Sam Wells guest column: Torture undermines American character

What are we proud of about America? What is it that we fight so hard to protect?

America is founded on law. American and international law says torture is illegal. It says torture is never justified. It says torture has no place in a civilized society.

But America is vulnerable to an enemy that doesn't play by America's rules, an enemy that exploits American freedoms to undermine American democracy.

Does this mean America must set aside the rule of law to subdue its adversaries by military and economic might, sometimes including the use of torture? No. Why not? Because by suspending the rule of law so often and so routinely that water-boarding, mock burials and ritual physical humiliation become almost conventional instruments of interrogation, we let the terrorists win: We become like them. If the way we engage our enemies means we have to give up our nation's core values, then winning does us more harm than good — because it turns us into enemies of ourselves.

Study after study shows torture doesn't work. We can all imagine that if we caught a terrorist who knew the location of a time bomb due to explode on Manhattan, and the terrorist wouldn't talk, we'd be strongly tempted to torture the terrorist to save the lives of millions of people. But this scenario is so unusual as to be almost irrelevant: Almost none of the thousands of recent instances of torture supported by our country have arisen in cases of this kind. In addition, what people say under such duress is notoriously unreliable.

The tragedy is that everyone involved in sponsoring torture already knows these things. So why do planes routinely fly from the Johnston County Airport to facilitate the practice of torture? Because we say to ourselves, "If we love our country, we must go to any lengths to defend it. Even if torture abrogates the foundations of our country's identity, even if torture demonstrably doesn't succeed in making the world a safer place, we still must torture, because torture is an act of witness that proves our absolute loyalty to America, and America's rightful dominance in the world."

It's time to say this is wrong. It's time to say we love our country best when we never forget what it truly stands for, and we serve our country best when we remember it stands for freedom and flourishing for all. Torture is against America's DNA. Torture does not make America safe. Torture lets terrorists win by making America more like them.

A recently released UNC School of Law report by Deborah Weissman argues that our governor and attorney general have a duty to explore the activities in Johnston County. It also reveals that so-called "extraordinary rendition" flights operated by the CIA often originate at the tiny rural airstrip outside Smithfield, where Aero Contractors is based. Aero is a CIA-affiliated aviation company that journalists and human-rights experts have clearly implicated in rendition flights. The planes fly to Washington, where CIA agents board, and then to other parts of the world to pick up CIA detainees and take them to nations where torture is habitually overlooked. Detainees are tortured in gruesome ways; yet many of them are innocent. They have no information to give the CIA; yet they are left emotionally and physically wounded.

North Carolina can be a state that has the courage and the vision to say, "America's been through tough times. But those times are not so tough that they should ever let us forget the freedoms and the security on which this nation is built. We must cease these rendition flights now. They're not about freedom and security. They're built on a lie. We want nothing to do with them."

Torture is what terrorists do. Why are we fighting terrorists? Because we reject everything they stand for. Don't let us become a terrorist state. Let's resolve to have nothing to do with torture. If we continue to use torture, you know who we'll end up torturing? Ourselves.

Terrorists can kill our people and hurt our country. But American-supported torture rots our country's heart and kills our country's soul. This is our stark choice: If we don't stop behaving like terrorists, one day we'll wake up and find we've turned into them.