Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it
The perpetrators of the Inquisition - the torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actions - were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God - popes, bishops, friars, and priests.
Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those "easy speeches that comfort cruel men.
People on the right say to people like me, Oh, you hate America. And I always say, No, I love America. I want it back. I don't want you representing it. I don't want torture representing it. If I hated it, I'd be okay with being represented by the torturers.
Torture is senseless violence, born in fear. . . torture costs human lives but does not save them. We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages: the truth is that torture makes torturers.