...This was deliberate; governments that torture deny in public what they did in secret. To make the denial credible, victims must not speak. But isolation serves another purpose, equally pernicious but less readily grasped. It prevents victims from revealing themselves as complete human beings. Without form or voice, post-9/11 prisoners exist only as disembodied avatars of evil, menacing images on a screen. They do not love or laugh or mourn. They have no frailty, no grief, no regret. They lack what all humans possess: a past that brought them to this day and a will that can take them elsewhere. Isolation finishes what torture begins: it robs a victim of the things that make us human. ...

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