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.