I recently had the opportunity to visit California’s State Assembly and watch the legislature in action. I think this opportunity provided me a deeper understanding of the problem ailing California politics.

The first thing to know is that, if you’re a Republican legislator in California, you are always, always losing.

We are extraordinarily fortunate to converse today with psychiatrist and psychohistorical researcher Robert Jay Lifton. His new memoir, written after 60 years of professional life, is an amazingly fascinating and entertaining book. Dr. Lifton speaks in his persona of a gifted, intelligent, and rational observer and thinker, a self-described disciple of the Enlightenment and a humanist approach to understanding.

As part of a new investigative story, Truthout has published two documents written by the former psychologist for SERE, and later CIA contract interrogator for the Bush torture program, Bruce Jessen. Jessen’s notes describe an “exploitation” survival course that was “reverse-engineered” to provide a blueprint for the interrogation and detention policies of the Bush administration, which emphasized not just the ways to coercively interrogate an individual for intelligence purposes, but to “exploit” the detainee for a number of uses, including production of false confessions, recruitment of prisoners as U.S. spies, putting on show trials, and medical experimentation.

The voices of the tortured keep speaking to me. They will not be quieted. They will continuing speaking long after I am old and gone. Will they be heard, or buried again in a spiritual dungeon built out of human indifference, ignorance, and fear?