I am torn between thinking, "presenting the act was the statement"and thinking that torture has been so incorporated into the American psyche, at least in fiction but maybe also in the real world, that it no longer carries a moral burden which requires commentary. That would be dismaying about us as people.

Also, in that totally calculating writerly way, it would mean a loss of torture as a semeiotic signifier for evil on the side of the bad, and loss of innocence, or sacrifice, or other reveals of character under duress on the side of the good that have made its expression in storytelling a powerfull tool of mythmaking.