Begin with the idea that you should never, ever, torture anyone, and you won’t go wrong. But once you decide it’s okay to torture people as long as you call it “enhanced interrogation techniques,” you are not only going to be condemned by posterity, you are going to have to cover up what you have done. And if you can’t cover it up sufficiently, people might actually get embarrassed enough to actually hold you accountable for being monsters. At least, that could happen in theory, though probably not in America.
