by Harvey A. Silverglate

About the author: Harvey A. Silverglate is a lawyer and the coauthor of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses.

Among the unsettling effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and the anthrax mailings that followed is their triggering, seemingly overnight, of a national debate over whether the United States should practice torture—as a matter of national policy—to combat terrorism. The pro- torture camp wants to authorize law-enforcement agents to inflict intense physical pain in order to extract information from suspected terrorists (the word “suspected” is often conveniently omitted by the law’s proponents) where that information might pinpoint the location of a “ticking bomb&rdquo...