In the wake of 9/11, dozens of people were arbitrarily detained and tortured by the American government, sometimes with lethal consequences. These practices were not only grotesquely immoral but illegal. Last week, the Department of Justice announced that nobody would be held legally responsible for these reprehensible crimes. This decision culminates a series of failures that will be a permanent black mark on the Obama administration. The process by which almost nobody has been held responsible for horrible and illegal acts is two-step. Failures by high officials magically insulate the failures of less high-ranking ones. Infuriatingly if also not surprisingly, the people in the top levels of the Bush administration were not held responsible by a new administration that presumably didn't want to set an uncomfortable precedent by "politicizing" the Bush administration's torture policies. But even if we accept that self-interest would prevent the Obama administration from prosecuting...
