The nation’s current attempt at catharsis through a gargantuan report prepared by the Democratic staff of a Senate committee exhibits some familiar patterns. Most of them involve treating a government agency as if it were Dorian Gray’s portrait, which can take on all the hideous marks of our own transgressions while we present ourselves as pure and innocent. The saturation coverage of the report and most early comment about it have displayed several misconceptions and misdirections.

One misconception is that we, the public, and our representatives in Congress are learning something new from this report that better enables us to make policies and set national priorities—better than we already could have done, based on what we already knew about this whole unpleasant business. In fact, the main directions of the activity in question and even many of the relevant gory details have long been public knowledge. Many people seem to believe that wallowing in still more gory details is a form of expiation. The basis for that belief is hard to understand.

The report itself and almost all the coverage of it misses what is the main, big story—missed perhaps because we ourselves are characters in it. The story is that the American people, and thus our political leaders, have had a major change in fears, mood, and priorities from the early days after the 9/11 until the present. In the aftermath of 9/11 Americans were far more militant, more willing to take on costs and risks, and more willing to compromise long-held values in the name of counterterrorism. The interrogation techniques that are now the subject of controversy and abhorrence were condoned or even encouraged back then by our political leaders in both the executive and legislative branches. As time has gone by without another terrorist spectacular in the U.S. homeland, pendulums have swung back, moods have changed again, and old values have reasserted themselves. It is difficult for anyone, but perhaps most of all for elected politicians, to admit this kind of inconsistency. Thus we get the current effort to focus ignominy on a single agency, where people who were on the tail end of that entire political process happened to work, as a substitute for such admission.

This is by no means the first time that waves of fear in America have resulted in deviation from liberal values, with the deviation later becoming a source of shame and regret. There is a long history of this, going back at least to the Alien and Sedition Acts in the eighteenth century. Another example, now universally seen as a black mark on American history, was the internment during World War II of American citizens of Japanese ancestry.

Another misconception is that because a report comes from a Congressional committee or some ad hoc commission, it is the Voice of God and the ultimate source of truth on whatever subject it addresses rather than what it really is, which is one particular set of perspectives or opinions. Another official pronouncement is the CIA’s report on the report, which for anyone who bothers to look at it comes across as a sober and balanced treatment of the subject that carefully differentiates between the valid observations in the Senate committee staff’s report and the significant errors in it. The CIA’s report was prepared under senior officers who had no stake in the interrogation program. It is by no means the reaction of someone in a defensive crouch. Unfortunately few people will look at that report and make any effort to learn from it. The Washington Post barely mentioned its existence, let alone any of the substance in it, in its saturation coverage of the Senate committee report.

Anyone who did bother to look and learn from the CIA report would realize how mistaken is another notion being widely voiced: that the abusive interrogation techniques were the result of an agency or elements within it “running amok.” The program in question was authorized by the topmost authorities in the executive branch, as those authorities have confirmed in their public statements or memoirs. Congressional overseers were informed, according to the instructions of those topmost authorities and according to standard practice with sensitive covert actions. Overseers had ample opportunities to object but did not.

A final misconception being displayed from people on various sides of this issue is that the question of whether any useful information was gained from application of the controversial techniques has to be treated in an all-or-nothing manner. People, including authors of the Senate committee report, wishing to make an anti-torture statement seem to believe that they have to argue that the techniques never gained any useful information. They don’t have to argue that. In acting as if they do, they are exhibiting another American trait, which the political scientist Robert Jervis noted almost four decades ago, which is to resist recognizing that there are trade-offs among important values. The coercive interrogation techniques involve such a trade-off. One can accept that the techniques did yield some information that contributed to U.S. security and still oppose any use of such techniques because they are contrary to other important American values, as well as hurting the standing of the United States abroad and yielding bad information along with the good. This is the position expressed by former CIA director Leon Panetta.

