In the January/February 2012 issue of The Atlantic, Cullen Murphy writes about the history of torture and relates it to current events.

Excerpt:  “The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” and “waterboarding” all spring from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short–and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.”

Read the full article at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/torturer-8217-s-apprentice/8838/