To the Editor:

“Owning Up to Torture,” by Eric Fair, a former private contractor in Iraq (Sunday Review, March 20), is a chilling reminder of how easy it is to become a torturer yet how difficult it is to live as a former torturer. Combine a superior’s order with vilifying the “other” in the midst of real or perceived danger, and almost anyone will torture.

America’s core values and security demand that we choose leaders who have the wisdom and courage not to torture. Recent remarks by Donald Trump about torture demonstrate neither. We must reject such fear-mongering and hatred.

ALLEN S. KELLER

New York

The writer, an associate professor at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, is director of the Bellevue-N.Y.U. Program for Survivors of Torture.

To the Editor:

I was one in a relatively small cadre of Army interrogators for the first year of the Iraq war. Unlike the private-contract “professionals” who replaced us, we were bound by doctrine, the Geneva and Hague Conventions, the Law of Land Warfare, and, above all, a strong sense of American decency.