With most of the nation's eyes on a tight presidential race heading into its final days, it is hardly surprising that the growing allegations of torture and abuse of detainees carried out by U.S. authorities have largely fallen off the political radar screen. Neither campaign has much interest in saying anything that could be seen as negative about our troops, the vast majority of whom have indeed performed admirably. Likewise, the last topic any member of Congress facing re-election wants to discuss is how to be more “sensitive” to the laws against torture in the “war on terrorism.”

Almost as soon as the planes crashed into the twin towers, scholars, pundits, and politicians began asserting that our most important challenge as a democracy now is to reassess the balance between liberty and security. As Harvard human-rights scholar Michael Ignatieff wrote in The Financial Times on September 12, “As America awakens to the reality of being at war -- and permanently so -- with an enemy that has as yet no face and no name, it must ask itself what balance it should keep between liberty and security in the battle with terrorism.”