Torture and Truth

"It’s become a kind of cliché that, if in the struggle against terror, we forget our values, the terrorists will have been victorious. My question is, what do we mean by this? What exactly would constitute our having lost this battle and making changes in the way we live and our attitudes towards human rights and civil liberties that would actually constitute a kind of defeat? It’s hard to think of something more obvious than American troops and American intelligence officers torturing prisoners. And doing it not only as an act of desperation in the field, but doing it as a matter of policy which has been developed at the highest level of the administration. My question is, when we say the terrorists cause us to dispense with our values -- our belief in human rights, our adherence to laws we have passed that commit the U.S. not to torture -- if we have abrogated those, doesn’t that constitute the victory of the other side that we talk about? And if it doesn’t, what is the line you have to cross so that it does? "