Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses: No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.

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Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses: No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.

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The New York Times

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Opinion

EDITORIAL

Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses

Dick Cheney.

WIN MCNAMEE / GETTY IMAGES

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

DECEMBER 21, 2014

Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.'s destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.

Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down.

Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-pageexecutive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.”

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Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses: No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.

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