Slate has done this country a major service by pulling together an excellent and deeply disturbing presentation: “What Is Torture? An interactive primer on American interrogation.” By Emily Bazelon, Phillip Carter, and Dahlia Lithwick.

It pulls together in one place an extremely large amount of information, including a number of primary sources. While it is good to know that some people in the military take this seriously and have tried to combat it, the “Primer” makes clear that torture has been actively and consistently advocated and defended by the Bush administration. It also makes clear just how easy the public and Congress has made it for the Bush administration to act this way, with only an occasional bit of lip-service to decency.

To the extent that torture has simply been accepted by Americans as another part of war, we have become a nation of barbarians.

Postscript (5/27): Howard Kurtz, in this Washington Post article compares the silence over the emergence of corroborating (though not conclusive) evidence for the basic contention in Newsweek Qu'ran story with the howls over the weaknesses of the story's evidence a week ago.