impunity

...if you take a step back and you look more broadly at what the administration is doing on national security, in particular, what you see far too often is the administration endorsing policies that most of us recognize were extreme under the last administration. And, in fact, in some cases, you see this administration going even further than the last administration did...

some of the places we point to in the report include the endorsement of indefinite detention for some of the people who are now held at Guantánamo, the failure to hold accountable the people who endorsed torture. The last administration built a framework for torture, but this administration... is building a framework for impunity. Allowing those senior officials who endorsed torture to get away with it leaves torture on the table as a permissible policy option, if not for this president, then for the next president...

the decision to endorse torture was a decision that was made at the highest levels of the Bush administration... So the problem we have now is that there is... the Obama administration has initiated a criminal investigation, but the criminal investigation is very narrow. It examines only a handful of incidents in which contractors or CIA interrogators went beyond the authority that was invested in them. And nobody, as far as we know, is looking into the responsibility and the criminal liability of the people who endorsed torture and authorized it. And that seems indefensible to us...

In a sworn declaration ... Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell during George W. Bush''s first term in office, said he would be willing to state, under penalty of perjury... that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others knew the "vast majority" of prisoners captured in the so-called War on Terror were innocent and the administration refused to set them free once those facts were established because of the political repercussions that would have ensued.

"By late August 2002, I found that of the initial 742 detainees that had arrived at Guantánamo, the majority of them had never seen a US soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review," Wilkerson''s declaration says. "Secretary Powell was also trying to bring pressure to bear regarding a number of specific detentions because children as young as 12 and 13 and elderly as old as 92 or 93 had been shipped to Guantánamo. By that time, I also understood that the deliberate choice to send detainees to Guantánamo was an attempt to place them outside the jurisdiction of the US legal system."

He added that it became "more and more clear many of the men were innocent, or at a minimum their guilt was impossible to determine let alone prove in any court of law, civilian or military."