Next time I go abroad, the pride I have always felt upon presenting my passport may be dimmed by the knowledge that to much of the world the eagle now stands for hypocritical disregard for human rights. On March 8, President Bush vetoed an intelligence authorization bill that would have prevented the CIA from using a host of torture practices that are explicitly banned in the Army Field Manual, justifying the practices as “valuable tool[s] in the war on terror.” The CIA is independent from the military and therefore is not subject to the Army regulations in the absence of specific legislation to the contrary. Although U.S. law prevents anyone from engaging in torture, it does not define it, leaving a great deal of discretion in the hands of an administration with an appalling history of contempt for the rule of law. In order to provide clear standards that allow interrogators to operate with confidence, the Army Field Manual explicitly bans particularly abhorrent practices. Among them is waterboarding: a form of torture in which the victim is tied on his back and immobilized while water is poured over his head and breathing passages. He simultaneously suffocates and inhales water, creating a sensation of drowning and imminent death.

With this veto, the President has done something that bin Laden could only dream of – he has compromised our society’s liberal values. The President argues that our enemies hate the West “because of our freedoms” – yet he will not protect the principles which supposedly divide us from them. Even if defending the dignity of every man and woman meant accepting less security, it would be a sacrifice we would have to make in order to remain the shining “city upon a hill,” that we claim and desire to be. The President’s oft-repeated claim, “The United States does not torture” should never have to be qualified; it ought to be a fundamental dividing line between ourselves and the people against whom we fight. As a nation, we have rarely compromised our principles for momentary expediency. When we have - on issues from slavery, to internment, to McCarthyism - we have always come to regret it.

Waterboarding is not only an assault on our scruples but on the very concept of the rule of law. U.S. law bans torture, defined as any act which causes clear mental or physical pain or suffering. Although there is no clear consensus on whether waterboarding meets this definition, most human rights NGOs feel that it does, according to University Law School professor Steven Ratner. Almost all of these groups agree that at the very least, waterboarding, as well as other U.S. tactics like stress positions and sleep deprivation, violates the broader bans on inhumane treatment in the Geneva Conventions, to which the US. is a signatory.

The sacrifice of our safety to preserve our values would be an unpleasant trade-off; it is fortunately not one we have to make. Torture likely does nothing to preserve our safety. There has been very little scientific study on what works in interrogations, but in a 2006 Pentagon study entitled “Educing Information,” Colonel Steven Kleinman wrote that “the scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information” and noted that “profound emotional, psychological, and physical discomfort” can “significantly and negatively impact the ability of the source to recall information accurately.”

Indeed, harsh methods, whether the ones the administration sanctions in Guantanamo or the more appalling but thankfully less common ones in Abu Ghraib, make us less safe in the long run by undermining our support among moderate Muslims throughout the world. Explaining why four out of five Muslims in the Middle East have an unfavorable view of the United States, Rami Khourim, editor of Lebanon’s Daily Star, cites a “self-serving double standard” and a lack of accountability. Surely, American human rights violations do not approach the atrocities which are common-place in many Middle Eastern countries, but whether allegations of American hypocrisy are correct or not, torture plays into them and foolishly cedes ground to our enemies in the battle for hearts and minds throughout the Arab world. Of course, America will not convince Osama bin Laden to end his jihad against the West if we stop waterboarding terrorist suspects, but that’s not the point. The life-blood of Islamic terrorism is not the committed leadership, but the thousands of eager new recruits. These recruits do not hate our freedom or our liberality. A November 2007 article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “Where Boys Grow up to be Jihadis” detailed that the path to violence is complex, but it is one that is driven quite often by specific political events. While the article specifically cites the Iraq War, one of the issues that most inflames the Muslim world is, as Khourim mentions, our hypocrisy: a hypocrisy most clearly demonstrated by our stance on torture.

President Bush’s father fought and nearly died in order to rid Asia of the scourge of Japanese imperialism. His cause was righteous; the Imperial Japanese were aggressive and violated human rights with the same frequency and brutality as their German allies. After the War, the United States set about bringing the most atrocious violators of human rights to justice. Among those convicted of war crimes and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor was Yukio Asano. It was a punishment he richly deserved. His crime? Waterboarding an American civilian. Our grandparents fought to rid Europe and Asia of torture, our brothers and sisters fight to rid Iraq and Afghanistan of torture. It is an insult to their memory to introduce it in the US.