These past weeks, watching the tortured and torturous debate over the confirmation of Michael Mukasey to be Attorney General, one thought frequently entered my mind: How did we ever sink to the level where torture is considered debatable?
The Eighth Amendment ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" has been in place since December 15, 1791 and is as straightforward a prohibition as you can get. There is no hemming and hawing, no ifs, ands, maybes or buts.
And though some soothe their conscience with the lie that we live in uniquely dangerous times the truth as that the Americans who wrote those words lived in a time far more dangerous than ours. When they put quill to paper the success and survival of the United States was no sure thing, but they recognized the folly of defending freedom with tyranny and realized the greatest threat to liberty came not from outside but from within.
Representatives of another great generation on Americans, on August 12, 1949, just four years removed from the most destructive conflict the world has ever known, agreed to the Geneva Convention. These were men who had seen the horror and folly of war and the inhumane mistreatment of whole swaths of humanity first hand; they agreed it must never be allowed to happen again.
The Geneva agreement bans all " torture or inhuman treatment" and considers it a grave breach of the articles, of which no "Contracting Party shall be allowed to absolve itself." It also bars "Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."
What sort of upside down world do we live in, when those who would disregard our founding charters and most binding and sacred agreements consider themselves patriots, while attempting to brand those who support them as traitorous?
The struggle in which we find ourselves, like the Cold War, is not a shooting war of the conventional sense but a struggle for hearts and minds. We did not win that struggle by building gulags of our own; ultimately we won it because most of the world was convinced by our actions that we were in the right.
Waterboarding is torture. It was torture when performed by the Spanish, when performed by the Japanese, by the Viet Cong and by the Khmer Rouge; it was and is torture when performed by the United States, and made even worse by the betrayal of the honorable oaths we have sworn against it.
I am deeply sorry that since the terror of 9/11 so many willingly, even anxiously, trade decency and liberty for the illusion of security, for as Dr. Franklin long ago suggested they have gotten neither.
On that dark September day the terrorists got very lucky; they struck a target that was far more vulnerable than even they suspected and erased in an horrible instant thousands of innocent lives.
But terrible as it was, that is the extent of their power. They are not a threat to the existence of the United States. Not matter how much you inflate the danger, they are not the Nazis, not the Soviet Union, not the Red Coats or the Confederacy. They are far from the greatest danger we have ever faced; compared to past threats they shrink in comparison.
We won World War 2 and the Cold War without sinking to the level of Hitler and Stalin. We can, and must, do the same today if we are to win at all.
Abraham Lincoln put it best. "At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up among us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide."
A thousand Al-Qaedas in a thousand years could not destroy the United States.
Only we can do that.