Of course. International law is very clear on this but it's also common sense.
Considerable efforts are being made in various quarters to cover up the record of US torture and prevent the prosecution of military and Central Intelligence Agency torturers and those higher up who ordered them to carry out their crimes.
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are reportedly holding up approval of Barack Obama's nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, until he promises not to prosecute any former Bush administration officials for their part in approving torture.
Not that the incoming Obama regime needs much encouragement along those lines. The new administration has made a series of cosmetic changes that will in no serious way alter the brutal course of US policy in regard to the "war on terror" and the treatment of detainees. The eventual closing down of the Guantánamo internment camp and illegal CIA prisons, as well as the official requirement that CIA and military personnel follow the Army Field Manual's prohibitions on torture, will resolve nothing.
The ideological and political framework—with its accompanying network of lies and justifications—for wars of aggression and attacks on democratic rights remains intact.
Obama's aim is to repair some of the damage done to America's standing as a result of the Bush administration's policy of abuse and torture carried out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and a gulag of secret detention sites, without changing the essence of US foreign policy, the drive toward global hegemony, and the illegal and violent methods employed in the implementation of that policy.
The new president has made clear his administration has no plans to prosecute the perpetrators, whose transgressions, in any case, were carried out with the full knowledge and approval of leading Democrats in Congress. "I don't believe anybody is above the law," Obama told the media. "On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards." This is, for all intents and purposes, a preemptive pardon for torturers.
It is critical, however, that just such an investigation into US torture and associated illegal practices be carried out, and the guilty parties, up to the highest levels of the Defense and State departments and the White House, be prosecuted.
To pretend, as supporters of Obama and the liberal media are now doing, that these criminal policies can be halted without an exhaustive examination of how they were ordered and carried out—and by whom—is a grotesque fraud.
This is a political and moral issue. The aim is not to exact revenge—although those responsible should pay a heavy legal price—but to expose and discredit the policies that have led to war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and threaten even greater crimes and disasters in the future. The American military-intelligence apparatus, the greatest instrument of terror and violence on earth, needs to be uprooted and dismantled. A first step is the careful recording and public exposure of its many crimes.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/pers-j28.shtml