The jailers and torturers acted on orders that descended from President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, C.I.A. chief George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others. They justified their action with twisted legal memos arguing that torture was not torture when the president wanted to do it.

C.I.A. officers destroyed the videotaped evidence of waterboarding, which for eons was considered to be torture until the Bush administration decided it could be inflicted on Muslim prisoners. The Justice Department, under President Obama, did investigate both the prisoners’ debasement and the destruction of evidence but decided not to file criminal charges.

Under Mr. Bush, foreign citizens with no connection to terrorism were snatched from the streets and, on one occasion, from Kennedy International Airport in New York. They were bound, gagged, blindfolded and flown off to countries that commit even more hideous acts of torture than the ones the C.I.A. seemed to prize so highly. The United States knew, of course, that would happen; it was the point of sending the prisoners to those countries in the first place.

No one was held accountable. When the prisoners were finally set free, their bodies broken and their lives ruined (one was dropped on a remote road in a lonely part of Europe where nobody spoke his language and had to make his way home to a family that had long thought him dead), the United States rolled out its legal guns to make sure that no court ever heard their cases. The excuse was national security. The real reason was that if these stories were told in public, it would be hideously embarrassing to the government.

That policy of concealment continued into the Obama administration, with perhaps even greater zeal than under Mr. Bush. To this day, the United States government will not even acknowledge these abductions, much less apologize or provide compensation.