“While I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls, and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected, the program ultimately did damage to our officers and our standing in the world,” Haspel said in the letter, first obtained by CNN. “With the benefit of hindsight and my experience as a senior agency leader, the enhanced interrogation program is not one the CIA should have undertaken.”
I suppose the elite consensus now is "that was a nasty bit of business let's just move beyond it." But at the time it was pretty mainstream elite opinion that torture was good and also not torture and shut up dirty hippies.