The CIA’s torture program architects create a contrived debate, and journalists are complicit.

After several years and numerous bureaucratic roadblocks, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence finally published a – shortened, partially redacted – report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program during the years after 9/11. Though it amounts to less than 20 percent of the actual 6,000-page investigation, the 528-page executive summary still presents an exhaustive, damning indictment of our democracy sacrificing its principles. Along with previously unknown examples of detainee torture and abuse by the CIA, there’s also overwhelming evidence of rampant misinformation if not outright deception about the torture program on the part of the agency.

With no real examination of the culpability of the Bush White House in crafting the torture policy and no political will to prosecute the outrageous wrongdoing of those who carried it out, there’s little actual precedent here to dissuade future (or current) administrations from the same flawed moral calculus on torture’s acceptability. But the Senate probe’s narrow, self-limiting scope and the Obama administration’s half-hearted commitment to justice, respectively, aren’t the only things to blame for this. The establishment media has also played a key role in undermining even this feeble attempt at reckoning with our torture era.

It’s done this by once again letting the architects and apologists for the CIA’s torture program redefine the issue into a contrived “debate” about its efficacy. This has been the right-wing’s modus operandi for years – co-opt the press into ignoring the universal moral repugnance of torture in favor of a narrow, Machiavellian parsing of whether or not it produces actionable intelligence. Admittedly, the latter argument is much more comfortable terrain for the media, since it offers a convenient neutral ground from which to report (i.e., “senior administration officials say torture works, critics say it doesn’t… ”). This wishy-washy “both sides” stance does little for readers even when discussing mundane policy debates, but it does a real disservice to the public when the subject matter involves defining down a supposedly bedrock American principle via rhetorical dissembling.

One of the loudest of these Beltway cheerleaders, though, has been former Bush speechwriter and current Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen. Over the past few years, he has essentially gone all in on torture, writing a fawning book on the CIA’s interrogation program and occasionally stepping into the Post’s op-ed breach whenever he felt the need to push what are, in fact, inaccurate anecdotes about thwarted terror plots. Naturally, the publication of a massively detailed investigation into the CIA’s torture program – one that would seriously threaten his worldview – set him off. And so, there was Thiessen on the eve of the Senate report’s release this week, pre-emptively attacking the report and defending the CIA with a new Post column about how waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammad led the CIA to target Adnan el Shukrijumah, an Al Qaeda commander (who happened to be killed just this past weekend by Pakistani forces). It almost goes without saying, but, yes, Thiessen’s argument falls apart in the face of the SSCI report’s actual findings on Shukrijumah, which start on page 358.

OK, this kind of pushback was to be expected. Normalizing torture has literally been Thiessen’s meal ticket, and he conveniently occupies one of several Post columnist slots apparently reserved for former Bush staffers. But he was by no means alone in his campaign. In fact, as the SSCI report’s release drew nigh, a critical mass of former CIA and top-level Bush administration officials suddenly re-emerged across the media landscape. Many of the same names the country learned not to trust thanks to little things like chimerical WMD evidence and the disastrous Iraq War got a warm welcome back to the mainstream media’s op-ed pages and news shows to defend the agency’s torture program. (Torture and the Iraq War are not unrelated.)

Everyone was rallying ’round the CIA’s waterboards, it seemed. There was George Bush, on CNN; Dick Cheney, in The New York Times; the CIA officer who destroyed the videotapes of agency torture, in The Washington Post; and don’t forget former CIA director Michael Hayden, in The Wall Street Journal and on Morning Joe and Face the Nation and NBC Nightly News and probably on a random street corner in Washington right this minute, hectoring passersby about how our nation’s security necessitated odious things like rectal feeding. The latter’s all-out enthusiasm for rebutting the Senate report finally made perfect sense once you saw its 37-page Appendix 3, which was solely dedicated to cataloguing the many times Hayden lied to Congress.

That the press would end up enabling these attacks on the torture report isn’t that unexpected, sadly. That’s because the Senate report found the media was a willing conduit for a propaganda campaign back when the torture program was active. Whether it was leaking classified info to gin up sympathy for the agency or feeding the media made-up terror plots to justify the inhumane treatment of the detainees, the CIA clearly played the mainstream press. And the mainstream press mostly played along, whether by passing along inaccurate claims of torture’s success or repeating false chronologies to support those claims. (Two specific examples of this cited in the Senate’s report involve The New York Times and Dateline NBC.) At times, the media acted more like an extension of the agency’s Office of Public Affairs than a watchdog of the government.

That’s why any self-congratulation over what is, at best, a piecemeal attempt at reconciling our nation’s recent torture regime should be avoided. We’ve put no mechanisms in place to prevent it from happening again because we haven’t learned the how it happened the first time.

One interesting solution came from ACLU Director Anthony Romero, who argued in a New York Times editorial that Obama should pre-emptively pardon everyone involved in the CIA’s torture program – including former President Bush – as a way to emphasize torture’s illegality. Of course, such a move would unleash a vitriolic outpouring of right-wing outrage so intense it would make impeachment hearings look like a Sunday picnic. What’s more, the idea would be a non-starter with a president whose one-way vision of justice only looks forward and not backward. But, as a thought experiment, it’s worth considering, if only to reinforce the moral culpability of everyone involved in enabling torture in our name. And as long as we’re handing out imaginary pardons for that, we should save one for the media too.

REED RICHARDSON is a media critic whose work has appeared in The Nation.