No impunity.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Comment - Legal and ethical grounds of torture - Essay

Over the last two or three decades, throughout Latin America, when one death squad regime fell after another, a cry rang out from the people: No impunidad . No impunity for murderers. No impunity for torturers. It was this outcry that led to the indictment of Augusto Pinochet of Chile, this outcry that brought truth commissions to El Salvador and Guatemala, this outcry that forced the supreme court of Argentina to overturn the blanket of blamelessness that shielded the junta there.

Now we need such an outcry here at home.

Because the Bush-Cheney regime disappeared people.

It tortured people.

It waged an illegal war.

President Barack Obama repeatedly talks about moving forward, not backward. But we can't move forward as a nation while we're weighed down by the crimes that were committed in our name.

Obama wrongly has exempted from prosecution the CIA personnel who engaged in waterboarding and other obvious examples of torture. He claims they were simply acting under guidance from the Justice Department.

But the "just following orders" excuse didn't fly at Nuremberg, and it shouldn't fly in Washington. Every human being, even those in the military or in the intelligence agencies, has an obligation to live up to the Geneva Conventions and the Treaty Against Torture. Every American has a duty to obey the War Crimes statute.

Only when accountability reaches down to the people who are doing the torturing will we have any hope of preventing interrogators from crossing the line again.

But the responsibility for torture rests not only, or even primarily, with those who waterboarded the detainees and inflicted other horrors upon them. No, it rests most squarely with those who ordered, directed, and rationalized the torture.

It rests with the lawyers at the Justice Department who drew up the torture memos: John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Stephen Barbury.

It rests with David Addington in Dick Cheney's office, who pressed for the hideously euphemistic "enhanced interrogation techniques."

It rests with Alberto Gonzales, who called the Geneva Conventions "antiquated" and "obsolete."

And it rests with Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush himself.

There is a prima facie case that all of them engaged in war crimes. Attorney General Eric Holder has a legal, moral, and constitutional obligation to indict them forthwith.

L et's look at the war crimes statute. Section 2441 of Title 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code says that someone is guilty of a war crime if he or she commits a "grave breach of common Article 3" of the Geneva Conventions. And then it defines what a grave breach would be.

One such breach is...