Imagine a patriotic twelve-year-old boy, a George Washington buff who’ll join the ROTC in high school and afterward volunteer for the National Guard. His career is as yet undecided, though his daydreams include all the professions you’d guess. For example, a Cold War-era spy novel he just finished provoked intense curiosity about the CIA, especially its interrogators. Questioning suspected international bad guys seems to comport perfectly with his life’s ambition: to enter a field where he can practice and advance American values.

Our twelve-year-old, if he got curious enough to Google “CIA interrogation,” would learn that some fellow Americans who do that job recently threatened to rape the mothers of prisoners, tortured them by pretending they’d drill into their skulls, and even beat one prisoner to death with the butt of a flashlight—and if he read a bit more, he’d come to realize that other prominent Americans are against punishing the people responsible for all that, with some even going so far as to praise them.

Will that twelve-year-old boy still think of US intelligence gathering as an honorable profession where one can practice and advance American values? If a generation grows up expecting that the War on Terror requires these kinds of tactics, what kind of people are going to pursue careers in the CIA, the FBI’s terrorism units and the armed forces? The answer is the men who are most willing and able—even eager—to sneer believably, “Tell me the answer or I will violate your mother in front of you as she begs me to stop.”

Do we want to replace the honorable men who now safeguard our country with that other kind?

Our government tortured and sundry pundits insisted that the end justified the means because on September 11, 2001, a frightened America assessed the world anew, appreciated the evil of Al Qaeda, and steeled itself admirably to fight that vicious foe—and in that necessary process, too many of us made a grave error: we allowed our patriotism to be perverted by an imprudent belief that so long as we warred against evil, radical Islamists, we could do no wrong, and need not be on guard against committing abhorrent acts ourselves.

How deep this perversion of patriotism ran!

It led me and countless others to dismiss the earliest evidence that our government systematically tortured and violated the Geneva conventions. I didn’t possess any contrary evidence, or look deeply into the allegations made by fellow citizens without any reason to lie. I just couldn’t believe America would do such things, especially as President George W. Bush, an apparently decent man, explicitly said that the United States does not torture. Of course, Richard Nixon said he wasn’t a crook. Bill Clinton wagged his finger and said I didn’t have sex with that woman. So why did I assume that my president wasn't lying?

I suppose I hazily thought, as some critic of this piece is bound to insist, that America is the best country the world has ever known—that it’s done more for the freedom and prosperity of people the world over than any other nation. And I agree, even now! Yes, I say, a thousand times yes! I share that pride in America’s accomplishments, and the necessary precondition for them: a set of founding values, still being realized, that are exceptional in the history of the world. How irrational, if common, to summon that belief in response to allegations of wrongdoing. Being a great country doesn’t make us immune to abuses of power, nor do exceptional values afford any guarantee that we’ll live up to them—particularly when the government uses an emergency to undermine the checks and balances that prevent abuse, and argues that our values must be compromised by the emergency.