So it’s significant that today they’ve released a report calling on the United States to follow its legal obligation to prosecute the leaders in the U.S. government responsible for the “torture, cruel and inhuman treatment” of detainees during its own “war on terror.”

“Investigations and prosecutions should focus on the engineers of official policies that were the basis of illegal abuses, to send a clear signal that the absolute prohibition of torture and the ban on cruel and inhuman treatment will be respected by the United States,” the report said, adding that if the U.S. government fails to initiate prosecutions, then other countries will take up the cause. Italy, for example, recently convicted 23 Americans for their involvement in “extraordinary renditions.”

“Failing to hold accountable the architects and overseers of a policy of abuse undermines the U.S. justice system and the fundamental idea that law provides a check on power,” Alex Boraine, acting president of ICTJ, said in a statement today. “As we have seen in countless examples around the world, abuse of power by allowing torture and cruel treatment can tear down what the law and democracy have built.”

While there’s support among many Democrats for some sort of accountability, whether through criminal prosecutions or an independent truth commission, Republicans vehemently resist any suggestion that the Bush administration even did anything wrong.

Since Attorney General Eric Holder announced on Friday that the Justice Department would try the alleged 9/11 co-conspirators in a U.S. federal court in New York, some Republicans have denounced the move as an illegitimate attempt to put the Bush administration, rather than the terrorists, on trial.

“The government is going to try to put Khalid Sheik Mohammed on trial. Defense lawyers will try and put the government on trial,” former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Fox News.

Tom Ridge, head of the Department of Homeland Security during the Bush administration, added that any effort to use the 9/11 trial to “delve into a fishing expedition” to go after Bush officials is “wrong and unconscionable.”

Meanwhile, in The Wall Street Journal today, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo — a potential target of any future criminal prosecution of Bush officials — attacked the decision to try the 9/11 detainees in federal court as a dangerous mistake. “The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than as an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism,” Yoo wrote. “It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war.”

Writing about the case of Rasul v. Myers, in which four British former Gitmo detainees are suing for allegedly being tortured and denied their religious rights while imprisoned by US authorities — the Times bravely writes that “Part of the process of undoing that ugly legacy [of detainee abuse] is making clear that detainees have the right to sue if they were tortured or otherwise abused.”

Doing that could change everything. Imagine if hundreds of even thousands of victims around the world sued the US government for damages. How much do you get for being tortured? for indefinite detention? for religious abuse and humiliation? Canada paid Maher Arar — the Canadian sent to Syria to be tortured — $11 million in compensation. Will the US be liable for many billions?

So far, there have been surprisingly few civil cases brought against the US by torture victims, in part because suing is costly, the outcome is uncertain and appeals can go on for years. The Rasul case was made possible by the pro bono representation of the Washington law firm Baach Robinson & Lewis, working with the Center for Constitutional Rights, and hoping to establish exactly the precedent the Times is advocating for now.

The DC Circuit, instructed to reconsider its ruling in light of Boumediene v. Bush, which made clear that detainees imprisoned by the US in Cuba do have rights under the US Constitution, could now decide that US officials are not immune from lawsuits brought by torture victims, because the right not to be tortured has long been well established in both US and international law. It could also decide that the 750 or so men who’ve been held at Gitmo are indeed “persons” protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, something the court oddly denied before. And there are thousands of others held by US authorities abroad whose rights under the US Constitution have yet to be decided.

All this could — and perhaps should — open the door to a flood of lawsuits by alleged victims of torture, physical and psychological abuse and religious deprivation, as I’ve explained before. As in the Arar case, there are strong arguments for why victims of torture at the hands of the US government deserve a remedy.

But should torture victims really have to pay a lawyer to take their case to court and wait years for a result? And is the US willing to pay billions of dollars in damages?

The better approach might be one suggested to me by Carolyn Patty Blum, a consultant for the International Center for Transitional Justice: have an investigatory commission set up both to investigate what crimes were committed and compensate their victims. That’s a common role for Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that have been created or considered around the world, and while it wouldn’t and shouldn’t preclude prosecution of criminals, it could make compensating the victims far easier for everyone involved.

A slew of lawsuits isn’t hard to imagine. About 750 people have been detained as suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. Thousands more have been held around the world. Many claim they were tortured, and we know from the Bush administration’s own documents that tactics such as waterboarding, stress positions, extreme hot and cold, blaring music and sleep deprivation, and sexual and religious humiliation were all among the tactics used to wring information out of them.

Although the Military Commissions Act tries to preclude lawsuits filed by enemy combatants, many of the people held were never determined to be enemy combatants, or were still held after they were cleared for release. Of the lawsuits already filed against US officials by detainees, none of them were ever deemed enemy combatants. The Second Circuit heard arguments in the case of Maher Arar this week, and lawyers on the other case (Rasul v. Rumsfeld) have asked the US Supreme Court for review. The court will consider the request when it meets on Friday.

Although all sorts of immunities protect US officials from wrongdoing on the job, there’s a strong argument to be made that torture can never be considered part of a government official’s job, so those immunities shouldn’t apply. And the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which protects against violations of detainees’ religious rights, such as having their Koran flushed down the toilet or being forcibly shaven, is very broad. (That didn’t stop the DC Circuit from dismissing four British detainees’ claims under it earlier this year, though, as I’ve written about before.)

But as I was talking to Carolyn Patty Blum the other day, an emeritus law professor at Berkeley and consultant to the International Center for Transitional Justice, she mentioned that a commission set up to investigate torture and other abuses perpetrated by Bush officials could also recommend, in addition to prosecution, a means by which torture victims can be compensated. Even if Bush were to pardon himself and his officials, a topic of much recent discussion, that wouldn’t shield anybody from future civil lawsuits demanding monetary compensation. But a statute that set up an investigative commission that had the power to, among other things, recommend compensating victims of torture and arbitrary detention, could also protect the US government from some costly future litigation.

“If a commission led to the creation of some sort of process that allows people to clear their name and apply for some sort of monetary compensation for being arbitrarily detained, one of the benefits is it would foreclose the ability for people to pursue another remedy,” Blum explained. “That would be a net gain in terms of cost savings for the new administration.”

Although that’s not the primary reason why Obama should create an investigative commission — Scott Horton at Harper’s has made the case for one quite well — it’s yet another argument in its favor.