So you really thought things would change?

I have some good news and some bad news.

First, the good news: After a thorough and diligent investigation, I have solved twenty-five unsolved murders. I know who the murderers are, I know how they committed their crimes, and I have more than enough evidence to convict them.

Now for the bad news: I am not going to release any of this evidence or demand that any of these murderers be prosecuted.

While this may seem anathema to the fundamental concept of justice, I have five reasons for my actions:

Reason Number One: If you want these murderers to be prosecuted, you are seeking vengeance, not justice;

Reason Number Two: Putting these murderers on trial might implicate other, more “important,” people who should remain above the law;

Reason Number Three: All of these murders occurred only after the murderers engaged in a “well-thought out” debate about whether or not to commit them;

Reason Number Four: If you want crimes of the past to be prosecuted, you are “looking backward,” when you should be “looking forward”;

Reason Number Five: These twenty-five murders were not really murders at all. They were simply extroverted suicides.

If any, or all, of these reasons seem ludicrous to you, then welcome to America’s so-called “debate” over whether the individuals who engaged in, encouraged or authorized the use of torture during the criminal reign of George W. Bush should be prosecuted.

Reason Number Five is the semantic argument propagated by Bush himself: Torture isn’t really torture when the politically powerful refuse to label it as such. According to this logic, members of Joseph Stalin’s NKVD never used torture. They only applied “physical pressure.” And the Bush dictatorship never used or sanctioned the use of torture. It simply authorized and utilized “expanded interrogation techniques.”

Reason Number Four is the argument being disseminated by America’s current president Barack Obama. Obama’s claim that Americans should “look forward, not backward” is now being cited to defend the alleged architects of the Bush-era torture policies, including former United States attorney general Alberto Gonzales.

Yet, ironically, Gonzales himself implicitly rejected this argument during his own tenure in office when he announced, with much ceremony, that the Justice Department was investigating and seeking to bring to justice the persons responsible for decades-old crimes committed during America’s civil rights era.

Just as the torture apologists are doing today, critics of Gonzales’s civil rights initiative argued that investigating and prosecuting such cases would only open up “old wounds.” But if the “opening up of old wounds” argument was rejected by the highest law enforcement official in the nation during the Bush dictatorship, how can Bush and his minions now embrace it, particularly since the perpetrators are not disgruntled racists who lawlessly sought to uphold the status-quo, but politicians, attorneys and law enforcement officials sworn to uphold the laws and principles of the United States?

Reasons One through Three represent the tortured logic of Washington Post columnist David Broder. In perhaps one of the most sophistic and repulsive editorials ever written, Broder proffered these three arguments to support his contentions that Obama should refuse to be “pressured” into bringing Bush-era torturers to justice, and should instead “close the books on the torture policies of the past.”

But what good is a criminal justice system that cannot seek justice? As any teacher of correctional theory will acknowledge, one goal of this system is to ensure that crime victims receive some retribution for the wrongs perpetrated against them. In fact, in the federal criminal justice system rehabilitation has largely been abandoned in favor of retribution.

The result is that America has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. And certainly nobody can dispute that the goal of its overused, and often abused, death penalty—a punishment banned by most other industrialized nations—is retribution, not rehabilitation.

The sadism that led to the torture policies of George W. Bush can be traced back to his days as governor of the execution crazed state of Texas, where he signed over one hundred and fifty death warrants and contemptuously mocked inmates, like Karla Fay Tucker, who were scheduled for execution, while at the same time routinely denying petitions for DNA tests that could have exonerated wrongfully convicted prisoners.

Yet now it is somehow “vengeful” to demand that George W. Bush and his cadre of torturers be prosecuted, despite mounting evidence that their torture policies were themselves nothing more than sadistic acts of vengeance.

According to a New York Times editorial written by former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, “high profile” terrorists like Abu Zubaydah actually provided the most useful information prior to the use of torture. Soufan went on to say, “No actionable intelligence [was] gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques . . . that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics.” And, contrary to the glowing reports about the successes of the Bush-era torture policies now being vomited by America’s premier liar, coward, torturer and warmonger Dick Cheney, Soufan even admitted that the use of torture actually “backfired on more than a few occasions.”