Jane Mayer reminds us that it’s simply not the case that 2002 was such a crazy time that everyone was swept up in torture fever and so there’s no sense holding anyone accountable:
By June 2002—again, months before the Department of Justice gave the legal green light for interrogations—an F.B.I. special agent on the scene of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah refused to participate in what he called “borderline torture,” according to a D.O.J. investigation cited in the Levin report. Soon after, F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller commanded his personnel to stay away from the C.I.A.’s coercive interrogations.
If the FBI could see that this was no good, then why not the CIA? And doesn’t it seem relevant that among the various federal agencies, it’s the FBI that does the most work in the field of questioning malefactors to try to obtain reliable information about other bad activities? The CIA does a lot of things, but it’s not really an investigative agency at all.
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