By Matthew Schofield, Kansas City Star editorial board columnist

Here's a central problem with the notion of accountability in the matter of CIA interrogations:

It's never going to come. Not really.

It's easy for President Barack Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder to note that the facts of these practices were worse than first thought, and need further scrutiny.

Holder's words: "As attorney general, my job is to examine the facts and follow the law... Given all of the information currently available, it is clear to me that this review is the only responsible course of action for me to take."

CIA interrogators reportedly choked one detainee, and threatened the lives of the children of another.

Okay, those are easy calls. Those things aren't allowed.

But where does this investigation lead? Where can it lead? Does it lead us to the CIA agents alleged to have conducted these interrogations?

Clearly, these agents were wrong.

But that stops well short of the more important question: Why? Why did they conduct such interrogations?

And that answer is not nearly as easy. Post September 11, we've been a nation intent on making sure it never happens again.

The pressure to get information, at any cost, came from everywhere. Clearly, it came from the White House. the rhetoric of President George W.Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney was un-ambiguous. We may have pretended that we didn't know what they were talking about when the President directed the military and CIA to use all means necessary to destroy Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

But that's not true. We knew they were talking about torture. Heck, we celebrated it. Jack Bauer was (is?) only a television character, but he was as close to an intelligence officer as most Americans ever got, and he was cheered on as he ripped out human rights laws as if they were facial tissues (Hell, he once cut off a guy's head to get someone else to talk, didn't he?).

The support for this abhorrent behavior began in the White House and trickled down onto Main Street.

So while it might be easy to find that these agents operated outside the bounds of what should be acceptable, its much tougher to affix blame properly.

Bush is to blame. Cheney is to blame. We're all to blame. We were all in this War on Terror together, and we were all just fine with the idea that whatever was going on was acceptable, for the greater good.

Now, criminally charging a former president for policy decision, no matter how wrong-headed, seems like a step too far. If the Obama abministration charges Bush, doesn't the next GOP administration, or a future one, have to figure out a way to charge Obama, or at least some Democrat?

That's a path to madness. Instead, we collectively apologize, to each other, and promise it will not happen again.

We recommit ourselves to being a nation of law, and a nation that values life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We recommit to the notion that the end does not justify the means. We take the black-eye we gave ourselves, forgive ourselves, and move on.

And we dump the idea of finding stooges for our empire.