This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2008, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

As Independence Day approaches and we proudly fly the Stars and Stripes and hear stirring speeches on patriotic themes - all attesting to America's greatness as a nation and beacon of freedom to the world - we should take a moment to ponder a terrible truth about the country we have come to be.

The United States of America in the 21st century is known around the globe as a warlike nation that imprisons and tortures its suspected enemies. And, with a hypocrisy that escapes no one, farms out some of its torture to countries that are fixtures on the U.S. State Department's annual list of governments that routinely trample human rights.

We wish that we, and all Americans, could state with conviction that there is no substance to this perception of an America gone astray. That this country so many of us have known from childhood as "the land of the free and the home of the brave" would never engage in government-sanctioned torture of even the worst of its enemies.

But of course, we cannot say that. Not anymore. Not as we learn more each day about the Bush administration's use of torture as an instrument of interrogation against battlefield detainees, many of whom had no ties to terrorism and eventually were let go. Not as details emerge about the campaign of lies and obfuscations that the White House orchestrated to cover it all up.

Sadly, this ongoing campaign has largely succeeded. Too many news reporters, too many media organizations (including this one), and, finally, too many Americans have been too willing to be duped, too willing to be distracted, too willing to believe the best about this worst of administrations. After all, Americans, we all knew, or thought we knew, don't torture. That's the work of the tyrants, despots, warlords and terrorists we condemn. But not the America of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.

Yet, as we were reminded in documents made public by a congressional committee last week, the policy giving the green light to torture was formulated at the highest levels of the Bush administration in response to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The legal justifications for torture ordered up by the Bush administration are models of moral bankruptcy. How else to describe the premise that "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment, short of causing organ failure or death, isn't really torture at all? It's merely "harsh," or "tough" or "aggressive."

Minutes of a late 2002 meeting of lawyers from the Pentagon and CIA recorded their advocacy of waterboarding and other illegal interrogation methods subsequently used at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and later at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. Top CIA lawyer Jonathan Fredman argued that the United Nations Convention Against Torture was vague and therefore easily circumvented. Torture, Fredman said, "is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong."

Last week also brought a new report by the group Physicians for Human Rights based on in-depth interviews and mental and physical evaluations of 11 detainees held for long periods in U.S. custody and then released without charge. The smorgasbord of cruelties visited upon these unfortunates included beatings, isolation, sleep deprivation, electric shocks, "stress positions," threats of execution, forced nudity and sexual humiliation.

Indeed, U.S. torture techniques are virtually indistinguishable from those favored by the Soviet secret police under Josef Stalin. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago, wrote that interrogators extracted ludicrous "confessions" from millions who had committed no crime. They, like U.S. detainees, endured temperature extremes, standing or squatting for prolonged periods, forced nakedness, deafening noise, bright lights, threats, isolation and sleep deprivation.

In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev described the results: "How is it possible that a person confesses to crimes which he has not committed? Only in one way - because of applications of physical methods of pressuring him, tortures, bringing him to a state of unconsciousness, depriving him of his judgment, taking away his human dignity. In this manner were 'confessions' acquired."

The administration's torture regime was revealed in early 2004 when photos of abused detainees held at Abu Ghraib were posted on the Internet. Predictably, 13 official investigations concluded that the episodes were the unauthorized work of lower-ranking soldiers. Then, as now, President Bush maintained that the United States does not torture, which, given what we know now, is a distinction without a difference.

Retired Army Gen. Antonio Taguba, who headed a 2004 investigation of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, in remarks accompanying the physicians' study, wrote that "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

As we mark our nation's birthday, perhaps we should think about the America we, through our inattention, have come to be. And vow to restore the ideals of the America we once knew, and still have it in us to be.