Constitutional Law

Desensitized to Torture?

Dahlia Lithwick writes on Slate that the American people are becoming desensitized to the government's use of torture – "we've gone from banning it to trivializing it to justifying it."

If there really are thousands of hours of videotaped interrogations at Guantanamo, we should be clamoring to see them now, while they might still be able to horrify us. John Yoo and Steven Bradbury think that an interrogation method is torture only if it produces irrevocable damage. But long after the torture tapes are forgotten, what may be irrevocably damaged is our capacity for outrage.

More information is available on the CIA's destruction of videotaped interrogations.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on February 22, 2008 (boomark / email).