Exporting homegrown torture

Torturing other human beings does something to a person, something dark and deep and ugly. And by allowing it to become part of the fabric of our military training and intelligence gathering we were making some American soldiers and agents into people for whom torture became an end unto itself. We wondered, how many of these people were out there? And what would happen when they came home?

That question remains unanswered. But this series by Spencer Ackerman in the Guardian raises an entirely different one. Perhaps the question isn’t whether those who took part in torture will bring their immoral practices back to America but whether America actually took its existing dark practices to those prison camps around the world...