In a Monday editorial titled “Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses,” The New York Times called on the U.S. Department of Justice to launch an investigation of former Vice President Dick Cheney and several other Bush administration officials for actions they took to counter terrorism and root out terrorists, post Sept. 11, 2001.

The press for a federal query came in response to the Senate’s Democratic-fueled analysis on the administration’s response to terrorism — the so-called torture report.

“[This] report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like ‘rectal feeding,’ scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten,” The New York Times opined. “These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law.”

As such, the Justice Department should launch a full investigation of the key players, The New York Times said.

“The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? … Any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; former CIA Director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the office of legal counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos,” The New York Times wrote.

The newspaper pressed for the investigation just as the American Civil Liberties Union is set to present Attorney General Eric Holder with a letter that demands a special prosecutor to investigate “what appears increasingly to be ‘a vast criminal conspiracy … to commit torture and other serious crimes,’” The New York Times wrote.

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