For years the gay marriage battle has been waged on the east and west coasts, in states like New York and Massachusetts and California. This was not a bad strategy. These states had a large gay population and favorable court rulings would not only help the greatest number of people but influence other states who might follow their lead.

But the gay marriage strategy failed in New York, where the Court of Appeals uphleld the restrictions against same-sex marriage on the theory that the government had a legitimate interest in promoting heterosexual unions, deemed to be more stable than same-sex unions. This was a horrible court ruling, with legal reasoning that a first-year law student would be ashamed of. A few years ago, when the New York Court of Appeals ruled against gay marriage, here is how it got around the question of whether the government could treat gay and straight couples equally:

The Legislature could rationally decide that, for the welfare of children, it is more important to promote stability, and to avoid instability, in opposite-sex than in same-sex relationships. Heterosexual intercourse has a natural tendency to lead to the birth of children; homosexual intercourse does not. Despite the advances of science, it remains true that the vast majority of children are born as a result of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman, and the Legislature could find that this will continue to be true. The Legislature could also find that such relationships are all too often casual or temporary. It could find that an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born. It thus could choose to offer an inducement -- in the form of marriage and its attendant benefits -- to opposite-sex couples who make a solemn, long-term commitment to each other.

The Legislature could find that this rationale for marriage does not apply with comparable force to same-sex couples. These couples can become parents by adoption, or by artificial insemination or other technological marvels, but they do not become parents as a result of accident or impulse. The Legislature could find that unstable relationships between people of the opposite sex present a greater danger that children will be born into or grow up in unstable homes than is the case with same-sex couples, and thus that promoting stability in opposite-sex relationships will help children more. This is one reason why the Legislature could rationally offer the benefits of marriage to opposite-sex couples only.

There is a second reason: The Legislature could rationally believe that it is better, other things being equal, for children to grow up with both a mother and a father. Intuition and experience suggest that a child benefits from having before his or her eyes, every day, living models of what both a man and a woman are like. It is obvious that there are exceptions to this general rule -- some children who never know their fathers, or their mothers, do far better than some who grow up with parents of both sexes -- but the Legislature could find that the general rule will usually hold.

I wrote then, and I still believe now, that this was horrible legal reasoning. As the Court of Appeals saw it, reckless sex between heterosexual couples can produce children. The State wants to prevent children from growing up without a mom and pop, so we induce the lovers to get married to save the children. The State can deny the same marriage right to gays and lesbians because although they can adopt children, they cannot naturally reproduce. The State Legislature can thus distinguish between same-sex marriage and heterosexual marriage. And, the Court ruled, the Legislature can rationally decide that children are better off with a mother and father rather than a father and father. This is what counts for legal reasoning in New York.

I receive a lot of reading material from the New York Bar Association and court system extolling New York's commitment to "our cherished values" under the Constitution. It sure sounds nice, but as I drop this stuff into the trash can, I think about the same-sex marriage decision in New York and how the 20-something Green Party mayor of my village (New Paltz) was the first small-town public official to sanction same-sex marriage, a gutsy move that got him arrested for breaking the law.

Iowa is not New York. So when the highest court in Iowa took up the issue of same-sex marriage, it probably looked at the New York decision and dropped it in the trash can. Iowa can think for itself.

Here's the general framework for courts to apply in deciding whether to strike down marriage restrictions. Under the Constitution, there are certain "fundamental" rights, like the right to travel, the right to privacy, the right to raise your children as you see fit and the right to marry. The language we usually see in these court rulings is that a fundamental right is something that is "deeply rooted in our tradition." In 1967, the Supreme Court held that it was illegal for the State of Virginia to prohibit interrracial marriage. A few years later, the Court said flat out that "the right to marry is of fundamental importance for all individuals." For this reason, even inmates can get married. Even serial killers can get married while in prison.

If a right is "fundamental" under the Constitution, it cannot be abridged or restricted without a "compelling" reason. In street language, the government needs a damned good reason to restrict a fundamental right. Hatred of an entire class of people is not good enough. "We always did it this way" is not good enough. "Just because" is not good enough. Prejudice is not good enough. Public opinion is not good enough. The rationale for this is that some rights are so fundamental that it does not matter what the majority thinks. Constitutional rights cannot be put up for a majority vote.

