I then quoted conservative columnist and blogger Andrew Sullivan:

"... my first response to reports of abuse and torture at Gitmo was to accuse the accusers of exaggeration or deliberate deception ... It struck me as a no-brainer that this stuff was being invented by the far left or was part of al Qaeda propaganda. After all, they train captives to lie about this stuff. Bottom line: I trusted this president in a time of war to obey the rule of law that we were and are defending.... And then I was forced to confront the evidence. He betrayed all of us. He lied. He authorized torture in secret, and then, when busted after Abu Ghraib, blamed it on low-level grunts. This was not a mistake. It was a betrayal."

I noted how Sullivan's use of the word "betrayal" recalled Moveon.org's Sept. 26 ad, which many considered childish at best, politically unsavvy at least, or worse. But Sullivan's use of the word struck me as anything but childish, because ...

"Our nation's reputation, not to mention that of the presidency, has been dishonored by this betrayal of trust. Honorable people - conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat - need to follow Andrew Sullivan's example, coming together to express our grief and outrage about the political hypocrisy and betrayal to which we have been subjected by people we elected."

In another posting on this subject ('Devils and Dust': How We Learned to Torture), I recalled a New York Times story about our government's secret authorization of torture, quoting this chilling sentence: "With virtually no experience in interrogations, the CIA had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture."

I asked, "Copying tactics used by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the former Soviet Union ... what does this say about our nation's trajectory?

Since reading those words last week, I can't keep Bruce Springsteen's song out of my head. First, he echoes what many Americans might say in response to the secret authorization of torture:

"Well I've got God on my side
And I'm just trying to survive."

But then he raises this question:

"What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love?"

Springsteen then concludes:

"Fear's a dangerous thing.
It can turn your heart black you can trust.
It'll take your God-filled soul
Fill it with devils and dust."

I believe it was Nietzsche who said to be careful when fighting a monster lest you become a monster in the process.

A person who tells a lie to cover up a lie does so because he doesn't want to be thought a liar. But his efforts to avoid being thought a liar makes him more of a liar than he was before. Similarly, torturing secretly and then seeking to defend torture as a valid moral option only hardens us in a monstrous identity.