A week has passed since President Obama set a train in motion with the publication of secret memos to justify harsh interrogations by the CIA, and the White House appears to have lost control over its ultimate destination.

Fresh disclosures of declassified documents on Wednesday implicated a dozen senior officials in the Bush Administration, including Condoleezza Rice, as having approved techniques such as waterboarding — simulated drowning widely regarded as torture — on terrorist suspects.

The previous evening a Senate Armed Services Committee report linked the decision to authorise the CIA’s programme with the abuse of detainees by the US military at prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.

On the Left, human rights groups — at home and abroad — are clamouring for criminal prosecutions of those involved in designing or implementing the policy. In Congress, many top Democrats are vocally demanding the establishment of a truth commission even though an inquiry by the Senate Intelligence Committee is already under way.

There is also pressure from the Right with Dick Cheney, the former Vice-President, calling for the release of other secret documents that he claims will prove the interrogations helped to save innocent lives. He clearly intends to blame Mr Obama if there is another terrorist attack on America, saying: “The threat is there, it’s very real and it’s continuing. And what the Obama people are doing, in effect, is saying, ‘Well, we don’t need those tough policies that we had’.”

The President, already weighed down with a heavy agenda of pressing policy challenges, wanted none of this and had repeatedly insisted he wished to focus attention on the future rather than the past. According to The Washington Post yesterday he had earlier quashed proposals from within his Administration for a commission-style investigation.

According to aides, he felt that he had no choice but to release the Bush Administration’s secret legal memos in the vain hope that it would help to close a “dark and painful chapter” in American history. Instead Mr Obama has had to watch the book being prised ever more open.

When the White House tried to draw a line under the prospect of any prosecutions there was outrage from the liberal base of the Democratic party and the Justice Department privately warned that it amounted to political interference in a judicial process. This week Mr Obama has been forced to retrench behind new positions: while CIA operatives should not face criminal sanction if they followed legal advice, he said, the Attorney- General should decide how to deal with those who designed the policy. And if Congress insists on setting up a Commission, the President would like it to be as free as possible from political rancour.

Yesterday, the White House was forced to issue yet more clarification, saying Mr Obama would not support any further investigation.

The release on Wednesday of a chronology of the key decisions taken to authorise the interrogations shows the explosive political potential of any such inquiry. The fingerprints on this programme were not merely those of the Justice Department legal advisers who drafted the memos but also of Dr Rice, then the National Security Adviser, and John Ashcroft, the Attorney-General, who approved the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” as early as May 2002. The following summer, Mr Cheney and Alberto Gonzales, then the White House legal counsel, affirmed that the programme was lawful.

Even Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives and the most senior figure pushing for a truth commission, was briefed as far back as 2002 about waterboarding in secret intelligence briefings. She claimed this week to have no recollection of being informed that the controversial technique was being used. Taking court action against those responsible is fraught with difficulty, both legal and political. Any case against the authors of the memos, for instance, would probably require evidence that they acted in bad faith by writing opinions that they knew to be untrue. Much will depend on a looming ethics report from the Justice Department, which is said to have obtained private e-mails from the likes of Jay Bybee, Steven Bradbury and John Yoo, who authored the memos.

The Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, as well as the Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman, have written to Mr Obama cautioning him against prosecutions that would have “a chilling effect” on any future administration’s legal advisors.

Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, has warned that if Mr Obama pursues officials from the Bush era his Administration is in danger of resembling a “Third World regime where the incoming junta of colonels” conducts “show trials of their predecessors”. There is little precedent for such action in the United States and Mr Obama does not want to set one. Some day, he will himself be a former President who perhaps faced tough dilemmas involving national security and legal ethics.

More immediately, Mr Obama must maintain some vestige of a bipartisan sheen if he is to get key policies, including healthcare and energy reform, through Congress over the next few years.

A full-scale Washington storm raking over the past decisions of his Republican predecessor is the last thing the President needs — even if it may be too late to stop one.

Record of complaints

Afghanistan Prisoners reported deafening rock music and exposure to extreme cold and darkness

Egypt Four prisons used by CIA

Gambia National intelligence headquarters used to hold detainees before their transfer to a jail in Afghanistan

Guantánamo Bay A total of 800 prisoners have been housed there

Iraq Abu Ghraib prison

Morocco Two prisons operated by the Moroccan internal security service. Alleged abuse includes slashing the chest and penis of detainees with razor blades

Pakistan Three prisons used by CIA. Extensive torture reported

Poland Prison near Szymany called “the concentration camp of death”

Source: Times database

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