As the New York Times reports, no one will pay any price for the U.S.’s embrace of torture conducted in the wake of September 11.

After five years of often bitter internal debate, the Justice Department concluded in a report released Friday that the lawyers who gave legal justification to the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation tactics for terrorism suspects used flawed legal reasoning but were not guilty of professional misconduct.

Sure, the lawyers may have enabled war crimes–in contravention of international and domestic law as well as any notions of decency–but taking away their license to practice law would just be a step to far.