I remember receiving an email on 9/12 with pictures of dozens of vigils across the world, from London to Tehran, Cairo to Moscow. The outpouring of grief and support from abroad was a moment of community that mirrored our instinctive and inspiring unity at home. But on 9/16, Dick Cheney went on Meet the Press and foreshadowed the response that squandered this global good will and divided the country:

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

Seven years on, it's common knowledge that agents of the American government torture detainees. We do. We deprive people of sleep for days on end, subject them to hypothermia, tie them in agonizing stress positions, slowly drown them, beat them, sexually humiliate them, hold them incommunicado for years on end. People of faith, like everyone else, have come down on both the right and wrong sides of this moral issue. As support for torture lingers, hopefully the golden rule persuasion message that worked so well in the poll we released yesterday will come into wide use and change the hearts and minds of misguided people.