I’m not sure that I see it so clearly associated with just certain administrations, I think it is still going on (and has been world wide since time immemorial), perhaps at a much lower level now. Torture (and serial rape and murder and violence person-against-person in the context of war or peace) will go on and on regardless of administration or how previous offenders were handled. That’s our nature – we want what we want for whatever reasons and some of us will stop at nothing to get it. Until we reach a point where the whole thought of that kind of thing never enters people’s minds as a means of getting to goals, we’ll have it again and again, regardless of any policy of handling offenders or Geneva conventions. I have always believed that I’m capable of incredible violence towards somebody who hurts somebody close to me. I don’t know how I would react, but I think I could have hunted somebody down and personally killed them, at least as a younger woman. Luckily, I’ve never been in a position of putting that to the test, so I guess at a level I don’t see myself as so different from the torturers. Most of us are potential torturers in the right situation, so the real question is how to change that propensity in ourselves.

I think the new values represented by Obama have a better chance of moving us forward toward an end point where this stops. I can hope so, but I don’t really know… I guess I’m not as big a believer in the power of the political process as you are. We need deeper transformations than that can achieve. And until everyone gets on board with the idea, we’re all screwed. Oh well, just my view of it.