Psychological torture is, [it’s believed] pretty much by consensus, worse than physical torture if it’s done at an extreme level. John McCain said that for him, by far, the worst part of captivity in North Vietnam was the isolation and the psychological torment — not the physical torture to which he was subjected quite extensively. There are studies about how people go insane if they’re kept in solitary confinement in American prisons in a way that doesn’t happen if the soles of your feet are beaten or you’re forced into stress-positions. And so much of this [program] was about dehumanization. It had nothing to do with interrogation; it was about exploitation and control. It was about the assertion of power.

And that’s what makes it so evil. Detainees are, by definition, helpless; they’re captive. So to completely brutalize them and remove their humanity is really worse than anything you could do to someone physically, including killing them. It’s basically like being dead while alive.

A lot of people don’t know this but one of the most effective torture techniques the Soviets used in the Stalinist era — especially during the Great Purge — wasn’t some kind of horrific physical abuse or mutilation. It was sleep deprivation.

Oh, yeah, I’ve written about this before. Andrew Sullivan, to his credit, found this Gestapo manual about these interrogation tactics, and the parallels — you don’t even have to search for them, they’re just right there for anyone to see. They’re obvious and self-evident. And they’re not ancillary similarities; they’re central. The way they talk about the techniques and the objectives.

And this is what makes the fact that there’s even something called “the torture debate” so ridiculous. This debate, quote-unquote, has been settled not for decades but centuries. Everything that we did as part of the war on terror, in terms of how we treated detainees, has [long] been viewed as morally vile and inexcusable and criminal, pretty much across cultural and social lines. (And the United States has prosecuted people as war criminals for doing things we did.)

So it’s not even a debate. There’s no debate. [The program’s] defilement [of the United States] is self-evident and indisputable.

When I hear people argue against the anti-torture position, like Nicolle Wallace did Tuesday on “Morning Joe,” I often want to say, “Look, your fight’s not really with me right now, it’s with the Enlightenment.”

Exactly. Although, I have to say, one of the benefits of Tuesday, despite all my frustrations with the process, is that it has prevented anybody from denying that America tortured — and not just in the three cases of waterboarding. It actually has been a disinfectant of that central lie. I mean, for a long time, that was the debate; it wasn’t “Is torture good?” it was “These things aren’t torture!” Dick Cheney described [waterboarding] as dunking people’s head into water.

What was really annoying for those of us who were actually [covering] this is that the waterboarding was almost the least of it. It was the easiest case to call torture because there was a whole body of law calling waterboarding torture; but [the larger issue] was the entire regiment of techniques that they were using that clearly constituted torture — not on dozens or even hundreds but thousands of people, and not just at Guantánamo but around the world. It was a systematic regime of torture, and I think yesterday’s report has prevented that from being denied any longer.

And that’s why people like Nicolle Wallace and others are now resorting either to “Yes, we tortured, and we should have!” (which I think is a healthy thing to force them to say) or “Yes, we tortured, and we shouldn’t have, but we’re still the greatest thing ever to exist.”

I’d like to get your response to a couple of things Gen. Hayden said in the Politico interview that came out the day after the summary’s release. He didn’t say anything particularly new, but what is very clear is that he’s leaning heavily on the Department of Justice’s decision in 2012 not to prosecute the CIA agents involved in the deaths of two detainees. Does he have a point in saying, well, if this was so bad then how come the DOJ gave it a pass?

I don’t blame him for making that argument; and it was totally predictable that that argument would be made. That’s what made what President Obama did [by not prosecuting torturers] so disgraceful and why he does bear a very significant part of the culpability and why this will be a huge, dark mar on his legacy. It’s so predictable that if you prevent not just criminal prosecutions but even civil liability or international investigation for America’s torturers — which is exactly what he did; he not only blocked criminal investigations but used the state secrets privilege to prevent civil liability, and then bullied and coerced other countries in Europe not to investigate — the message that’ll be sent is that [torture] is not actually a crime, that it was a policy dispute.

