“What kind of monster does that!?”

So cried a Cleveland reporter while chasing after the owner of Horror House during his recent perp walk. It was a question on all our minds upon learning details of the decade-long kidnapping three young women and their unimaginable ordeal of beatings, rape and imprisonment.

But wait a minute, let’s have a look at the details. Ariel Castro is accused of having snatched innocent girls off the streets, put them in tiny cages, deprived them of food, beaten them, sexually abused them repeatedly—in short, of cutting them off from life and condemned them to permanent residence as his playthings with no recourse to anyone from the outside world.

“What kind of monster does that?”

Why, a very well-known one: us.

Every single detail of what has happened to those Ohio women is included in the litany of horrors suffered by the men in Bagram or Guantánamo, including their innocence. (How many were picked up off the street in Pakistan or Kabul and sold to the Americans as ‘terrorists’ for ransom?) They’re been starved, beaten, sexually humiliated and kept in cages for almost exactly 10 years.

The outrage and shock over Cleveland is a massive psychological trick. Our fury at Ariel Castro is nothing compared to the shame we are projecting onto him from our own unspeakable behavior.