I side with Andrew Sullivan in his denunciation of torture, but I contest his attempt to define modern torture as a historical aberration, as if it weren’t common behavior for the United States until George W. Bush rode into Washington.

Sullivan says modern torture advocates are “junking the entire history of Western jurisprudence and the laws of war,” later condemning their “radical assault on one of the central pillars of our civilization.”

The “pillars of our civilization” sit on land stolen from the natives, who we tortured and exterminated, and they were constructed by African slaves, who we whipped and murdered.

This was the situation in America from 1492-1865. At what point, exactly, do we start the clock on Western Civilization?

At the turn of the 20th century, “United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water” in a war planners thought “might serve as an effective ‘stepping stone'” to controlling China’s growing markets. In the latter half of the same century, the U.S. was supporting (PDF) Ferdinand Marcos, a Filipino head of state notorious for … you guessed it … torture.

In fairness, torture practices were more radical under Bush, in the sense that his reign saw them “admitted into the mainstream,” (as Sullivan puts it). This doesn’t mean that torture wasn’t widely practiced before, only that influential people didn’t advocate it in public. And, crucially, it wasn’t performed by American soldiers. Instead, we paid others to do it for us.

The result, however, is the same.

Sullivan tries to pin torture on the current G.O.P., but the historical narrative shows us that it’s a long-standing practice. A return to the pre-Bush norm – where torture is illegal but practiced anyway – cannot be the answer.