Torture and values

I was struck last week by the volume of commentary about whether the U.S. used torture on its detainees in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq. The flood of blog posts, stories and opinion pieces came in the wake of the Obama administration releasing four Justice Department internal memos authorizing the use of tactics such as waterboarding on detainees. These memos were authored under President Bush's two terms in office, and they confirm that the government tortured in our name.
There seemed to be a lot more open anxiety about what the use of torture means for U.S. values than I remember there being in 2002, 2003 and 2004 when we were rounding up terrorism suspects.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been actively campaigning for his point of view: that harsh interrogation tactics proved fruitful in yielding valuable counterterrorism information. He's pretty much said that Obama's approach puts Americans in peril. The FBI and other critics, however, have said the tactics did no such thing.
Some pundits and politicians have always opposed harsh interrogation techniques or torture based on their values. One of them, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, is pushing for a truth commission to investigate the matter. Other Democrats want Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor. However, Obama himself has said that we need to look forward, not look backward.
I say looking back and reflecting on how we got here could be helpful. It could help us reflect on what kind of country we have been, what kind of country we are and what kind of country we should strive to be. What sets apart America isn't the abstract of "freedom," but the concrete of trying to live up to high standards.
I tuned in last night to PBS's excellent "We Shall Remain" series about American Indians. Monday's program was about the Trail of Tears, in which U.S. forces and citizens compelled the Cherokee to march from their homeland in northern Georgia, North Carolina and Alabama to their new government-approved territory west of the Mississippi River. What an awful event, a low point in our country in which President Andrew Jackson ignored the law of the land and failed to protect the Cherokee, a people to whom we had pledged protection.
What if we had the opportunity then to reflect on how we lost our moral bearings? We do have that chance now. There are hard questions we should ask our leaders and ourselves.