By George Friedman
Editor's Note: This piece was originally published in April 2009, as U.S. President Barack Obama – at that time only a few months into his first term – began to reverse key security policies and decisions made by his predecessor, George W. Bush. We are re-distributing the piece in light of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s blistering report this week on CIA interrogation practices implemented after the 9/11 attacks.
On the scale of human cruelty, these actions do not rise anywhere near the top. At the same time, anyone who thinks that being placed without food in a freezing cell subject to random mild beatings — all while being told that your family might be joining you — isn't agonizing clearly lacks imagination. The treatment of detainees could have been worse. It was terrible nonetheless.
But torture is meant to be terrible, and we must judge the torturer in the context of his own desperation. In the wake of 9/11, anyone who wasn't terrified was not in touch with reality. We know several people who now are quite blasé about 9/11. Unfortunately for them, we knew them in the months after, and they were not nearly as composed then as they are now.
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