GLOBAL DIALOGUE Volume 12 ● Number 1 ● Winter/Spring 2010—Working the Dark Side

The Illusion of Accountability: The Idea of an American Truth Commission on Torture

STUART STREICHLER

Stuart Streichler is a faculty associate at the University of Washington Center for Human Rights and an adjunct professor at the Seattle University School of Law. He is the author of Justice Curtis in the Civil War Era: At the Crossroads of American Constitutionalism (University of Virginia Press, 2005).

erhaps there can be nothing more revealing about George W. Bush’s presidency than his facile and repeated assertion that “the United States does not torture”. And perhaps, as the American public became aware of mounting evidence to the contrary, nothing reveals more about contemporary politics in the United States than the ensuing debate over whether—and how—to bring to account persons...