Courage

Mr. Cheney's politics of torture, Mark Danner says, looks, Janus-like, in two directions:

back to the past, toward exculpation for what was done under the administration he served, and into the future, toward blame for what might come under the administration that followed.

Obama chooses to take this bull by the horns:

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British, during World War Two, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said 'we don't torture', when all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat. And the reason was that Churchill understood you start taking shortcuts, and over time, that corrodes what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

But the narrative gets a little more complicated if you recall that Churchill sanctioned the area bombing of civilian populations in Germany.

P.S. 2 May Dowd on corrosion of character