Ronald Reagan had a point when he called the Soviet Union the "evil empire." What nearly every American understood during the Cold War -- even those who virulently disagreed with the Gipper -- was that communist regimes around the world were willing to treat human beings in ways that were profoundly immoral. We also firmly believed that we were different. Yes, the United States made mistakes, and individual Americans occasionally committed unconscionable acts, as humans everywhere are prone to do, but our system had the requisite checks and balances to correct and punish bad behavior when it occurred.
That faith has worn thin. After years of legalistic flimflamming by the Bush administration about what constitutes torture, it has yet to declare waterboarding illegal, though U.S. officials say they no longer do it. After years of claiming that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay were being treated humanely, the administration now admits that some were waterboarded. And after years of administration insistence that U.S. interrogation methods were inherently superior to those of our enemies, now comes the revelation by the New York Times that military trainers at Guantanamo Bay taught an interrogation class based on communist Chinese torture techniques. They reportedly relied on a 1957 Air Force study of the effects of Chinese torture methods on American prisoners during the Korean War.
