Other observations on the press conference later, but I wanted to jump on this right away since it looks like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are discussing the president's torture remarks.
While I agree that there ought to be investigations and prosecutions for torture, the president can't go on television and say that members of the previous administration committed any sort of crime. So it might've felt nice to you and me for the president to have said, yeah, those guys violated the law.
But imagine the craptastical legal morass it would've created: a chief executive announcing who's guilty on national television. It would sabotage the whole thing. I'm satisfied with "waterboarding is torture" and "it was a mistake." And the investigation needs to happen in a non-partisan way. The president's responses were sharp without screwing the whole deal.