On July 4, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson delivered an Independence Day address that was to prove remarkably prophetic. Speaking in Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence was signed, he declared: “My dream is … that America will come into the full light of day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights and that her flag is the flag not only of America, but of humanity.”

Only days before Wilson spoke those high-flown words, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated in the obscure Balkan town of Sarajevo. Wilson was unaware of it, but events were already in motion that were to plunge Europe into World War I, and to propel America to the leadership of the democratic world.

For nearly a century afterwards, the American flag was indeed the flag of humanity. We had our faults as a nation, and we made our share of mistakes as a great power. But even our toughest critics had to admit that when it came down to a fundamental choice between freedom versus tyranny, justice versus oppression or humanity versus barbarism, America was on the side of the angels.

If I had to pick the moment when I was proudest of being an American, it would be an occasion in mid-November of 1983, when I was part of the crowd on the White House lawn to welcome President and Mrs. Reagan home from their state visit to Korea. In his remarks on that occasion, President Reagan pulled a surprise: He introduced two doll-like Korean children whom he and the First Lady had brought back to the U.S. to receive treatment for severe medical problems. The President explained that the children were orphans, and that they came from an orphanage for Korean children that our GIs had built with their own money.

I don’t remember all that he said. I just remember that when he finished I was in tears. At that moment, the American flag that waved in that perfect, cloudless November sky was truly the “the flag not only of America, but of humanity.” Who but Americans, I marveled, would have cared as much?

In recent years, I have had occasion again and again to contrast that moment with sickening reports of torture and human rights violations perpetrated by America. Not isolated incidents, not the inevitable by-products of the grim necessities of war, but the result of deliberate, systematic policies countenanced by the highest levels of our government.

I have heard our President admit to the existence of CIA prisons around the world where suspected terrorists have been subjected to interrogation by an “alternative set of procedures.”

I have read shocking reports of innocent people being abducted, held incommunicado, without arraignment and without trial, and subjected to barbarous treatment. All to obtain information that, as it turned out, they did not possess.

So I turn from the speech by President Wilson in 1914 to a speech delivered last week by Senator Hilary Clinton, in opposition to the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Senator Clinton said this: “Have we fallen so low as to debate how much torture we are willing to stomach? By allowing this Administration to further stretch the definition of what is and is not torture, we lower our moral standards to those whom we despise, undermine the values of our flag wherever it flies, put our troops in danger, and jeopardize our moral strength in a conflict that cannot be won simply with military might.”

Senator Clinton is right when she says that we cannot win the war against terrorism by military might alone. In a battle for the hearts and minds of the world, we have to show that we are morally superior to the crazed fanatics who bomb, behead and torture innocent people -- just as we showed ourselves to be morally superior to the Kaiser, the Axis powers and Soviet Communism. By countenancing the use of torture, even “to save American lives,” we are doing more than descending to their level. We are engaging in a kind of moral disarmament. We are throwing away one of our most potent weapons.

We are lowering the flag, and we will pay dearly for it.