Torturing people in the name of America's safety has always upset me. I know—I know—the enemy did horrible things: They killed 3,000 Americans and are still determined to do their worst, and I detest them for it.

Believe me, I've had plenty of lively debates about all that. But it seems that our government, all of us, so quickly reverted to a "Lord of the Flies" mentality, stooping to the level of those we so despise. And in doing so, we gave up so much more than individual lives.

I'm reminded of the biblical quote, to paraphrase, "What does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his own soul?"

Does that phrase apply to us as a country? Did our government seek to save lives at the expense of our nation's values?

Have we as Americans sought to keep "the world" to the detriment of what made that world good and, yes, holy?

A recent N.Y. Times article revealed that those "enhanced interrogation techniques" were designed as part of military training to prepare soldiers for what we considered fully to be torture by despotic communist regimes such as those in Cambodia.

Waterboarding had been prosecuted by America as a war crime following WW II and had been used since the Spanish Inquisition. Think about it. The president sat there on camera and told us that America does not torture!

Well, we now know that not only do we use techniques that we consider torture but that our president lied to our face about it.

I could handle Clinton telling me he didn't have sex "with that woman." Fine. I didn't care anyway. Sell it to the tabloids.

But the facts are: The United States can never again be considered by the world as a country that doesn't torture its prisoners; the president lies to the people about it; and I don't want to hear again how Bush/Cheney kept us safe.

We not only lost 3,000 individual souls on 9/11—we lost our nation's soul in the aftermath. Michael Preddy Westlake Village