Tom Engelhardt’s one of the best commentators on our appalling times that I know. Here he reminds us that the US has been long been using waterboarding (since at least the long war to colonize the Philippines a century ago), that torture has been standard operating procedure for the national security state (either directly or through trained surrogates), that projects like the CIA’s Operation Phoenix kidnapped, tortured, and murdered tens of thousands of Vietnamese. But most of these things were far away, marginal to the general run of the American fantasy, and, of course, officially deniable. No longer. Now the kidnapping, torture, and imprisonment of enemies (or as Abu Ghraib and our own domestic criminal justice system reveal, alleged enemies), is right out in the open, acceptable and official. Concentration camps, torture centers, and extrajudicial execution are a given. Politicians lobby for it. It’s permeated our culture, our politics and of course our entertainment. GOP candidates, to show how “tough” they are, boast that they’ll be the ones to expand the camps, torture more people, and make habeas corpus but a dream of pussy fifth-columnist liberals. Even third party dreamboats like Mike Bloomberg have accepted it; his instant prison camp during the GOP convention was a squalid containment of legitimate and vital dissent.