Immediately after 9/11, Colin Powell said the terrorists were clearly engaged in a war on civilization itself. Soon after, as secretary of State, he prophetically warned the president — and the lawyers drafting and justifying “torture memos” in the Justice Department — that this country’s rejecting the Geneva Conventions and our own laws on the treatment of terrorism-related prisoners would “undermine public support among critical allies, making military cooperation more difficult to sustain.”
Increasingly, as Powell predicted, while the president strongly insists that the CIA be allowed to continue practicing what Bush calls “its specialized interrogations” in its secret prisons, and “renditions” (kidnapping Europeans to be tortured elsewhere), we have lost the trust and respect of many our allies’ citizens.
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