"YOUUU!!!"
Words. For Your Consideration.
"Most prosecution enthusiasts aren't all that thirsty for the blood of the CIA bureaucrats who actually conducted the torture of suspected terrorists. Their anger and desire for retribution are aimed at the Bush administration officials who ordered the torture of suspected terrorists and those very near the top who knew all about it and apparently approved (or did nothing to stop it), especially the Justice Department lawyers who wrote those fatuous memos claiming that practices such as "waterboarding" were actually within the law.
The trouble with this desire for retribution isn't that it goes too far. The trouble is that it doesn't go far enough. There is another group -- a large one -- that stood by doing nothing while Americans grabbed people off the streets of foreign countries, took them to other foreign countries (because we don't allow this sort of thing in the United States!) and tortured them until they said whatever our government wanted to hear. If you're going to punish people for condoning torture, you'd better include the American citizenry itself.
Sixty-two million of us voted to reelect George W. Bush in 2004. That was more people than had ever voted for a presidential candidate up until then. (In 2008, Obama got 69 million.) Unlike 2000, Bush's 2004 victory was solid and unambiguous.
Bush was so unpopular by the time he left office that it's hard to believe he was reelected four years earlier. That gave him and his associates four more years to violate America's dearest principles. But plenty of torture had gone on by the end of his first term. If you're looking to punish the ultimate decision makers, you can't stop at the Justice Department or even the White House. You've got to go all the way to the top. You have to ask the famous Howard Baker question about the voters themselves: What did we know, and when did we know it?"
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