And, yes, he is on the other side of the Republicans in this policy dispute, and he thinks we shouldn’t torture — because it doesn’t work, because it’s inefficient, because it’s contrary to our values — and Republicans can believe it should. But this was never a policy dispute; these are war crimes, among the most atrocious war crimes. And when the Justice Department decides that nobody should pay any price, legally, for what was done, the message President Obama sent was: At worst, this is just a policy error. So of course people like Dick Cheney and Michael Hayden are going to say, well, if we’re really such brutal war criminals, why aren’t we being prosecuted?

I tried to get at this in a recent piece but one of the consequences of having torture now be a policy dispute is that all this talk of the report chronicling a dark chapter in our history and so forth is misleading, because it’s not like the torture era has actually ended. It’s just on pause, at best.

The United States is still torturing people — and continued to torture people well into the Obama administration. It didn’t do it by following legal memos from the Justice Department about these specific techniques, but the abuse of prisoners is well-documented at Bagram, in Iraq and even at Guantanamo. For years after president Obama’s inauguration, according to reporting from Jeremy Scahill, there were torture chambers in Somalia.

And the United States didn’t just torture on its own. We sent — we “rendered” — people to these tyrants that we claim to hate the most now, like Mubarak in Egypt and Assad in Syria and Gadhafi in Libya, in order to be tortured as well. And this has gone on for decades; obviously the CIA has supported all kinds of torturing squads around the world. So torture is a tool that the U.S. government has used pretty openly and continuously for decades — but especially since the war on terror. And nobody [in Washington] was surprised about learning that on Tuesday, although they pretended to be.

The other thing Hayden said that I’d be interested to hear you respond to was a comment that came near the end of the interview, which I guess was kind of darkly funny in a not-funny way. He basically says, If Congress said I lied to them, that’s not true, because I was just communicating what subordinates had told me, so it’s really their fault. It’s like a twisted, reverse Nuremberg defense — instead of just following orders from above, the claim is that you’re just passing along information from below.

You’re right entirely in what you just said, but I actually think that that’s what people like Sen. Dianne Feinstein are doing as well — or, for that matter, people in the U.S. media. They’re saying, look, we didn’t raise alarms about what the CIA was doing and about the torture they were engaging in because they were telling us that it was working, or that it wasn’t as brutal as it actually turned out to be. We were just misled. It’s exactly what people like Hillary Clinton do to justify their very vocal and public support of the Iraq War …

At some point, this blame-shifting has to stop. It should become apparent just how deeply corrupt, toxic and sociopathic the Washington political and media class is. I mean, it would be one thing if this was some isolated aberration, but this is a reflection of what the United States government in so many different ways around the world for a long time — but certainly since the war on terror, when it was intensified. And all of this faux indignation and shock and anger over discovering it is really unconvincing and disingenuous.

The reality is that people were comfortable with this and now all the truth has come out and they’re embarrassed about what they’ve done. That’s what this is about.

Last question: What do you think about this idea being floated around that Obama should issue a blanket pardon of torturers before he leaves office? The idea is that a pardon would represent an acknowledgment that laws were broken, which would in turn reestablish the norm of torture as an illegal act?

I hate that idea. I mean, I stand second to nobody in my admiration for the ACLU, but I thought the Op-Ed in the New York Times by Anthony Romero advocating that was really unconvincing, to put it generously.

For one thing, the world and certainly the overwhelming majority of the American public views a pardon as an expression of [the belief that] someone is deserving of leniency and protection from punishment — not as an admission of guilt. The lawyers at the ACLU might understand that a pardon is actually a formal declaration of guilt, but the rest of the world wouldn’t see it that way.

Secondly, all these people who’d get pardoned would have to do is just rhetorically reject the pardon and mock it and say they don’t need the pardon because they did nothing criminal. So the whole message would be destroyed anyway, and the only message that would come from it is that the people who tortured are being protected by President Obama from criminal liability (which happens to be the case anyway).

And thirdly, President Obama would never do it. He’s made it completely clear that he won’t risk an iota of his political capital in order to enforce U.S. legal obligations and treaty obligations to make clear that torture is a crime. The last time he talked about torture he talked about it like it was just the most casual thing in the world; he said, “We tortured some folks.” And then he told us not to be sanctimonious about it because these [torturers] were great patriots who were doing it with good hearts.

So it’s an unrealistic proposal and an incredibly unconvincing one. It’s very, very misguided.