When the same-sex marriage controversy first wound up in the courts, I thought that an honest court would recognize that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to get married. After all, what compelling reason could justify the exclusion? The best parallel was the Supreme Court's ruling in 1967, Loving v. Virginia, which said that the government cannot restrict interracial marriages despite any arguments that it was always government policy to enforce these restrictions. As we know from the New York ruling, courts will find a way to sidestep the obvious.

Not Iowa. This is how the Iowa Supreme Court did it: It noted how the U.S. Supreme Court, in determining whether to grant certain social and racial groups heightened protections under the Equal Protection Clause, considers the following factors: "The Supreme Court has considered: (1) the history of invidious discrimination against the class burdened by the legislation; (2) whether the characteristics that distinguish the class indicate a typical class member’s ability to contribute to society; (3) whether the distinguishing characteristic is “immutable” or beyond the class members’ control; and (4) the political power of the subject class." Long ago, courts have applied this test in finding that discrimination on the basis of gender, race, national origin and religion is illegal under the Constitution. The dividing line is homosexuality.

Iowa's judges have found that gays and lesbians get heightened protection under the Iowa Constitution because gays and lesbians have historically been discriminated against. The Iowa court also held that they have minimal political clout and that the same-sex lifestyle is an immutable, or natural predisposition. Equally interesting, the court ruled that sexual orientation forms a part of the gay and lesbian identity. The Court also finds that gays and lesbians can contribute to society regardless of their sexual preference. Here is some good language from the judges:

We are convinced gay and lesbian people are not so politically powerful as to overcome the unfair and severe prejudice that history suggests produces discrimination based on sexual orientation. Gays and lesbians certainly possess no more political power than women enjoyed four decades ago when the Supreme Court began subjecting gender-based legislation to closer scrutiny. Additionally, gay and lesbian people are, as a class, currently no more powerful than women or members of some racial minorities.

In other words, the same reasoning that granted equal protection against racial and gender discrimination now applies to laws against same-sex marriage. In order for the State of Iowa to defend the restriction, it has to provide a good reason to overcome the presumption that laws against same-sex marriage violate the state Constitution. The state cannot provide those reasons, the Iowa Supreme Court says. It is not enough for the state to argue that it wants to preserve "traditional marriage," because that argument only advances discrimination for its own sake. While the state argues that male-female marriage is best for children, the Iowa court disagrees; not only do many opposite sex marriages produce no children, but there is nothing to prohibit gays and lesbians from raising children. In essence, the court shoots down all the justifications in support of the same-sex marriage ban.

You don't need to be a legal scholar to understand what the Iowa court did. The prohibitions against same-sex marriage are borne of prejudice against gays and lesbians along with religious objections and the sense that "we've never done it before." Same-sex couples can be as commited as opposite-sex couples, and I couldn't care less what religious objections someone wants to raise in opposition to these marriages. The framework that the courts have set up to determine that racial and gender discrimination violate the Constitution applies equally to the prohibition against same-sex marriage, especially when we remember that the courts have held out the right to marry as among the fundamental rights which cannot be abridged without an airtight reason.

So what do you do when you move into a house and discover evidence of a crime lodged in the basement, such as the bones of someone who died a few years ago, or documents hidden in the closet showing stock fraud or some other wrongdoing? Do you turn in the people who used to live there? Do you call the police? Your decision will say a lot about who you are.

The country is making that decision right now. We have long known that the Bush administration was using what it called "harsh interrogation techniques" on al Qaida prisoners and others in custody from the War on Terror. These practices are widely believed to be illegal, except for the lawyers who told the administration what it wanted to hear in clearing waterboarding and other brutal tactics. The scary part was that it was not just al Qaida terrorists who were held in U.S. captivity but innocent people who were taken in questionable sweeps and then let go after release from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons.

