“THE PHYSICISTS HAVE KNOWN SIN, AND THIS IS A KNOWLEDGE WHICH they cannot lose,” reflected Robert Oppenheimer on the dropping of the atomic bombs in Japan. Oppenheimer was referring both to the particular physicists involved in the Manhattan Project, including himself, and to physicists in general. A discipline whose traditional aim was the production of knowledge had become, in the pressures of war, a discipline producing fear and death.

When the Justice Department torture memos were initially leaked to the press, Oppenheimer's line floated through my mind. The lawyers too now know sin. The government lawyers who produced, reviewed, and apparently endorsed these memoranda, including lawyers at both the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense, spent their creative energies shaping a policy whose aim and effect was to legitimate previously illegitimate forms of interrogation and captive treatment – forms ranging from the cruelty and degradation of forced nudity, sexual humiliation, sensory deprivation, and prolonged use of stress positions – to the clearly torturous, most notably including the practice of “waterboarding,” wherein interrogees are submerged in cold water so as to create the impression of imminent suffocation.

As a result of these memoranda, law itself also now knows sin, or at least has become profoundly reacquainted with it. One of the signal, if incomplete, victories for the Enlightened rule of law – a campaign fought by Voltaire and Beccaria – has been the erasure of torture from the menu of governmental policy choices.