I hope they find SOMEONE accountable that was involved.

Well, I will grant that that might be nice in some versions of the world. However, we live in a version of the world where we really ought not to be surprised that the outcome from such an investigation is likely to be boringly predictable.

Part of the problem is that what happened happened on a few levels and the stratification of authority is probably going to work to keep people from being accountable.

On one level, we have the lawyers at different government agencies who spent years writing documents designed to define what limits we would impose on ourselves. So basically, we have what amount to opinions of what is legal (or to put it another way, how far we can go without crossing the line into actual torture).

Let's face facts here, those guys made it possible for us to go right up to the edge of where interrogation crosses over into torture. At the end of the process, they wrote a bunch of documents but did not actually participate in the overt actions. They defined a “line in the sand” that, if not crossed, would constitute presumably legal practices.

On another level would be the actual people performing the interrogations. Provided that they stayed inside the lines defined for them by the lawyers, I would not expect a whole lot of incrimination to come from that direction. And since we know that the records of the more exciting interrogations were often destroyed, good luck proving that anybody really crossed the lines.

The third level would be the various agency officials who were not actually performing interrogations but had a supervisory role. They were probably the people who ordered the destruction of records in the first place. If there is any dirt left to be found, those are the guys who have it. Again though, they have custody of the remaining records and a very low incentive to reveal what may still exist. They are also only functionaries in a larger machine and not really public faces for the war on terror.

Finally, we have the senior administration officials. People like Rumsfield and Wolfowitz. The problem with this group of people is that they were largely concerned with what information percolated up from the lower levels. How that information was gathered, well they would have to be world class stupid to not use all the lower level people to shield them from any accountability.