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In 2004, photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became public.
American soldiers had been systematically abusing, humiliating, and torturing Iraqi detainees.
The photographs showed prisoners in stress positions, on leashes, in forced sexual poses, with injuries. Some detainees had died in custody.
The American response, at the official level, was to prosecute a handful of low-ranking soldiers.
Lynndie England. Charles Graner. A few others.
The architects of the policy, the lawyers who wrote the "torture memos" defining waterboarding and stress positions as legally permissible, the officials who approved "enhanced interrogation" as official doctrine, and the senior military commanders who oversaw facilities where these practices were standard, faced no criminal accountability.
John Yoo, who wrote the memo legally authorizing torture, is a tenured professor at UC Berkeley School of Law.
He teaches law.
At Berkeley.
Jay Bybee, who co-authored the torture memos, was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where he served as a federal judge.
He judged people.
For crimes.
Think about the message that sends.
Not to Americans, who largely moved on within a news cycle.
To the people in the region.
To the Iraqis who were in that prison.
To the Arab and Muslim world watching a country that had invaded their region on false pretenses, occupied and destabilized it, and then when photographs of systematic torture emerged, promoted the people responsible and prosecuted the people who took the photographs.
Chelsea Manning, who leaked evidence of war crimes including the killing of civilians and journalists, went to prison.
The people who exposed the crimes were punished.
The people who enabled the crimes were promoted.
This is not a system that malfunctioned.
This is a system that functioned exactly as designed.
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