In the wake of the latest reports that important figures within the Bush administration signed off on White House legal counselor John Yoo’s memo advocating the use of torture, the administration has simply shrugged, as if to say, so what?

And why should they care? All of them will land on their feet. Colin Powell is already making a killing on the lecture circuit. Condi Rice was even promoted to Powell’s old job. Since his resignation from the Pentagon, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been working at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a conservative think-tank. Yoo, the author of the legal memo that justified the use of torture, has been teaching at the Berkeley College of Law. Of course, Bush and Cheney will have little issue finding work after they leave office next year.

These people got away with a crime. However, no punishment can fit the real damage this administration has inflicted to the moral credibility of the United States.

America has never asked itself whether or not its status as a military superpower has been earned morally. From the end of World War II until Sept. 11, the U.S. used its power to promote the ideals of liberal internationalism, succinctly described in Matthew Yglesias’ new book, “Heads in the Sand.” This was particularly true in the Clinton administration, when the U.S. sought to further legitimize international institutions, often unsuccessfully, with international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court.

Indeed, an important aspect of the liberal internationalist tradition predates World War II: the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention explicitly and unequivocally abolishes torture. First agreed to in 1929 and later revised in 1949, the Third Geneva Convention states that “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever.

Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.” The Yoo legal memo, essentially, gets around this by saying that enemy combatants are no prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. As are most notions this administration expresses, this is false. Terrorists associated with al-Qaida meet the criteria of being members of an organized resistance group.

The problem with the American torture regime has less to do with the quantity of instances and more to do with legal revisionism. With one memo and with all hands on deck, the Bush administration compromised the international legal framework that took years to build. The fact that torture has done absolutely nothing to make the U.S. any safer demonstrates the administration’s overconfidence in executive power. Overconfidence will be Bush’s legacy. Rather than maintain any shred of faith in our constitutional principles, he has asserted his office’s authority. The implications of legalized torture become even more apparent and severe when one considers the indefinite nature of an abstract “war on terror.”

Matt Struhar is a junior in political science and history. He can be reached at [email protected].