The only thing worse than watching a slow-motion train wreck is to watch people who should know better move the switches to make sure the trains collide. I don’t know how else to describe the White House’s last few days in explaining who should and should not be investigated/prosecuted for torture.

For years now, we’ve known that a group of lawless White House and Senior Administration officials ordered brutal methods recognized as torture be used to extract information from detainees. We know this group orchestrated the interrogations and the methods used. We’ve learned that this group kept pushing for more, because they were not getting the answers they wanted to justify their war policies. [kudos to JimWhite]

These officials were facilitated by a group of morally compliant DoJ attorneys who willingly wrote legally bogus memos to define away and thus sanction torture. And the policies were carried out by a group of CIA operatives who obviously knew it was wrong (and whose superiors destroyed evidence) and so demanded CYA legal authorizations and orders from the President.

And finally, we know the White House — and what used to be called the Justice Department — did everything they could to cover up their conspiracies to commit war crimes.

Given this set of well known facts, any normal eight-year old would conclude that if anyone were ever held accountable, it should be those officals at the top who ordered these policies, followed by sanctions for the compliant attorneys. Only then, unless you could establish good faith reliance, you’d hold accountable those who carried out the orders.

In other words, you would do the opposite of what happened with Lynndie England at Abu Ghraib. But this weekend, the WH tried to argue, in effect, that John Yoo was just another Lynndie England.

Everyone with any decency knew that dismissing what happened at Abu Ghraib as the work of a few bad apples acting without encouragement/authorization from senior officials was dishonest. Restricting legal accountability to that level was morally repugnant, destructive of accountable government and the rule of law. But apparently, this simple principle of accountability escaped the White House counselers. Hence the slow-motion, but entirely avoidable, train wreck.

On Sunday, Rahm began throwing the wrong switches by insisting that Obama did not mean to excuse only CIA operatives, as his statements suggested; Rahm assured us the President really meant that people who ordered the policies should also not be prosecuted.

But by Monday, the White House threw another wrong switch, declaring they would not rule out legal sanctions against the attorneys who wrote the OLC memos. That implied that those who were manipulating/ordering the OLC attorneys — the WH group demanding more brutal interrogations and insisting OLC write cover memos — would not be investigated. Now the crash was virtually certain.

By Tuesday, President Obama was forced to contradict Rahm Emanuel and move the switches himself, but not far enough:

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Tuesday left open the door to creating a bipartisan commission that would investigate the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects, and he did not rule out taking action against the lawyers who fashioned the legal guidelines for the interrogations.

That switch left Press Secretary Gibbs to fumble with the inevitable question: doesn’t this mean that an investigation would have to hold WH officials accountable too?

To which the only honest answer is, and always has been, uh, "Yes; what did you expect when the President and Vice President and their closest advisers order the CIA to torture people?"

Tell AG Holder we need a special prosecutor — sign the petition.