Hoodwinked

A few years ago, Dahlia Lithwick wrote about the connection between the torture photos taken at Abu Ghraib and the congressional debate over detainee treatment rules. She argued that the leaked photos, along with memos from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel that redefined torture in appalling new ways, were not in fact a public relations blow to the Bush administration, but a sort of foot in the door for looser torture standards—a way to begin desensitizing the American people to the kinds of abuse that had been going on in secret. Two years after the images surfaced, Congress enacted a law essentially permitting the acts depicted. And just as those images paved the way to our broader torture policy, the CIA torture tapes now stand to do the same thing for water-boarding in particular.

An investigation is currently underway to determine who authorized the destruction of the CIA interrogation tapes. But as Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced this month, there will be no investigation into the water-boarding depicted in the tapes, because it's not illegal, or it wasn't at the time of the interrogations. Our views on water-boarding seem to be on the same trajectory as our views on sexual humiliation and stress positions—it looked sort of awful at first, but after a few months it seemed more like a fraternity prank. That's the road we're headed down with water-boarding. We've gone from banning it to trivializing it to justifying it. We are becoming inured to torture at approximately the same rate that it's becoming legal. How convenient.

Now President Bush is promising to veto anti-torture legislation that Congress just passed. John McCain—who has surfed the public opinion waves on torture more deftly than anyone—says he supports the president. A few more months of government mincing and parsing on the subject will leave us confused at best and more apathetic at worst. If there really are thousands of hours of videotaped interrogations at Guantanamo, we should be clamoring to see them now, while they might still be able to horrify us.