It's bad enough that the United States was holding some innocent people at the prison camps. But making things worse, the government has been using torture in attempting to extract confessions. No doubt that some of the prisoners are guilty of heinous crimes. But torture is against the law. It violates international law and American law. (There are also good arguments to the effect that torture does not work). There are three ways for the U.S. to get away with it: either get some government lawyer to assure you that the interrogation techniques are actually legal; do it in secret and hope that no one finds out; and hope that if anyone does find out, no one cares enough to go after the torturers.

Some excellent commentary is available online about the recent torture memos that Obama agreed to release this week. This commentary provides links to the actual documents. The ACLU's website provides easy to use access to these records (it was the ACLU which got the memos released). Prisoners are thrown against a wall, waterboarded (which simulates drowning), stripped naked in freezing temperatures and humiliated. Apologists argue that none of this is torture, but torture is not limited to electrocution or ripping out fingernails.

Here's why it all matters. As one commentator, Glenn Greenwald, points out, some of the legal documents justifying the use of torture note that nearly identical techniques are used by authoritarian countries and our own government condemns those very countries precisely for using those techniques. But one of the highest ranking government lawyers, Steven Bradbury, who ran the prestigious Office of Legal Counsel (which advises the president on legal issues) baldly stated that "we recognize that as a matter of diplomacy, the United States may for various reasons in various circumstances call another nation to account for practices that may in some respects resemble conduct in which the United States might in some circumstances engage, covertly or otherwise. Diplomatic relations with regard to foreign countries are not reliable evidence of United States executive practices and may be of only limited relevance here."

This is a remarkable statement by a prestigious lawyer, a man who held the same position that in years past was occupied by men who went on to become Supreme Court justices. What he is saying that the United States can hold other countries to standards that we do not have to follow. This is the last message you want to convey when you are trying to win the hearts and minds of the international community in your effort to protect this country from future terror attacks.

In part I of this series, I outlined the problem. It is now confirmed that the United States was using torture on prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Prisons. Thanks to the Internet, these documents are readily available together with analysis parsing the legal contortions that Bush administration lawyers used in telling administration officials what they wanted to hear.

These memos could have been under wraps for all eternity. President Obama did not have to release them. He did so over the objections of some advisors. There is no way that John McCain would have released them had he won the election last November. McCain was old school: a veteran who defers to the military and thinks that "national security" is enough to justify anything. Obama is a former law professor who believes in brains over brawn.

That does not mean Omama deserves a gold medal. He does not want to prosecute Bush administration officials and intelligence workers who used torture against prisoners even though torture is illegal under U.S. and international law. Making matters worse, Obama used the mind of bullshit public relations language in justifying his decision. He said: "this is a time for reflection, not retribution."

But it's not about retribution. It's about upholding the rule of law. This country has long since taken the rule of law seriously. The last time it happened, it was 1998, when Congress impeached President Clinton for lying under oath about a consensual sexual relationship with an adult intern. Impeachment may have been a partisan affair intended to bring down a president that the Republicans hated, but at least the Republicans were able to do this on the basis that they were upholding the rule of law. When Republicans captured the White House in 2000, they set aside any concerns about the rule of law as President Bush routinely violated the law in a myriad of ways, from warrantless wiretaps in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to half-truths and lies in support of the Iraq war which violated the laws of war in that the war was not an act of self-defense but an aggressive attack.

The political class in this country does not know what to do about lawbreakers anymore, at least not the lawbreakers who wear silk suits and $200 neckties. There remains in this country a view that "disputes" foreign affairs are politcal, not legal, and that anything done in the name of self-defense or anti-terrorism is legitimate. That's how we can get away with hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties in a war that never should have started.

Fortunately, not everyone holds the view that we can only look forward, not back, in dealing with the crimes of yore. The New York Times ran a few letters the other day that perfectly summarized what Obama should be saying. Let's read them together:

April 18, 2009 Letters The Uproar Over the C.I.A. and Torture To the Editor:

Re “Memos Spell Out Brutal C.I.A. Mode of Interrogation” (front page, April 17) :

President Obama has decided that the C.I.A. employees involved in the torture of terrorism suspects will not be prosecuted and has justified his position by stating that “this is a time for reflection, not retribution.”

I find it hard to believe that a man as intelligent as Mr. Obama, who once taught constitutional law, would equate the pursuit of justice with retribution. It makes it appear as if his decision is one of political expediency.

