Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, is among several contributors featured in the current edition of the Washington Monthly magazine, which features a special section on the controversial use of torture by the U.S.

In the introducing the special section the editors write, “In most issues of the [magazine], we favor articles that we hope will launch a debate.  In this issue we seek to end one.” Other essay contributors include former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, General Wesley Clark, the former supreme commander of NATO, and U.S. Senators Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE).

Slaughter flatly asserts torture is wrong and that America’s current policy on its usage as a method of interrogating detainees must end.

She writes, “what I really want is an America that will simply stand and say, as President Bush did when he saw the Abu Ghraib photographs, that this is not who we are.  That America is an idea more than a place, an idea that cannot coexist with the use of force by an all-powerful state to break a human spirit.  That the men and women who fought to establish and defend that idea across the generations believed that our values were more important than life itself. If we cannot take that stand, then we are not the country I thought I knew.”

Slaughter is the author, most recently, of the book The Idea that is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World.