Obama shrugs off request to drop CIA abuse probe

By James Vicini

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama shrugged off a request by seven former CIA chiefs to end a probe into allegations of prisoner abuse, saying in an interview released on Sunday that "nobody's above the law."

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder last month named a prosecutor to examine whether criminal charges should be filed filed against Central Intelligence Agency interrogators or contractors for going beyond approved interrogation methods.

A letter by the former CIA directors sent to Obama on Friday said the Justice Department's investigation would hamper operations and damage the willingness of intelligence officers to take risks to protect the country.

"I appreciate the former CIA directors wanting to look after an institution that they helped to build," Obama said in an interview with the CBS television show "Face the Nation."

"But I continue to believe that nobody's above the law. And I want to make sure that, as president of the United States, that I'm not asserting in some way that my decisions overrule the decisions of prosecutors who are there to uphold the law," he said.

In a separate interview on CNN, Obama said, "I don't want to start getting into the business of squelching, you know, investigations that are being conducted."

Obama noted he consistently has said he wanted to look forward, not backward, on problems that occurred under the Bush administration involving the use of harsh interrogation methods like waterboarding and sleep and food deprivation.

Bush-era officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have defended their actions and said the interrogations yielded valuable intelligence.