Barack Obama made a conscious choice when taking office to Look Forward and Not Back after eight years of illegal torture committed by the Bush administration.
Tom Engelhardt unpacks this legacy:
To put it another way, every CIA torturer, all those involved in acts of rendition, and all the officials who okayed such acts, as well as the lawyers who put their stamp of approval on them, are free to continue their lives untouched.… Recently, the Obama administration even went to court to “prevent a lawyer for a former CIA officer convicted in Italy in the kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric from privately sharing classified information about the case with a Federal District Court judge.”… (Yes, Virginia, elsewhere in the world a few Americans have been tried in absentia for Bush-era crimes.)… In response, wrote Scott Shane of the New York Times, the judge “pronounced herself ”˜literally speechless.’”
The realities of our moment are simple enough: other than abusers too low-level (see England, Lynndie and Graner, Charles) to matter to our national security state, no one in the CIA, and certainly no official of any sort, is going to be prosecuted for the possible crimes Americans committed in the Bush years in pursuit of the Global War on Terror.