The congressional hearings on torture are both a waste of time and, worse, damaging to the image of the Untied States in the eyes of ordinary people around the world. These hearings should not ever have been started. President Obama urged Congress not to hold them.

Those holding the hearings know they are worthless; it is impossible to identify individuals who took actions that were illegal and could be prosecuted because no one did anything illegal. Morally wrong, possibly, useless, likely, but not forbidden by law.

So why conduct hearings to determine if the CIA or the military did use methods considered torture in efforts to gain information from terrorists? Is the reason for holding them to reveal to Americans that agencies of our government sometimes tortured prisoners? President Obama has stopped the practice and Americans already know all they wish to know on the subject. Is the reason for the hearings to discredit the Bush Administration? For most of us the Bush administration is already ancient history.

Why do they protest the President’s refusal to release photos of torture? It is a strange Freudian twist in the psyche of some Americans that imbues them with a desire to prove their country does not adhere to an ethical standard higher than our enemies, but to prove we are equally morally corrupt, The only people happy about what the congress is doing are A-Qaeda and the Taliban. A high-ranking A-Qaeda official has said every photo of the U.S. abusing a Muslim attracts hundreds of new recruits.

In creating daily headlines on the extent to which torture may have been used to extract information accomplishes only one thing. It gives ammunition to our enemies to undermine our image as a nation. The American people and people everywhere have always believed the United States held itself to a higher standard than other nations. In the hundreds of movies that showed the German SS or the Gestapo or the Russian KGB torturing prisoners it has always be implicit that their actions were abhorrent, thing that Americans would never do. Peoples of foreign countries, even those whose governments were enemies of the United States, held the image of the Statue of Liberty holding her torch aloft as a signal that somewhere there was nation that they might one day reach. One that stood for liberty, freedom, justice and where a higher standard of morality existed than in other nations of the world. That image was one of our most powerful weapons when we were challenged by enemies.

This belief in America was never so vividly demonstrated than during World War II when enemy soldiers tried desperately to surrender to American forces. In captured cities and towns when soldiers of the victorious nations arrived the people hid themselves in cellars and attics fearing the inevitable rape and pillage, but emerged when they realized the trucks rolling through the streets held American GIs.

Even though we Americans realized that as a people and as a nation we were not all that superior to others, we were proud we were viewed that way and believed that to some extent it was true. And most of us regret that a bit of that luster has been tarnished when it was revealed we were not much better than Al-Qaeda or the Taliban when it came to our treatment of prisoners. But for supposedly patriotic congressmen and senators to daily keep shouting it from the rooftops is worse than disgraceful, it is down right un-American.

President Obama was right when he asked members of his party in Congress to refrain from rehashing the past. Doubtlessly there are a few Americans who will never tire of demonstrating the alleged evils of the Bush Presidency, just as there are some who are still raking the dead embers of the Clinton administration for proof of wrong doing. For that matter, there are right wing fanatics who work tirelessly to prove what ever is wrong in America today can be blamed on President Franklin Roosevelt, dead and buried 63 long years ago.

However, with the exception of these few dedicated haters, virtually all Americans, of whatever political persuasion, are aware of some mistakes and misjudgments made by President Bush, but believe the past is the past. Nothing can be done to change it. And Americans do not wish to hear any more about it. There are more than enough problems facing the nation right now that deserve the attention of congress; so let them get at it and leave the issue of torture and everything else that cannot be changed for future historians.