The Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said he told President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team that some of the Bush administration’s controversial interrogation policies should remain intact.

In an interview with Congress Daily, Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, said he also recommended Obama retain the directors of the CIA and national intelligence, both of who oversaw and implemented the White House’s domestic surveillance activities.

“The leadership of both the CIA and the [Director of National Intelligence] is going to be pivotal to keeping us safe and secure,” Reyes told Congress Daily. “I made a recommendation that they stay on during the transition so that there would be a period of time that there would be overlap.”

Moreover, Reyes, who earlier this year voted in favor of reauthorizing the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, said he advised Obama’s transition team that obtaining information from suspected terrorists is crucial and “some options” that extend beyond interrogation rules in the Army Field Manual need to be available.

Civil rights organizations have pressed Obama to aggressively investigate the Bush administration’s actions once he is sworn in next month.

Obama has not indicated whether Eric Holder, his choice for Attorney General, will pursue an investigation into the Bush administration’s policies, particularly issues related to torture.

In response to press reports about Obama shying away from such a probe, Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights said “one of Barack Obama’s first acts as President should be to instruct his Attorney General to appoint an independent prosecutor to initiate a criminal investigation of former Bush administration officials who gave the green light to torture.”

In an article published in the magazine The Progressive, Ratner pointed to a statement Holder made a few months ago in which the Attorney General designee said the “American people” are owed “a reckoning.”  

Ratner said anything less than a full-scale criminal investigation – a substitute like a Truth Commission assigned simply to ascertain the facts – would be unacceptable.

“If Obama and Holder want to adhere to our Constitution and uphold our highest values, they must pursue those in the Bush administration who violated that Constitution, broke our laws, and tarnished our values,” Ratner wrote. “To simply let those officials walk off the stage sends a message of impunity that will only encourage future law breaking. The message that we need to send is that they will be held accountable.

“This is not Latin America; this is not South Africa. We are not trying to end a civil war, heal a wounded country and reconcile warring factions. We are a democracy trying to hold accountable officials that led our country down the road to torture. And in a democracy, it is the job of a prosecutor and not the pundits to determine whether crimes were committed.”

Yet Reyes, a Vietnam War veteran, is advocating that some aspects of torture programs remain in place.

“There are those that believe that this particular issue has to be dealt with very carefully because there are beliefs that there are some options that need to be available,” Reyes told Congress Daily. “We don’t want to be known for torturing people. At the same time we don’t want to limit our ability to get information that’s vital and critical to our national security. That’s where the new administration is going to have to decide what those parameters are, what those limitations are.”

Reyes is just one of a handful of top Democrats in both Houses who in recent weeks have changed their positions in regard to the brutal techniques used by the CIA during interrogations, such as waterboarding, which has been widely regarded as torture.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., pressed her colleagues earlier this year to back legislation to force the CIA to strictly adhere to the Army Field Manual. She won passage of the bill, which President Bush swiftly vetoed.

But in an interview with the New York Times ealier this month, Feinstein, who will become chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in January, said she would allow interrogators “flexibility” in “extreme cases.”

“I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible,” Feinstein told the Times, and added that an imminent terrorist threat might call for extreme measures.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, who is also a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told The Times he would allow the CIA to use interrogation techniques that go beyond the Army Field Manual as long as they were “legal, humane and noncoercive.”

As reported by Congress Daily, lawmakers spent the past two years fighting over whether the CIA should be required to adhere to guidelines in the Army Field Manual during interrogations. The committee Feinstein will chair approved a fiscal 2009 intelligence authorization bill that contained language prohibiting intelligence agencies from employing any interrogation technique that strays from the Army Field Manual.

“But Reyes opposed adding such language in his panel’s version of the authorization bill, which the House approved over the summer,” Congress Daily reported.

Obama has been under intense pressure from civil rights organizations, human rights advocates, and progressive bloggers to immediately shut down the Bush administration’s interrogation program, which Obama denounced on the campaign trail.

In an interview with “60 Minutes” last month, Obama told correspondent Steve Kroft “that America doesn’t torture and I’m going to make sure we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.”

But some left-leaning critics are worried that Obama’s pursuit of bipartisanship may result in some cabinet choices that will represent some of the Bush administration’s worst abuses.

The president-elect has already come under fire for choosing John Brennan, a veteran of the CIA, to head the spy agency. Brennan, who was an national security adviser to Obama’s campaign, withdrew his name from consideration for the job after he found himself the subject of critical stories posts by progressive bloggers for allegedly supporting the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation tactics.

Obama’s transition team would not say whether they will act upon Reyes’s advice and retain Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and/or CIA Director Michael Hayden, who was head of the National Security Agency when Americans phone calls and e-mails were monitored without prior authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was set up after widespread abuses of domestic surveillance during Richard Nixon’s presidency.

McConnell is a staunch defender of the Bush administration’s torture program. In congressional testimony last February, McConnell said the interrogation techniques in the Army Field Manual were designed for young and inexperienced” soldiers. He defended interrogators using harsh techniques that extended well beyond military rules. 

Obama is reportedly struggling to find intelligence officials who are not tainted by their roles in the Bush administration’s torture and domestic spy programs. If he decides to retain McConnell and Hayden it will likely cause a revolt by progressives who already see his team as too hawkish.

His decision to keep Robert Gates on as Secretary of Defense was met with extreme disappointment by the president-elect’s most ardent supporters. 

Beyond keeping Gates, Obama has staffed much of his foreign policy team with people tied to the Clinton administration, including many who were strong supporters of the Iraq War, most notably Sen. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. [See Jeremy Scahill's "This Is Change?"]

That trend has raised concerns among Obama supporters who had hoped Obama meant what he said when he declared during the campaign that “I don’t want to just end the [Iraq] war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.”

“Obama ran his campaign around the idea the war was not legitimate, but it sends a very different message when you bring in people who supported the war from the beginning,” said Kelly Dougherty, executive director of the Iraq Veterans Against the War, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Reyes, however, thought retaining Gates was a brilliant move, which underscores the Texas Democrat’s hawkish position on national security matters. 

“As Defense Secretary, Robert Gates has established himself as an effective and pragmatic leader who is well respected by both Republicans and Democrats,” Reyes said in a statement after Obama announced his national security picks. “As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I have appreciated his candid assessments of our military strategy when testifying before Congress, and I look forward to continuing to work with him.”

Also see: Mukasey Uses Nixon to Defend Bush.