Interesting that you would ask that because as I was reading the article I kept thinking that it's beneficial to the US government to stop prosecuting these thi

Interesting that you would ask that because as I was reading the article I kept thinking that it's beneficial to the US government to stop prosecuting these things due to two reasons. 1) Maintaining a facade of complete denial. 2) Not giving credence to the idea that there were two people willing to rat out their government due to what they had seen, so as to maintain the possibility that it was just a lone rogue. But this is just my external perspective, as a european who never set foot on US soil.