If holding the C.I.A. operatives accountable for violating federal or international laws is retribution, then the prosecution of ordinary citizens for crimes is also retribution.

The president does not have the authority to be selective about who should or should not be charged with a crime, and he has made a grievous error by confusing the pursuit of justice with retribution or retaliation.

If the president reached his conclusion not to prosecute because the C.I.A. agents were merely following orders, I would remind him that that defense did not hold up at the Nuremberg trials. Those involved must be tried and held accountable regardless of the political consequences.

Seeking justice is moving forward, not backward. The whole world is watching.

Chase Webb
Gresham, Ore., April 17, 2009

•

To the Editor:

The overall idea put forth on Thursday by torture apologists that the C.I.A. and other government employees were only following Department of Justice legal opinions and essentially didn’t know that waterboarding and other tortures they committed were illegal and wrong is complete nonsense.

Why was torture only whispered about throughout government in hushed, embarrassed tones? Why did the F.B.I. open a “war crimes file”? Why did the news of Abu Ghraib immediately shame all Americans?

It’s true, and proved repeatedly in social psychology experiments, that otherwise good people will tend to conform to authority. It’s true that people, under such circumstances, often fail to listen to their consciences. But don’t conflate this obedience factor with not being able to appreciate the wrongfulness.

In choosing to appease powerful interests by trying to sweep this horrible wrongdoing under the rug, President Obama undoubtedly had to overcome the pangs of his own conscience.

Coleen Rowley
Apple Valley, Minn., April 17, 2009

The writer is the retired F.B.I. agent who exposed F.B.I. lapses that led to the 9/11 attacks.

•

To the Editor:

Expressing my personal views based solely on the public record, I believe that President Obama should not sanction impunity for high-ranking government officials who approved or facilitated the use of torture.

Although licensed legal or medical professionals who aided and abetted torture certainly should at the very least be disciplined for their role in war crimes and crimes against humanity, the principal focus of the needed criminal investigation should be on the policy-making officials and advisers at the highest levels of our government — the White House, the Departments of Justice and Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency — who authorized or enabled such criminal conduct. This would also include many lawyers who provided legal cover for lawlessness.

Using torture is not merely an ethics violation. It is also a domestic and international crime, and Judge Baltasar Garzón in Spain should not be the only one investigating these reprehensible actions with an eye to criminal proceedings. The United States should finally put its own house in order.

John S. Koppel
New York, April 17, 2009

The writer is a career attorney (1981-present) on the appellate staff of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.

•

To the Editor:

Call me naïve, but I found the recent publication of the torture memorandums strangely hopeful.

This is not to make light of the unimaginable horrors endured by human beings in our custody. We as a nation looked the other way and allowed the Bush administration to act out our darkest desires for vengeance on the bodies of other human beings. All of this is devastatingly shameful.

Of course powerful nations have routinely exploited their power through all manner of coercion and torture. What seems new — and it is here that I root my hope — is the decision by the Obama administration to release this information and thereby affirm international standards that transcend any one nation’s claim to power. One such standard is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

(Rev.) Tom Martinez
Brooklyn, April 17, 2009

•

To the Editor:

The director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, defends those under President Bush who justified torture, saying that what they wrote appears “graphic and disturbing” only because we are reading it “on a bright, sunny, safe day.”

The law does not care whether the sun is shining. Its very purpose is to be a constant yardstick by which we judge the actions of individuals — even in times of great anger, or great fear. Where individual moral compasses failed, the law stood firm: torture was, is and must always be illegal.

Given all the immediate problems at hand, perhaps the Obama administration is right not to burn its energy prosecuting torturers, but it certainly should not defend them.

Paul Cantrell
Minneapolis, April 17, 2009

•

To the Editor:

Re “Report Outlines Involvement of Medical Workers in Abusive C.I.A. Interrogations” (news article, April 7):

The ethic of medicine is rooted in the basic idea that society can trust physicians to “do no harm.” If the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of health personnel in torture included physicians, this trust will have been threatened.

The A.M.A.’s Code of Medical Ethics clearly states that physicians must oppose and must not participate in torture for any reason, because participation in torture undermines the physician’s role as healer. For this reason, the A.M.A. opposes any direct physician participation in an interrogation.