Amid all that is misleading in the committee report itself and in reactions to it, some kudos are in order for other reactions. One compliment should go to the Obama White House, which provided in its statement on the subject a principled declaration that torture is wrong along with some recognition of the public emotions and moods that underlay what was done several years ago. A particularly graceful touch was a reference to how “the previous administration faced agonizing choices” in how to secure the United States amid the post-9/11 fears. This fair and correct way of framing the recent history was the opposite of what could have been a partisan “those guys did torture and we didn’t” approach.

Also worthy of compliments in the same vein is Senator John McCain, who made an eloquent speech on the floor of the Senate opposing any use of torture. McCain often is as hard-minded a partisan warrior as anyone, but on this matter he spoke on the basis of principle.

Finally, kudos should go to the CIA for not going into a defensive crouch but instead recognizing deficiencies in performance where they did exist and, unlike the Senate committee report, coming up with specific recommendations for improvement. This response, too, represented important American values. As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper noted in his own statement, “I don’t believe that any other nation would go to the lengths the United States does to bare its soul, admit mistakes when they are made and learn from those mistakes.”

This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission.

Finally, someone in the US government has followed through on President Barack Obama’s judgment that CIA-conducted and “-outsourced” torture—let’s call it by its common name—is “not who we are” as a nation.  Finally, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has given us a (still heavily-redacted) account of what the CIA did between 2002 and 2006.

There is good as well as bad news in all of this mess.  After all, the Senate Committee (or at least its Democratic members) was prepared to see the United States “come clean” about some practices that—certainly in hindsight and, for people of any true moral sense, as should have been obvious at the time—are unacceptable  to a civilized society.

How many other countries would have done the same? Quite a few it turns out, at least 28 at last count, in what are typically known as “truth and reconciliation commissions.” Notable have been those in South Africa, Argentina, and Chile. However, by contrast with crimes in those countries, mostly against their own people, what was done by US government officials and their paid servants—some US “contractors” and some foreign governments—directly affected only a few people; most of them were avowed enemies of the United States; and at least some of whom were involved in the worst foreign attack on the continental US since 1814.

The published part of the report actually contains few surprises, other than to reveal that some of the “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs), an antiseptic euphemism like the Vietnam War’s “termination with extreme prejudice,” was much more brutal than hitherto reported.  More details than previously known were provided by how officials of the Central Intelligence Agency lied to Congress—a felony—and also, supposedly, to senior officials in the George W. Bush White House (which had its own share of the cover-up).  Further, the report confirmed what many terrorism experts and insiders-now-outsiders had said before: that such techniques rarely if ever produce “actionable” intelligence and certainly not in this case.

Thus, the argument is now being made widely around the world that the United States—self-styled since 1630 as a City Upon a Hill,  the producer of regular human rights reports about  every other country on the planet, and a list-keeper of other peoples’ misdeeds—has confessed to its own inhumane acts.

Yes, that is still part of the (relatively) good news.  Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca.) and her Senate committee did not have to release the report. While the journalism community would continue to sniff at the edges of scandal, and awareness of thus-and-so would long be whispered around Washington, the full picture could have probably been buried, not quietly, but still buried.

The unalloyed bad news comes in different forms. As the inevitably-to-be-leaked list grows of foreign countries that either allowed the CIA to build private, purpose-built prisons or even took part in the “extraordinary rendition” of US terrorism suspects (to be tortured away from prying American eyes), there will be domestic embarrassment for some political leaderships that have not already been called to account (e.g., as has happened in Poland). As President Obama summed it up this week: “These techniques did significant damage to America’s standing in the world and made it harder to pursue our interests with allies and partners.”

The “bad guys,” especially the thugs of the world who have been subjected to American criticism or who themselves engage in immoral actions—like al-Qaeda, Islamic State (ISIS or IS), and a host of brutal governments, many but not all in the Middle East—will now claim a US precedent for what they do, and terrorist groups will use the Senate Committee revelations as a recruiting tool.

