Generally, when past regimes are tried for their crimes, the cases do not come to trial for many years after the transgressions were committed. In Chile and Argentina, for example, a decade passed before prosecutors were able to press charges against those in the government who participated in crimes against their own people during political turmoil of the last century. In Chile, various entities attempted to bring charges against Gen. Augusto Pinochet for his abuse until he finally died, unprosecuted, in 2006. With this in mind, it is particularly impressive that in the US all it has taken is a presidential election to bring about a change in governmental policy that may well result in the prosecution of CIA operatives and some contracted by the CIA for the manner in which they interrogated various individuals in the US “war on terror.” The irony is that the president himself, Barack Obama, has resisted efforts to look into the alleged crimes of the Bush administration in order to avoid spending too much time and energy concentrating on the past with the ultimate victim being the problems of the present that must be dealt with. US Attorney General Eric Holder, however, is said to have found the evidence pointing to illegal activity so egregious that it is impossible to allow the CIA violations to simply fade into the sunset. An attorney general is the person most responsible for seeing that the law is upheld on a national level and as such he often comes under tremendous political pressure from sitting administrations. This pressure is deemed unethical and, in some cases, illegal, but reality being what it is, the pressure can come in various forms. The announcement that prosecutions may take place comes just before a report is to be made public in which some of the wrong-doing will be highlighted. Again, the case for prosecution is said to be so obvious that no amount of political engineering can nudge it out of the public eye. US behavior on the world stage during the Bush administration was, of course, pathetic in the worst sense of the world. Granted, it was not engaged in a fight with a bunch of angels but behavior such as that engaged in only served to diminish the standing of the US in the eyes of nearly the entire world. There will be many within the US who will be angered by the attorney general's move to prosecute interrogators for what amounts to torture, but such prosecution will go a long way in restoring the moral credibility of the US. __
