But just then, McCain, who spent five and a half years in a POW camp in Vietnam, decided to rain on the parade. “If we torture people,” he said sadly, "what happens to our military people when they’re captured?" After the debate, he went even further, offering a history lesson on one of America’s choicest "enhanced" interrogation techniques, water-boarding. "Do you know where that was invented?” McCain asked. "In the Spanish Inquisition. Do we want to do things that were done in the Spanish Inquisition?"

For a first-person account of the torture McCain and other captured airmen suffered in the Hanoi Hilton, I recommend Prisoner of War: Six Years in Hanoi by John M. McGrath.

Milgram concluded that ordinary people will follow orders even if the result is to produce great suffering in innocent others. Asked whether something like Nazism could occur in the United States, Milgram memorably replied that "if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town."

The next title, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism , describes how systemic torture is a key strategy used by right-wing dictatorships around the globe

For a fictionalized but entirely believable account of torture from the point of view of an American torturer, I strongly recommend The Contractor by Charles Holdefer. ( The Permanent Press, New York)

George isn't just trying to figure out who he is; he is trying to figure out what his country is, and whether he is a good guy or just another terrorist wearing a different suit of clothes.