Prosecute US officials who authorized torture

Instead of looking closely at what high-level officeholders in the Bush administration have done over the past eight years, and recognizing what Americans have tacitly permitted, people would rather turn their faces forward toward a better future, promising that this year and the inauguration of Barack Obama will mean ringing out Guantanamo Bay and ringing in due process; it will bring the end of waterboarding and the reinstatement of the Geneva Conventions.

Indeed, the almost universal response to the recent bipartisan report issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee - finding former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials directly responsible for detainee abuse that clearly rose to the level of torture - has been a collective agreement that no one need be punished so long as Americans solemnly vow that such atrocities never happen again.

This hope that the election represents some kind of legal self-cleansing, a constitutional "rebooting" of the rule of law, is of course not the language of the law. It is the language of recovery, of religion, of political pragmatism.