There are many awful legacies of the Bush administration's criminal embrace of torture in the months and years following the 9/11 attacks. Among the most agonizing — for the torture victims themselves, and for the lawyers who have represented them — is that not a single one of those victims has had his day in court. And not a single court that has been faced with a torture suit has addressed the core question of whether the victims' legal rights were violated.

This is, of course, a tragedy for the victims, who must live with the twin traumas of having been tortured by the state and turned away by its courts. But it is also a grave threat to the rule of law. Without definitive adjudication of the legality of torture, we face the risk that the door has been left open to future abuses.

Of course, the courts are not alone in turning a blind eye to torture victims; both the Bush and Obama administrations have actively subverted victims' attempts to obtain compensation and redress. Indeed, each of the democratic institutions that should have provided a check on abuses — and a remedy for the abused — has instead engaged in a kind of accountability shell game.

ACLU client Khaled El-Masri's case is illustrative. In a notorious case of mistaken identity, El-Masri, a German citizen, was kidnapped by the CIA in Macedonia, "rendered" to a CIA black site in Afghanistan, detained and tortured for several months, then released without apology or explanation. When a German reporter asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice whether the United States would provide redress for its horrific abuse of El-Masri, she responded: "When mistakes are made, we work very hard to rectify them. I believe that this will be handled in the proper courts, here in Germany and if necessary in American courts as well."

El-Masri sought to bring his claims to those "proper courts," both in the United States and in Germany. But this was a bait and switch: rather than "handle" El-Masri's claims, the American courts told El-Masri, at the insistence of the executive, that he had come to the wrong place. "If El-Masri's allegations are true or essentially true," wrote a federal judge, "then all fair-minded people . . . must also agree that El-Masri has suffered injuries as a result of our country's mistake and deserves a remedy. Yet, it is also clear . . . that the only sources of that remedy must be the Executive Branch or the Legislative Branch, not the Judicial Branch." We now know — through documents released by Wikileaks — that Secretary Rice's State Department expended considerable diplomatic resources in seeking to terminate El-Masri's judicial proceedings in Germany, as well.

El-Masri was not alone. When five other victims of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, also represented by the ACLU, sought judicial redress against a government contractor that had knowingly profited from arranging their torture flights, the court told them, in effect, to look elsewhere: "Our holding today is not intended to foreclose — or to prejudge — possible nonjudicial relief, should it be warranted for any of the plaintiffs." The executive branch, the court insisted could "determine whether plaintiffs' claims have merit and whether misjudgments or mistakes were made that violated plaintiffs' human rights." And if that didn't work, "Congress also has the power to enact private bills." This was doubly absurd: Congress, of course, had already enacted public bills prohibiting torture — the very laws that the executive had violated and the courts had disregarded.

ACLU client Jose Padilla encountered a different version of the accountability shell game: two courts pointing the finger at each other. Padilla, an American citizen, was seized by the military from a New York jail, unilaterally designated an "enemy combatant" by the president, detained incommunicado without charge or trial in a Naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina, and subjected to vicious interrogations, chilling sensory deprivation, and total isolation. After three years and eight months of illegal military detention, Padilla was returned to the civilian justice system and prosecuted for crimes wholly unrelated to his dubious "enemy combatant" designation.

When Padilla sued his torturers, seeking one dollar in compensation as well as recognition that his rights had been violated, he was told, remarkably, that he had already had ample opportunity to air his grievances. "It is not as if the American judicial system has failed to afford [Padilla] significant opportunities to vindicate his legal rights," opined the judge. In particular, Padilla "was allowed in his criminal proceeding to raise issues of his detention in support of his motion to dismiss the criminal charges." But the judge declined to mention that when Padilla had attempted to raise those issues in his criminal case, he was told that he was in the wrong venue, and that he was "free to institute . . . an action for monetary damages or any other form of redress that he is legally entitled to pursue."

"It ain't me, babe," sings Bob Dylan in a famous lyric. "It ain't me you're looking for." This has been the unvarying response of our courts and our Presidents to the powerful legal and moral claims of torture victims. The best that can be said about this chronic institutional buck-passing is that it betrays a degree of shame.

That shame now belongs to all Americans. These terrible things were done in our name. And the failure to acknowledge the victims has been carried out in our name as well.

Learn more about accountability for torture: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's brazenness is again on display this week as he promotes his new book In My Time. His comments in a recent interview coupled with excerpts from the book have served as a jarring reminder of the lack of accountability we've seen for the torture policies of the Bush administration.

The take-home message appears to be: He is not sorry. (The same unapologetic stance that a number of former Bush administration officials have maintained for a decade.)

For example, in promoting the book, Cheney has suggested that it is not the detentions at Guantánamo Bay that hurt America's image abroad but rather critics who peddle falsehoods about it. He has also indicated that he is pleased that President Barack Obama has failed to close the prison in Guantánamo Bay, as he had pledged. These statements indicate that not only does the former vice president have no regrets, but that he actually believes the policies, that violated the rights of many people, are boast-worthy.

In an NBC interview with Jamie Gangel, Cheney said we should still be using "enhanced" interrogation. When asked if we should still use waterboarding as a tool for interrogating terror suspects even though many have condemned it, calling it torture, Cheney stated that he would strongly support waterboarding if it were the only way to get a "high value detainee" to talk.

