If you haven’t already seen it, read this article in Harper’s entitled “We Still Torture.” Then go listen to “Blackout Beach” by the Kominas.
Now we have entered what we may wish to call the post-torture era, except that it is not. Indeed, we cannot even revert to the easy hypocrisy of the Cold War. We have returned to our traditional practice of torturing and pretending not to, but the old routine is no longer convincing. We know too much. We know that we are still imprisoning men who very likely are completely innocent. We know that we still beat them. We know that we still use a series of punishments and interrogation techniques—touch and “no touch”— that any normal person would ac- knowledge to be torture. And we know that when those men protest such treatment by refusing to eat, we strap them to chairs and force food down their throats. We know all of this because it is well documented, not just by reporters and activists but by the torturers themselves.