Americans, with broad bipartisan support, have not only embedded our unambiguous rejection of torture into American law (establishing legal constraints which the Bush administration is now determined to dismantle), but have for generations been in the forefront of establishing such standards worldwide through treaties including the Geneva Conventions.

Similarly, previous generations of Americans - left, right, and center - have been unified in the belief that not only is such conduct essential for the safety of our own captured servicemen and women, but that any nation which does not adhere to its own basic values (regardless of any self-proclaimed virtue) would cease to possess the moral prerequisites for genuine success.

Our present need for "the decent respect for the opinions of mankind" is no less compelling than it was for our founders. But the primary need for realigning our actions with our values is not improved public relations. The most compelling need is, for the benefit of our own society, to reaffirm moral constraints upon our actions, individual and collective, without which the character of our nation will be diminished.

Accomplishing this can only be done by reframing the issues in a manner which befits our Judeo-Christian and American values.

This will be contentious. The unifying values implanted by America's founders - values of liberty, non-aggression, and antipathy to authoritarian government; have historically prevailed only despite significant opposition from Americans with less honorable priorities. Indeed, the very eloquence with which Jefferson, Madison, and other founders defended civil liberties and warned repeatedly of the dangers of unrestrained executive power and the pernicious consequences of war and empire is primarily because their views were not universal. Their beliefs in liberty, defended by non-aggressive, anti-imperial foreign policy, and the right of dissent have survived to become the "common ground" of the American civic vision only after bitter and divisive political battles. During such times these cherished principles - now universally claimed (even those whose oppose the substance of their beliefs claim them rhetorically as their own) and taken for granted have not infrequently been severely threatened.

Today the rhetoric of this consensus American vision of liberty and non-aggression remains unscathed. But the substance of the beliefs of our founders (which constitutes the basic common ground of our political compact) is under assault. Certainly no one overtly challenges our commitment to liberty and democracy. Yet we witness proponents of freedom at home and abroad advocating perpetual military occupation, rationalizing permanent detention of American citizens without charges or trial, and those who claim to respect the rule of law remaining silent while administration lawyers concoct methods for the president to evade American legal prohibitions of torture and promote the legal theory that the president has the inherent authority to set aside American law.