My daily dose of humor was supplied by the original headline for this article, which was “Report cites evidence that US ‘outsources’ torture.” I had brief visions of lines of ex-CIA types outside unemployment offices.

In all seriousness, though, I wonder how much real indignation there is about such things. All societies—including our oh-so-enlightened European allies—have practiced torture (or Gitmo-style “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Torture”) since time immemorial, and while its use has generally been restricted to suspected scumbags in recent history, it still happens, wink-wink nudge-nudge denials, treaties, commitments, ad nauseum notwithstanding.

And, ironically, the incentives for torture may be higher in a democracy than a non-democracy. If the Spanish Popular Party government had waterboarded a few folks to gain enough intelligence to stop the Madrid train bombings (or at least to avoid erroneously attributing the attacks to the Basque separatists), they’d still be running the show. No dictatorship has ever been turned out of office because they couldn’t stop terrorist attacks.

In democracies, when it comes to questions of “us or them,” the constituency for “them” is George Galloway, Michael Moore, Robert Fisk, and a few other demented fools; not the makings of a broad coalition of voters, particularly when you have smoldering ruins as the backdrop of your campaign. Any rational government, left, center, or right, is going err on the side of “us.” And thus, sadly, those of us utopians who’d rather not see torture are probably going to be stuck with it.

One of these decades, I’ll master the black art of taking photos with my camera phone. Until then, here’s the fruits of my labor—a scoreboard shot from the women’s basketball game after the Blue Devils denied Pat Summit her 901st win as a head coach on Monday night: