Practically everyone from U.S. President Barack Obama to newspaper columnists has reacted to the bombing of the Boston Marathon by declaring that Americans will not abandon their daily habits, or their deepest values, in the face of another terrorist attack. Be it so. But a report on the torture of detainees in the United States and abroad, released the day after the Boston attack, painfully reminds us of what America’s leaders permitted themselves to do — and the American people permitted them to do — in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. And there is little reason to be confident that it wouldn’t happen again.

The report of the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment concludes that ‘it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.’ We knew that, of course. But this 577-page report not only reminds us of every sickening thing the United States did in the name of protecting Americans from the threat of terrorist attack, but it comes under the unimpeachably bipartisan seal of co-chairs James R. Jones, a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma, and Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas who later served in George W. Bush’s Department of […]