ABSTRACT
Torture, under governing international and domestic legal rules, is limited in most circumstances to state action. But in today’s sprawling military and intelligence bureaucracies, the grip that torture has on the human psyche gives it special virulence. Rooting out torture is more difficult than addressing many other kinds of human rights violations because the spaces of torture namely police interrogation rooms, forward operating bases in Iraq, or Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prisons around the world lie beyond the ken of ordinary judicial or democratic control. To the contrary, torture has been endemic to liberal democracies, where it has long been used to entrench boundaries of social, class, and especially racial stratification. A tripartite strategy, echoing the administration’s flaws, is required to reduce torture that involves law, leadership, and sunlight. To fight against the kind of torture perpetrated in Iraq in these ways is to set the nation’s face against a strain in human nature that cannot be eliminated, only mitigated.
