Our Obsession with Otherness Runs Deep (The Mantle)

With the torture debate making its way back into the headlines in recent weeks, I have found myself sifting through old news clips and articles from the spring of 2009. In April of that year, President Obama called for the release of what came to be known as the “torture memos”. These memos documented the Bush Administration’s efforts to create a legal argument allowing for the use of torture (referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques”) on high value targets in the “war on terror.” Notable contributors to these documents were none other than Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, David Addington and John Yoo, just to name a few. Read more…