CIA torturers should sue the federal government

The Bush administration told people torture would help America. They were wrong — and the torturers are paying the price.

Torturers suffer grave emotional consequences.
(Image credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

It's always the people lowest on the social ladder who face the worst of America's vicious criminal justice system. Consider the torturers at Abu Ghraib. A policy designed and implemented at the very highest levels of the Bush administration was blamed on a few low-level scapegoats. Hence, while a few actual torturers — the people swinging the rubber mallets, locking the handcuffs, pouring lungs full of water, and so on — were punished, the vast majority of the architects of torture got off scot-free. It seems too much of the American power structure was implicated to do more than punish low-level soldiers who tortured, people like Lynndie England and Charles Graner.

As a result, aside from the Senate torture report (most of which still has not been released) and a few independent studies, there has been no real accounting or reckoning with the fact of American torture.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.