Remember when the George W. Bush administration began sweeping up suspected terrorists and whisking them off, hooded and shackled, to offshore CIA "black sites" around the world where they were tortured into confessing to all sorts of crimes?
So many moral crises have come and gone since then, it is beginning to feel like the distant past.
These days, Bush has retired into the comfortable role of elder statesman. John Yoo, who prepared the legal justification for the torture program, is a tenured law professor at UC Berkeley. Gina Haspel, who oversaw the agency's black site in Thailand, was promoted to CIA director under President Donald Trump. No criminal charges were pursued against the torturers themselves.
