I don’t even know how to title this blog post.

This is the article in the New York Review of Books by Mark Danner, that comments on the International Red Cross report about the treatment of prisoners (oh, excuse me, detainees) after rendition to Guantanimo Bay and other secret U.S. prisons.

And so, after a devastating and unprecedented attack, the gloves came off. Guided by the President and his closest advisers, the United States transformed itself from a country that, officially at least, condemned torture to a country that practiced it. And this fateful decision, however much we may want it to, will not go away, any more than the fourteen “high-value detainees,” tortured and thus unprosecutable, will go away. Like the grotesque stories in the ICRC report, the decision sits before us, a toxic fact, polluting our political and moral life.

A shorter synopsis appeared in the Sunday New York Times.

The author’s web page includes audio interviews.