My country tortures prisoners. This fact is saddening and disillusioning. So I am doing the only thing I can: protesting through writing.

I have always connected torture with a more primitive form of society than the one in which I live. During the Middle Ages, torture was the standard reaction of European society to crimes against the state or the church. The Catholic Church openly tortured heretics or witches to make them confess their sins and implicate others. Medieval torture implements, such as the rack or thumbscrews, can today be seen in the many torture museums that attract tourists in European cities. People go to torture museums to thrill at the exotic practices of the unenlightened people of long ago.

In the age of European Enlightenment, beginning in England in the 17th century and spreading throughout Europe in the 18th century, banning torture was one of the first demands of the leading philosophers and reformers, who also advocated democracy and civil rights. Those great thinkers, upon whose ideas our American republic was founded, believed that eliminating torture was a necessary part of creating a free society with a just government.

The political leaders who founded the United States and codified our unique form of government clearly expressed their rejection of torture. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution includes the right of accused people not to be forced to incriminate themselves; the Eighth Amendment forbids “cruel and unusual punishments.”

During my lifetime, I have been taught that torture was a characteristic practice of those governments, which all good Americans rejected as totalitarian. The contrived confessions that the Soviet government forced out of its many victims in show trials came from psychological and physical forms of torture, which demonstrated the inferiority and inhumanity of the communist system. Just the other day, I and some of my students visited a former prison of the East German secret police. Our guide displayed and explained the sophisticated and brutal forms of torture employed there to extract confessions from innocent citizens. Only the end of communism meant the end of torture.

The Chilean Navy has just admitted that one of its beautiful sailing schooners was used to torture and murder political opponents in the early days of the Pinochet regime. The inhumane practices of the dictatorial governments, which have been replaced in recent years by democracies in Latin America and Africa, have been revealed by courts or truth and reconciliation commissions. Democracy is supposed to be the antidote for torture.

When the first reports of torture at Abu Ghraib were made public, it was possible to believe that a few rogue soldiers, under the stress of war, had mistreated their prisoners. That was what President Bush said had happened. Now we know better. Already last year, top officials in the Bush administration, including Alberto R. Gonzales, who is supposed to become our new attorney general, secretly had developed an official justification for torturing military prisoners. Torture has been a regular occurrence, known at the highest levels of government and military for months, at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Our political leaders, including our president, have lied and continue to lie about our practice of torturing prisoners, just like every corrupt regime across the world that we have been taught to despise.

The presidential campaign is said to have been about moral values. Americans often congratulate ourselves on giving moral values greater importance in political life than other western nations. I don’t know any group of Americans, conservatives or liberals, abortion opponents or gay rights defenders, born-agains or atheists, who would argue that the American government should torture our enemies. Yet there is no sign that our government is ready to change its practices in those secret prisons where the torturers work. No sign that the proponents of torture will suffer political consequences for their inhumane ideas.

That will only happen if the American people really are prepared to defend the most basic moral and human values. In Germany, the bystanders who did nothing during the Holocaust have been condemned for their inaction. They claimed they didn’t know. We can’t even do that. As long as our government tortures and we remain silent, we are all torturers.

Steve Hochstadt lives in Lewiston and teaches history at Bates College. He is temporarily teaching in Germany and can be reached at shochsta@bates.edu.

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