Joe Margulies is visiting professor in Cornell’s Department of Government and Law School and author of two books: “What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity” and “Guantánamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power." Margulies believes it is time to end torture once and for all.

Margulies says: “The United States Government will appear this week in Geneva before the UN Committee on Torture. They will have yet another opportunity to declare, finally and firmly, that the laws of the United States which prohibit torture apply to everyone, everywhere. The legalistic equivocations and evasions—the shameful pin-dancing of the post-9/11 era—must end.

But denouncing the “enhanced interrogations” is not nearly as important as ending the torture that continues—and I say this as counsel for abu Zubaydah, who was tortured at CIA black sites and now sits uncharged at Guantanamo.

Today, nearly 80,000 men, women, and children in the United States languish in prolonged solitary confinement, confined to tiny cages for months that too often stretch into years, with virtually no human contact.

The practice has been condemned as barbaric and denounced as unconstitutional. It has to stop. It is time to recognize that torture, in any form, has no place in American life.”