There's a great article on torture from Slavoj Zizek in the New York Times. He argues that we all are the victims of the routinisation of torture. Corruption comes in many ways and "we are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably our civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity."

Welcome to the desert of the real.