was on several occasions the site’s top topic and included several Tweets from Gordon Brown, the British prime minister. The topic was so popular it reportedly briefly crashed the Twitter site on Wednesday.

William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and one-time adviser to Bill Clinton when he was president, noted that the protests and the debate in the United States are “not just about healthcare”.

“Over the past year, the federal government has responded to the economic emergency by wielding nearly unprecedented powers,” he said.

“Clearly there are a number of conservative Americans who are concerned by the expansion of the powers of the federal government. This is about a deep political polarisation of the country. The gap between the two political parties is as wide as it’s been in a very long time.”

The US administration says delaying healthcare reform means more Americans will suffer as a result of the country’s current faulty health care system. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, on Wednesday accused some in the press corps of being disappointed that the president “didn’t get yelled at” during his town hall event in New Hampshire, a suggestion that the media have been hamming up the protests by highlighting the most extreme cases.

Outside the presidential event in New Hampshire, TV cameras caught a protester carrying what turned out to be a loaded weapon and a sign that read, “It is time to water the tree of liberty.”

That is a reference to the first part of a Thomas Jefferson quote that continues “… from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots.”

William Kostric, the protester, was breaking no laws in carrying the firearm and police told the media that he was under careful surveillance. Guns – mostly but not all licensed and legal – have also appeared at numerous non-presidential town hall events across the country.

Although many analysts, including conservatives, expect some sort of healthcare legislation to be signed into law by October, it is unclear if the protesters themselves are winning over converts or having the opposite effect of repelling people.

* The National

Photo by Flickr user WayneWHuang / CC BY-NC 2.0

He was re-elected governor of Utah with an exceptional 78 per cent of the vote and has been touted as the Republicans’ best chance to oust Barack Obama from the White House in 2012.

So why is Jon Huntsman Jr giving all that up to accept a position in the Obama administration as ambassador to China?

It is not that he does not have the credentials for the new job: he learnt to speak Chinese as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan and later worked in the commerce department and served as ambassador to Singapore and as deputy US trade ambassador before becoming the governor of Utah in 2004.

But an ambassador’s role is, by nature, less public than a governor’s – a quieter turn for Mr Huntsman, just as he was emerging as a national voice for a more inclusive Republican Party.

About two weeks before Mr Huntsman’s nomination as ambassador to China, David Plouffe, who managed Mr Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign, said: “I think the one person in [the Republican] party who might be a potential presidential candidate is Gov Jon Huntsman of Utah,” according to US News and World Report.

Kirk Jowers, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, said that although Mr Huntsman was looking like an interesting presidential candidate, “the reality of his future for 2012 was more difficult”.

For one thing, Mr Obama is hugely popular and would be tough to dislodge. More immediately, Mr Huntsman, a moderate Republican, would have to contend with his own party, which, after major defeats in the past few years, is undergoing a soul-searching period that has pitted right-wing elements against moderates.

As Utah governor, Mr Huntsman broke with conservatives in his party by signing on to a regional initiative to reduce greenhouse gases with a carbon cap-and-trade programme and by publicly supporting civil unions for same-sex couples, a move that also demonstrated independence from his church.

While he takes more conservative stands on many other issues, his moderate views would probably not play well in the next few years with Republican voters, who have been tending towards more conservative candidates, even though they are less likely to win a general election.

Not surprisingly, there was little criticism from within his party about his acceptance of the post, reflecting, some observers say, a desire to purge some of the more moderates from the party.

Mr Jowers said that time and experience on the other side of the globe would only improve Mr Huntsman’s position for national politics later – including, possibly, a presidential bid in 2016.

“He was able to be a key voice in the current Republican self-identification crisis, but he doesn’t have to be a part of the coming war on it. And he may very well return when the Republican Party is more at ease with itself,” Mr Jowers said.

“I imagine that Gov Huntsman will take the steps necessary to be ready to run [for president] at some point in the future. It’s so far away and it’s such a moment of chance, that all you can do is take the steps necessary … When he returns, he will not be simply an interesting small-state governor, but a high-level diplomat.”

In an unusual move, Mr Obama personally announced the nomination at a press conference last month in Washington, where he talked up the significance of the position. “Given the breadth of issues at stake in our relationship with China, this ambassadorship is as important as any in the world,” Mr Obama said.

The actual role of an ambassador, however, is fairly limited, according to Robert Daly, the director of the Institute for Global Chinese Affairs at the University of Maryland.

“While it is surely one of the most fascinating jobs in the world, I think the importance of it has been somewhat exaggerated,” Mr Daly, a former diplomat who has worked at the American Embassy in Beijing, said. “Policy is primarily made in Washington.”

Ambassadors often work behind the scenes, but Mr Huntsman will have the opportunity to explain China to high-level policymakers. He appears also to have the attention of the president and other administration officials, which could put him in a stronger position to advocate for rational China policy, according to Mr Daly.

The next step for Mr Huntsman is confirmation by the US Senate. Although he has won unanimous Senate confirmation on two occasions in the past and is likely to draw wide support from both Democrats and Republicans this time, his ties to a family company with a strong presence in China are likely to come up.

Mr Huntsman’s résumé includes work for Huntsman Corporation, a chemical company founded by his father and currently run by his brother. The firm says its 2008 revenues exceeded US$10 billion (Dh36.7bn) and that it expects sales to grow by more than $1bn in China and throughout South East Asia over the next two years.

Such ties could put him in a position to gain from China policies he advocates, but Mr Daly noted that the governor could also spin his company ties as an asset because they have given him hands-on, China-related business experience.

As for policy, no major shifts are expected in US-China relations.

If the confirmation hearings go smoothly, bringing another popular Republican into the administration helps Mr Obama score points with moderates of both parties. His nomination of Mr Huntsman has been described by political commentators in the US as “a political coup” and a “masterstroke of political strategy”.