Cheney has no regrets, even though the very policies that he wants his legacy to rest upon have been recognized as illegal and even criminal by the public and policymakers alike.

It's impossible to forget that many Americans were disgusted by the Abu Ghraib revelations and the negative reports of torture and abuse that dominated the news for years. Following that scandal, the McCain anti-torture amendment aimed at the military passed the Senate by a 90-9 vote and became law.

Also, the Senate Armed Services Committee wrote an exhaustive report on the damage done by the military's abuse of prisoners and held a series of hearings examining how the abuse hurt U.S. intelligence gathering and facilitated enemy recruitment. The Senate Intelligence Committee is currently undertaking a similar report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program. In addition, both chambers of Congress voted in favor of limiting the intelligence community to the Army Field Manual's interrogation techniques to make clear that the torture prohibition was absolute.

And more recently, after the killing of Osama bin Laden Sen. John McCain delivered a floor speech attributing the successes of Seal Team 6 to practically everything under the sun with the exception of the use of torture.

However, as we've seen again this week, the former vice president remains free to boast of his 'tough' interrogation polices because there has been little to no effort to hold Bush administration officials accountable for the torture and abuses they oversaw. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has made it clear that they would rather look forward and not back.

But holding those responsible accountable for their actions is critical to ensure that we never return to a time where torture is authorized against anyone. The Bush administration's torture polices may have been marginalized, hopefully to the point of no return, but the only way to ensure that is through accountability.

Follow us on Twitter where we'll tweeting live on Friday, September 9, 2011 from 9-10 a.m. EDT from an event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute where former vice president Dick Cheney will speak. The event is a 9/11 anniversary conversation entitled "Ten Years After: Lessons Learned, Lessons Unlearned."

Earlier today, we appeared in court for a hearing on our motion to hold the CIA in contempt of the court for destroying 92 videotapes depicting torture of two prisoners, Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri. (Coincidentally, the argument came on the nine-year anniversary of two of the “torture memos” that purported to provide legal cover for the brutal interrogation CIA detainees).

We argued that the CIA showed complete disdain for the court and the rule of law itself when it flouted several court orders to produce the videotapes and instead destroyed them. To provide some background, in September 2004, the court first ordered the CIA to produce or identify all records pertaining to the treatment of detainees in its custody, which would have included at least 92 videotapes documenting the harsh interrogation of the two prisoners. Despite the orders, the CIA never produced the tapes or even acknowledged their existence. Unbeknownst to the public, the tapes were destroyed in November 2005, a year after the court’s first order, although the destruction was not publicly revealed until 2007. This motion came in our ongoing litigation under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for records related to the detention and treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad.

After a lively round of arguments, the judge sanctioned the CIA for its attempt to evade the law and will require the agency to pay our legal fees for costs incurred in bringing the misconduct to light. The judge also asked the CIA to publish its forthcoming document-destruction policies, which are being considered in response to our litigation to prevent this type of destruction from occurring again. Finally, the judge commented that the ACLU had played an “extraordinary” role in revealing to the public information about the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. However, in his ruling from the bench, the judge failed to hold the CIA in contempt of court, leaving unaddressed our larger concerns about accountability.

Though the Court’s sanctioning of the CIA is a positive step for accountability, it falls short of the full accounting necessary before we can turn the page on the last decade. Far more disturbing than the CIA’s destruction of the tapes is the CIA’s authorization of the brutal mistreatment captured by the tapes. By destroying that evidence of criminal activity in direct violation of the judge's clear instructions, the agency's top officials aimed to deny the public and the courts the chance to hold them accountable.

Learn more about torture: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.

Over the last few weeks, some apologists for torture have argued that Navy Seals were able to locate Osama bin Laden only because of evidence obtained through torture. We think Sen. John McCain and CIA Director Leon Panetta effectively quashed that argument. There's no evidence that torture worked, and there's lots of evidence it didn't.

What we ought to be focused on now is making sure that no future administration revives the torture policies that the Bush administration authorized. This is why tomorrow's "Reckoning with Torture " event at Lincoln Center in New York is so important. "Reckoning with Torture" is an ACLU/PEN American Center event series that delivers key facts of the U.S. torture program through dramatic readings of documents related to the torture program, combined with video testimonials from former Guantánamo detainees and artwork by artist Jenny Holzer . (If you don't believe that an evening of readings of torture documents could be anything less than completely captivating, read this review of our Sundance event on Slate .)

Tomorrow's stellar lineup includes Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, former CIA officer Jack Rice, author Russell Banks and actresses Lili Taylor and Dianne Wiest.

When: May 24, 7 p.m.
Where: Walter Reade Cinema , Lincoln Center (165 West 65th St., New York, NY)
Cost: $12 general admission; $7 for ACLU/PEN American Center/Film Society at Lincoln Center members

Jack Rice blogged Saturday: "As a former CIA officer, I have extremely strong feeling about [torture]. However, as a criminal defense attorney who walks into courtrooms everyday to stand up for the rights of my clients, I feel the need to stand up as well. Because if we don't, who will[?]"

There are a few tickets left—buy them here, and be part of the conversation!

Learn more about accountability for torture: Subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.