The United States, even as it pursued its neo-imperial ambitions, championed the human rights revolution that began after World War II. But today, for the first time since the late Forties, Americans and their government are demonstrably headed in the opposite direction. It is not simply that assassination has become a mainstay of US foreign policy. It is that these things are the new normal: torture; cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; indefinite detention; assassination; extra-judicial killing. This is not who we are, as President Obama was fond of saying. And yet, it is what we do.
