The New York Review of Books has a new installment in Mark Danner's reports on the abuse of detainees held in secret CIA prisons after Sept. 11, 2001. As you recall, his previous article focused on what the International Committee of the Red Cross found in its interviews with 14 so-called high value detainees who were delivered from CIA limbo to Guantanamo in September 2006.

What should we do about those who tortured and, more importantly, those who authorized torture in the name of the United States is the theme of Danner's latest piece. The evidence of torture has become irrefutable. Danner writes:

The reports on American torture now fill a shelf next to my desk, beginning with the Taguba Report in 2004, still perhaps the best of them, and then going on to include the ICRC report on Abu Ghraib, the Schlesinger Report, the Fay/Jones Report, the Church Report, the Schmidt Report, and now the Armed Services Committee Report, the full text of which will soon break into the news in all its glory, telling us in much more conclusive detail a story the major outlines of which we already know. More revelations will come from this, and more news, particularly about the mechanics by which prominent senior officials approved use of the "alternative set of procedures" and closely monitored their day-to-day application. We will continue in an endless round-robin of revelation, in which we tell ourselves we are learning something new though in fact, when it comes to the central problem of torture—what we as a society should do about it and whether we will in fact do anything—we are in the end simply repeating to ourselves things, however increasingly detailed and awful, that we already know.

And yet there is one thing we don't really know: Did it do any good? We have Cheney's assertions, but every judicial proceeding that has come to light on Guantanamo seems to argue that little interrogators learned was of any real value. Danner says no one, not those who oppose torture, not those who favor it, really wants to find out the answer.

Aside from the article itself, the New York Review of Books has also reproduced the Red Cross report. It too is well worth the reading.