In addition, physicians must help support victims of torture, strive to prevent torture, and report any instance of torture and coercive interrogation.

As the nation’s largest professional association of physicians, the A.M.A. stands ready to play a constructive role to ensure that our professional ethic is upheld and strengthened.

Rebecca J. Patchin
Chicago, April 10, 2009

The writer, a medical doctor, is chairwoman-elect of the board of trustees, American Medical Association.

Some distinguished people wrote these letters. That should encourage the rest of us to put aside our insecurities about prosecuting government officials would would certainly argue in court that they were only trying to keep the country safe or that they were only following orders.

We can read about the crimes of the Bush administration and then turn the page or we can do something about it. Ignoring the problem allows it to happen again. Dealing with the problem responsibly allows us to stand up for our ideals, at least the ideals that most Americans claim to stand for when they proudly argue that this is a nation of laws, not men. It is also a nation of laws, not emotion. We have a choice. As I wrote the other day, it's like moving into a house to discover a body in the basement. Do you call the police, or do you look the other way and decide to move on? We can go after the criminals. Or we can allow the corpse to rot in the closet.

The torture files continue. In this morning's New York Times, we learn that the Bush administration was so eager to torture prisoners in the War on Terror that they agreed to adopt tactics that were actually used by Chinese communists many years ago during the Cold War. No one realized that waterboarding and other acts of torture approved by Bush's advisors were condemned by the United States many years ago.

The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

This is what it comes down to. September 11 shocked us all, but no one stopped to consider what it really means to torture. According to the Times, "'The process was 'a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,' a former C.I.A. official said. Today, asked how it happened, Bush administration officials are finger-pointing. Some blame the C.I.A., while some former agency officials blame the Justice Department or the White House."

What do we really know about this? Investigative reports can only learn so much. We did not have to learn about any of this at all. We really find out about torture and U.S. policy by accident. According to ThinkProgress.org, "In 2005, former State Department counselor Phillip Zelikow wrote a legal memo holding an 'opposing view' from the infamous OLC torture memos. But '[t]he White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department's archives,' he writes. Zelikow discussed the matter on the Rachel Maddow Show last night." More here. All of this was against the law. This country was run by criminals for eight years.

The Supreme Court this week heard a case on students' rights under the Constitution. The Constitution is written in vague terms, and it says nothing about students, but courts have famously held that students do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. After repeating that language, however, the Supreme Court often finds a way to restrict student rights.

The case this time around concerns whether school officials had the right to strip search a 13 year-old girl who was accused of carrying prescription drugs at school. Here's what happened:

In October 2003, one of the eighth graders was Savana Redding, who was 13 years old at the time. Based on a tip from another eighth grader, the middle school’s assistant principal, Kerry Wilson, focused on Savana in an investigation of students who carried prescription drugs to school and used them for non-medical reasons.

That investigation began after officials, suspecting substance abuse at a school dance earlier in the school year, grew wary of violations of a school rule against such uses. Acting on a tip naming Savana, for allegedly giving pain-killing ibuprofen to another student, principal Wilson first inspected Savana’s backpack, but found nothing. Two female aides then took Savana to the school nurse’s office, and conducted a strip search, requiring her to remove all of her outer clothing, and requiring her to expose her breasts and pelvic area by pulling her underclothes away from her body. Again, no pills were found.

So a 13-year-old is strip-searched because of an accusation that she was improperly carrying drugs comparable to Advil. This kind of search would never be legal on the street. But the rules are different in school. Like the military and prisons, students have some rights, but they are limited in light of the special concerns that govern the schoolhouse, at least according to the Supreme Court. Although the Fourth Amendment protects against "unreasonable searches and seizures," that standard has been relaxed in this institutional environments.

How far with the Supreme Court go in allowing officials to search students? Over the years, the Supreme Court has limited the First Amendment rights of student journalists. The Court has also more broadly limited the speech rights of students, most recently in the Bong Hits for Jesus case, where a smart-ass student who held up a nonsense banner during a school outing was disciplined. The Court has also given school officials leeway in searching student purses.