By any standard, the US is not in their league as a miscreant.  There is the issue of provocation to balance against the immorality of the CIA’s torture program. But at the same time, there is also the issue of efficacy—was the immorality worth the price? As President Obama said of the report this week: “It reinforces my long-held view that these harsh methods were not only inconsistent with our values as a nation, they did not serve our broader counterterrorism efforts or our national security interests.” They were not only wrong; they didn’t work.

More bad news will be felt immediately by America’s diplomats abroad.  They will just have to hunker down, stick to the talking points that Washington gives them and, we hope, contrast our openness (though it took far too long) with rampant terrorism and state oppression by people who would not dream of repentance or accountability. We can also expect Schadenfreude on the part of some of our closest allies, including in Europe. “Too bad about what happened in the United States, tut, tut,” they will say. Some friendly governments will face popular resistance to cooperating with the US in other actions abroad, as this report comes hard on the heels of revelations about the National Security Agency’s spying on foreign leaders.  However, these views will be tempered among those who recognize that damage to America’s standing could also negatively impact  them, since they still need us as a security guarantor, a point that was underscored earlier this year by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

We are already seeing the worst of the bad news, and it is at home.  Senator John McCain (R-Az.), who himself was tortured in a North Vietnamese prison, has welcomed the issuance of the report; but for most other Republican members of Congress, it is the Democrats and Barack Obama who are somehow to blame for this whole business. They contest the evidence and claim that water-boarding and other EITs did indeed help forestall further terrorism on our shores.  They see a witch hunt by the current administration, although President Obama said in April 2009 that “For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it’s appropriate for them to be prosecuted.” (Whether such a pledge should have been made is another matter.) The Attorney General, Eric Holder, followed through on that pledge in August 2012 by dropping two prominent cases. Even worse are former officials of the CIA who have joined the chorus in arguing that what was done protected the nation. Their efforts at self-justification add to the case that the CIA needs a thorough house-cleaning.  The agency’s leaders during the period in question should be denied any further government service. Those who lied to Congress should be prosecuted; the lawyers who justified the breaking of laws should be disbarred. (If that could be done to a sitting president for lying about sex, surely it should be done in this case.)  And no one should be allowed to get away with saying, however they phrase it, “We were just following orders.”  That line of argument fell to pieces at Nuremberg almost seven decades ago. Prosecution?  Maybe not—though it would be true to the rule of law and would send a useful message. No further government service? Definitely. Actions, whatever the sincerity of motives, must have consequences.

Maybe some larger good can begin to come out of all this. I do not mean just, as President Obama has said:  “I will continue to use my authority as president to make sure we never resort to those methods again.” That is a worthy goal—though all-too-likely of short duration, as can be testified to by those of us who remember the hearings in the 1970s by the Senate’s Church Committee, whose report and resulting national debate should have stopped in its tracks what the CIA did after 9/11.

The larger good can be a recognition that accountability needs to be returned to government, in general – a quality that has never been in great supply. The last senior political figure to quit over an issue of principle and policy was Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in 1979, following the abortive hostage rescue mission in Iran.  While Britain tried to sort out responsibility after its prime minister, Tony Blair, misled his country into joining the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, we have never done so and never will. We have never held accountable the small group of senior officials who consciously misled not just the president of the United States but also the American people, thereby leading the country into one of the most costly mistakes ever in US engagement abroad.

There can be no doubt that we are a great nation; we are basically a moral society, and the overwhelming majority of people in government, including most but unfortunately not all elected politicians, Republicans and Democrats, are so as well and work to do what they think is the best for our country.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has started us thinking once again about the demands of creating “a more perfect union” and has reminded us that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Let us hope that we also make a serious start on raising both the standard and the practice of accountability, across the board, to validate President Obama’s statement: “Today is also a reminder that upholding the values we profess doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us stronger and that the United States of America will remain the greatest force for freedom and human dignity that the world has ever known.”