These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Torture wasn’t confined to Guantánamo. In Iraq, American forces inflicted torture at Abu Ghraib, and in Afghanistan, in a CIA prison in Kabul and at Bagram Air Base, where, in 2002, two men died while chained to the ceiling of their cells. Within the legal academy and among civil liberties organizations, opposition both to provisions of the Patriot Act and to the treatment of suspected terrorists had been ongoing. During Barack Obama’s 2003 Senate bid, he called the Patriot Act “a good example of fundamental principles being violated,” and objected to the lack of due process in the arrest and trials of suspected terrorists. Glimpses of what was happening only reached the American public in 2004, after The New Yorker and 60 Minutes reported on abuses at Abu Ghraib and the ACLU published the torture memos. In June 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that, without congressional authorization, the president lacked the power to establish the military commissions. Six months later, Congress authorized the commissions, but in 2008, the court found this act unconstitutional as well.86 Still, something crucial about the fundamental institutions on which the nation had been founded had been very badly shaken.