A reader writes:

I would agree with Ross Douthat's point that the difference between the theory of "stress positions" and the reality of their systematic application is a distinction that is easier to maintain in the abstract than in the real world. The problem is that the actual visualization of "enhanced interrogation techniques" takes a kind of difficult, forced empathy that is very easy to glide over unless you sit still mentally and actually take your mind to the circumstances, the conditions, the minutes of what that experience might be like. And if you don't do that, it becomes that much easier to rationalize the behavior.

In some horrific way, Abu Ghraib removed the last excuse to rationalize it. And that is why I find the over-reach of the Bush-Cheney administration more explicable early on, and utterly indefensible thereafter. To persist in the policy even after Abu Ghraib, and to insist that the right to torture anyone is a permanent power inherent in the American executive is simply unforgivable. I cannot imagine any founding father agreeing that the constitution allows an American president to name anyone he wants an "enemy combatant" and to seize him indefinitely and torture him at will to procure confessions to justfy the seizure in the first place.

Now look again at the photograph of US citizen Jose Padilla above. Again: it's just a glimpse of the hell Cheney created. Padilla was charged with planning to detonate a dirty bomb in a major city, picked up on American soil, and thrown into a torture chamber until he was made insane. The original charges were dropped and the ones he was convicted on relatively trivial. He's no angel -- but Americans do not need to be angels to be free of this kind of brutality.