Philosophers long have pondered what separates humans from the great apes with whom we share 95 percent or more of our DNA.
Is it the ability to make and use tools? To remember the past and plan for the future?…

Christopher Hitchens, the tough minded journalist and social critic, undergoes torture waterboarding for Vanity Fair and talks and writes about the experience.

Read some commentary about his effort here.

David Addington, as chief counsel and then chief of staff to the vice president, and John Yoo, as a member of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, occupied top tier staff positions in national…

PANEL 1:
SEN. LEVIN: Good morning, everybody. Today’s hearing will focus on the origins of aggressive interrogation techniques used against detainees in U.S. custody. We have three panels of witnesses today, and I want to thank them for their willingness…

My column today pulls together and reflects on last week’s three major developments in America’s ongoing effort to understand how the Bush administration came to approve and use abusive interrogation techniques on prisoners — something that violates every principle of…

John C. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California-Berkeley. From 2001 through 2003, he served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice. It was there that…

For anyone interested in diving into the torture pool, which was the subject of my oped column of April 9, there’s no shortage of original documents on the subject. Here are links to a few that are mentioned in the column –…