The slide into lawlessness by successive US administrations has been aided by the courts which have been cowed by the ‘war on terror’ to essentially give carte blanche to the administration to do whatever it claims it needs to do to ‘keep us safe’. For example, it was ruled that Jose Padilla could not even sue Donald Rumsfeld and others who were responsible for the brutal treatment he received. The Obama administration has continued the process, covering up its own crimes and those of its predecessors while making token gestures towards upholding the rule of law.

Glenn Greenwald gives the full sordid story:

In August, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder — under continuous, aggressive prodding by the Obama White House — announced that three categories of individuals responsible for Bush-era torture crimes would be fully immunized from any form of criminal investigation and prosecution: (1) Bush officials who ordered the torture (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld); (2) Bush lawyers who legally approved it (Yoo, Bybee, Levin), and (3) those in the CIA and the military who tortured within the confines of the permission slips they were given by those officials and lawyers (i.e., “good-faith” torturers). [My italics]

Got that? All the people who authorized torture are immunized from prosecution, as are those who followed those authorizations, creating an almost perfect closed loop of immunity.

Of course, Obama has to find some way of sanctimoniously claiming that we are still a nation of laws and not men. Hence the only people who are at risk of any prosecution are those low level people whose actions overstepped even those broad categories of authorized abuses. It has announced that it will investigate just two of the most egregious of the many prisoner abuses by low-level people that occurred in the so-called war on terror, meaning that everyone else goes free.

Over 100 detainees died during U.S. interrogations, dozens due directly to interrogation abuse. Gen. Barry McCaffrey said: “We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.” Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the official investigation into detainee abuse, wrote: “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Thanks to the Obama DOJ, that is no longer in question. The answer is resoundingly clear: American war criminals, responsible for some of the most shameful and inexcusable crimes in the nation’s history — the systematic, deliberate legalization of a worldwide torture regime — will be fully immunized for those crimes. And, of course, the Obama administration has spent years just as aggressively shielding those war criminals from all other forms of accountability beyond the criminal realm: invoking secrecy and immunity doctrines to prevent their victims from imposing civil liability, exploiting their party’s control of Congress to suppress formal inquiries, and pressuring and coercing other nations not to investigate their own citizens’ torture at American hands.

I predict that even this ‘investigation’ will turn out to be a sham with no finding of culpability. I suspect that the cases will be quietly dropped. Already noises are being made that because these cases are ‘old’ and because of the code of secrecy that surrounds the actions of the military, it might be hard to build a case against the culprits, suggesting that the ground is already being laid for nothing happening. As NPR reporter Carrie Johnson says:

Well, former prosecutors are telling me it’s still going to be quite difficult to win an indictment by a grand jury, and eventually possibly any kind of conviction. And there are several reasons for that. One is that the evidence in these cases is very old – eight, nine and 10 years old. Or maybe it was never collected on or near the battlefield.

Finally, nobody in the government wants to squeal on his or her colleagues in the intelligence community.

So there we are. Imagine the outrage if a foreign government that tortured or murdered US citizens announced similar immunity for the perpetrators.