In one of his first acts, President Barack Obama ordered the suspension of prosecutions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and its eventual closure within the year.

At the camp, young boys, soldiers, are taught not to respect their prisoners as human beings, that they are animals undeserving of the unalienable rights extended to all other souls by the Constitution of the United States.

In violation of our own sacred ideals, battered men are dragged into closed concrete rooms without trial or counsel and forced to endure days of sleeplessness, hours of physical abuse, mock drowning, isolation, constant fear and worse. Government-sanctioned torture sessions are an affront to all free people of the world and the sanctified pursuit of such practices unavoidably leads to abuse. It’s an unjust method in violation of the law, not just of man, but of any righteous god.

It’s a practice more similar to the acts of totalitarian tyrants than perhaps any ever employed by our government, surpassing in offense to the illegal imprisonment of Japanese-Americans citizens during World War II, which the United States has apologized for time and time again. But our apologies carry little resolve so long as we continue to find ourselves at odds with civil liberty.

In those times, as in ours, the call to ignore the inconvenient beliefs of justice and reason were given weight by seemly desperate circumstances and ignorant leaders. The argument always heard is that our enemies are of a pedigree and belief so volatile there is no way to extend them equal consideration – that we must embrace a state of fear so compelling that the ends excuse all the means leading to them. This path has been walked many times in mankind’s past and the end result can be so horrifying it echoes across a civilization’s history for decades, if not centuries. We as a people, are the direct result of those horrors transgressed by the state at the very hour of our founding.