April may or may not be the cruelest month. But in 2009, it was a month of revelations of cruelty and of responses to cruelty. In consecutive issues of The New York Review of Books Mark Danner published a two-part essay on the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody (Danner 2009a, pp. 69–77; 2009b, pp. 48–56). The ICRC report, submitted as a confidential document in 2007, became available in April 2009 on the Internet. Danner poses the moral question whether torture is ever justified. He also presses the factual question whether the use of torture “really did produce information that, in the words of the former vice-president [former United States Vice-President Richard Cheney] was ‘absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack in the US’” (Danner 2009b, p. 55). Even if critical information was obtained, the question remains, as pointed out by US President Barack Obama in a nationally televised news conference (29 April, 2009), whether enough information could have been obtained by other methods. President Obama also went on record regarding waterboarding at that conference, stating without qualification that waterboarding is torture.