Today’s Washington Post has a must-read op-ed by Mark McKeon, who worked as a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia:

In 2001 and the following few years, we at the international tribunal built a strong court case against Milosevic. We presented evidence that he had effective control over soldiers and paramilitaries who tortured prisoners, and did worse. We brought into court reports of atrocities that had been delivered to Milosevic by international organizations to show his knowledge of what was happening under his command. And we watched as other heads of state were indicted for similar crimes, including Charles Taylor in Liberia and, of course, Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

At the same time, I watched with horror the changes that were happening back home. The events are now well known: Abu Ghraib; Guantanamo; secret “renditions” of prisoners to countries where interrogators were not afraid to get rough; secret CIA prisons where there appeared to be no rules. I tried to answer, as best I could, the questions from my international colleagues at The Hague about what was happening in and to my country. But as each revelation topped the last, I soon found myself without words.

I hope that the United States has turned the page on those times and is returning to the values that sustained our country for so many years. But we cannot expect to regain our position of leadership in the world unless we hold ourselves to the same standards that we expect of others. That means punishing the most senior government officials responsible for these crimes. We have demanded this from other countries that have returned from walking on the dark side; we should expect no less from ourselves.

To say that we should hold ourselves to the same standards of justice that we applied to Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein is not to say that the level of our leaders’ crimes approached theirs. Thankfully, there is no evidence of that. And yet, torture and cruel treatment are as much violations of international humanitarian law as are murder and genocide. They demand a judicial response. We cannot expect the rest of humanity to live in a world that we ourselves are not willing to inhabit.

The simple fact is that we are now faced with overwhelming evidence of illegal torture conducted during the Bush administration. People can debate whether this technique or that technique amounted to “torture”; or whether torture “works”; or whether some Republicans are somehow sexually aroused by the idea of torturing people — but one fact remains: we have mountains of credible evidence that many people in the Bush administration broke US and international law.

If we just whitewash this, without conducting a full investigation, we will have absolutely zero moral standing in the world going forward with which to criticize rogue regimes and demand that they themselves investigate allegations of prisoner abuse.

What is the government of some terrorized African country going to say when we demand that they investigate and punish the torture and killings committed by their previous dictator? Why would they say anything other than “Oh, that stuff doesn’t happen anymore. We prefer to keep walking and look forward, not backward. Won’t happen again; sorry…”?

We will never again be able to condemn others for the use of torture unless we now swallow the bitter pill and investigate ourselves.