US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites

War crimes. That's what we call them when other countries do this...

We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase 'War on Terror'—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was 'a wartime president'—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead.

Warning: There's a lot more, but it's really really ugly...
Read more at The New York Review of Books.