The largest share of responsibility for normalizing torture rests with George W. Bush, the man who presided over its officially sanctioned use. In so doing, he reintroduced a grave moral evil into American life, along with Dick Cheney, an advocate of his interrogation policy, and David Addington and John Yoo, the men who flirted with professional misconduct in the course of providing them dubious legal cover. These men, the psychologists who helped them to replicate interrogation techniques used by Communist regimes, and the personnel who openly carried out torture on detainees bear the most direct responsibility for undermining a core civiilzational taboo.

Outrage at the immoral acts of these men, however personally decent or well-meaning they may be, is appropriate. They played a more pernicious part in corrupting America's youth than any gangster rapper or pornographer. But responsibility isn't theirs alone. The members of a single administration cannot transform public attitudes on a matter this important without a cadre of apologists and a larger population that is basically complicit in its silence. So when historians look back on this era, let them assign blame more widely. Every Member of Congress who did nothing to stop these techniques bears some culpability. So do the purveyors of popular culture - most notably the producers of the show 24, though many Hollywood movies are guilty here too - that romanticized torture in a way that misled Americans about its efficacy.

Even most defenders of water-boarding condemned the abuses at Abu Ghraib. But Rush Limbaugh, then as now one of the most influential men in the conservative movement, remarked as follows:

This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?



Marc Thiessen earned a place in this pantheon by trying to persuade his fellow citizens that Catholicism - a religion of "love thy enemy" and "turn the other cheek" - is perfectly compatible with strapping defenseless men to a board, blindfolding them, and repeatedly tricking them into thinking that they're going to drown.

Absurd.

Some torture defenders argued it is a necessary evil. In contrast, Bill Kristol argued that CIA agents who engaged in waterboarding should perhaps receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

The New York Times was also complicit in normalizing torture insofar as it adopted the Orwellian euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques" to describe practices it had long called torture when they were being committed by foreigners. It shares this distinction with much of the American media.