While I share your horror, Elise, I wish I could share your surprise. It’s hardly as though the United States (and especially the CIA) has kept its hands clean up until now. From our campaigns against Native Americans, to dropping two atomic bombs on civilians, to all the nasty and still-classified things we did in remote corners of the Third World during the Cold War, the United States has done a lot of really terrible things. But you know what? That’s not special, and is really more of the norm. It’s actually pretty easy to get people to behave inhumanely towards each other.
Our chance to be special lies in what we do now. Respect for the rule of law demands it be enforced most vigorously the higher up you go. The only thing to be done is a full investigation; the specter hanging over this who incident is that its certain this was done on orders from the top, either the President or Vice President. No matter what they did wrong, they’ll never go to prison, which is disappointing, but we can still very publicly investigate. As conservatives have told us for decades, the innocent have nothing to fear. Speaking as an Illinoisan, I don’t think my state would be less corrupt if our governers had effective legal immunity, nor do I have reason to think the same logic would work better for the nation as a whole. I think we can take heart from the fact that these memos were released at all, and to remember that we still have the chance to demonstrate a capacity to be at least a little better. We just need to punish some people who broke some human rights laws that we ought to take pretty seriously.
As an aside: maybe if our Presidents went to prison when they committed crimes against humanity, they’d commit fewer crimes against humanity (or at least pay for Third World colonels w/ mirrored sunglasses to commit crimes against humanity).