The intense and ongoing national debate on torture was stoked recently by Kathryn Bigelow’s film “Zero Dark Thirty.” In an essay at The Nation, Samuel Moyn uses the film as a jumping off point to discuss contemporary thinking on the subject. Against popular accounts, such as that of The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Moyn points out that torture, sadly, is not a new practice for the United States government. What is novel, according to Moyn, is the idea of torture as a taboo, a development whose origins some have traced to Amnesty International’s 1973 anti-torture campaign.

Actually, that's a very important point.

Torture, like slavery and not letting women vote, used to be accepted in U.S. society.

It's only very recently that we've come to question and reject systematic torture.