The common thread in many of these cases is drugs. The War on Drugs has restricted students' rights. The Supreme Court thinks that school officials have greater leeway to restrict "search and seizure" and other rights because of the fear of drug use. A real concern, to be sure, but how do we justify strip searching a student over ibuprofen? At least a few Supreme Court Justices may find that this search was legal. No Constitution of mine would uphold a search like this.

The wonders of the modern age include real-time commentary on the arguments before the Supreme Court. Bloggers who attend the oral arguments and read the same-day transcripts offer their analysis on what happened. The sense is that the Supreme Court remains concerned about drugs in school and the Justices will defer to the judgment of school officials in rooting out drug abuse by any means, including strip searches:

It was common for members of the Court — and, especially, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — to express discomfort with an Arizona prinicipal’s order for a close-to-naked search of a 13-year-old girl. But that sentiment did not appear to be as strong as the concern that drugs may be so destructive for teenagers that some surer means of detecting them had to be acceptable under the Constitution.

Isn't there a better way to make sure students are not bringing drugs into school? Are we going to allow strip searches over pills that have the same potency as two tablets of Advil? By the way, the search revealed no drugs at all. The lower federal court noted in rejecting the search that the student could have been detained in the principal's office until her parents arrived. They decided to make her disrobe instead. What the hell is going on here?

A renewed debate on torture in this country is a good thing. A new president does not mean the old crimes are washed away. The old crimes are still sharp and they are slicing and dicing us.

A week ago, President Obama exercised courage in releasing internal torture memos from the Bush administration. Although it violates U.S. and international law, including the Geneve Conventions, torture was the official policy of the United States government. No one cared. September 11 changed everything, they said, and it was gloves off.

Here is what we are learning about torture these days:

1. An army major suggests the torture was done in part to establish a link between Iraq and 9/11 at the time the Bush administration was trying to sell the war to the American public. Rich links to this psychiatrist's testimony so you can see it for yourself. A New York Times columnist, Frank Rich, highlights this in a piece over the weekend. The link to the testimony checks out. What makes this eye-popping is that this was happening at the same time that (then) secret documents circulating among the British government had confirmed that the Bush administration was stretching the facts to support the war policy at a time when the public was wavering on the war but the administration wanted it badly. Dating to summer 2002 (seven or eight months before the war began), these are known as the Downing Street Memos, a smoking gun which establishes that Bush wanted war in the worse possible way.

2. OK, but does torture work? The growing consensus is that it does not. An FBI agent suggests there were other ways to gain real intelligence from detainees beyond torture. He published an article on this topic in the New York Times last Thursday. This AP article also summarizes the view that torture is less effective than commonly believed, and that there are other ways of gaining useful intelligence. This article is not new, but it's new to me, so it's probably new to you.

3. This particular government interrogator does not believe torture works and that it resulted in the deaths of American soldiers. And this fellow who was affiliated with the navy thought the same thing. He told the Senate:

First, there are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq – as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat – are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. And there are other senior officers who are convinced that the proximate cause of Abu Ghraib was the legal advice authorizing abusive treatment of detainees that issued from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002.

Second, allied nations reportedly hesitated on occasion to participate in combat operations if there was the possibility that, as a result, individuals captured during the operation could be abused by U.S. or other forces.

Third, allied nations have refused on occasion to train with us in joint detainee capture and handling operations because of concerns about U.S. detainee policies.
And fourth, senior NATO officers in Afghanistan have been reported to have left the room when issues of detainee treatment have been raised by U.S. officials out of fear that they may become complicit in detainee abuse.

4. Some of this information is new, but some of the most important information is not. We have long known that many of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (the scene of the photographs that came out a few years ago showing U.S. soldiers abusing prisoners) were innocent, guilty of nothing.

We have a choice. We can take all of this news seriously, or we can sweep it under the rug and look forward, not back. I prefer to look back. The people who condoned torture and made it U.S. policy should be severely punished. If Obama wants to be the man of change, this is the opportunity to show us what's made of. If he is afraid of looking weak on terror, he can highlight the fact that American soldiers died because of the torture policy. The Bush administration's desire for retribution killed our brothers and sisters.