I rarely have nightmares. In fact, I wake up most mornings without a single idea of what I dreamt about the past night.

A few nights ago, that wasn’t the case.

I remember my REM-rendered self lying face down on top of a metal table in a pitch-black room, my hands and feet shackled by steel cuffs. Three men – hooded and dressed in all black – entered and flipped on a blindingly bright spotlight aimed directly at my face. One of them placed a towel over my head, and everything was dark again.

A bucket of icy water was dumped over me before I could voice any sort of complaint to my captors. I was, impossibly enough, drowning on dry land; my arms and legs flailed in a fruitless effort to escape.

Then I woke up.

The likeliest source of such a vividly violent dream was my recent viewing of the Kathryn Bigelow film “Zero Dark Thirty,” which controversially depicted Central Intelligence Agency operatives utilizing waterboarding on suspected al-Qaeda associates in an attempt to locate Osama bin Laden. But for some enemy combatants captured during the war on terror, what transpired in my head wasn’t merely the product of an overactive imagination. For them, this was a real-life nightmare.

Lost amongst last week’s 24-hour coverage of the Tsarnaev brothers was the release of a report by the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment. It confirmed that during the George W. Bush administration, agencies of the United States government systematically tortured dozens of suspected terrorists at CIA black sites around the world and at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba.

Let me say this one more time: the most powerful nation in the world, governed by neoconservatives and warmongers, ignored every international statute on interrogations and torture out of hubris and an overgrown superiority complex.

The CIA’s program of “enhanced interrogation” was merely a euphemism for torture. That is not, as former vice president Dick Cheney and many former Bush staffers have maintained, a matter up for debate. It is an undisputable fact.

We — the University community and the nation as a whole — should be utterly shocked by the failure of our purportedly democratic society to maintain our lofty ideological standards. Yet we have failed to take this news seriously because the Bush administration succeeded in implementing a misinformation campaign not unlike a very high national dose of Novocain. Ari Fleischer and the rest of George Dubya’s spin team convinced the American people that terrorists were the “other” — that they were somehow less than human and therefore undeserving of the sort of legal recognition that the United Nations and international law mandated. The media, once a watchdog loyal only to the public, seemed to accept this propagandizing with little reservation; the one instance in which they allowed torture to permeate the national conscience was when pictures of leashed and beaten prisoners at Abu Ghraib, in Baghdad, were leaked in 2004. Even such an egregious display of immorality — with visual aids, no less — wasn’t enough to turn the public’s sentiment against detainee mistreatment.

There has to be some influential group of Americans still concerned with our constitutional rights to a fair trial and protection from unlawful detainment — right?

Tea Partiers and libertarians say that they are. But they haven’t stopped crying out against an imaginary Obama-led totalitarian agenda since he was first elected (as Sarah Palin once brilliantly tweeted, “Obama lies; freedom dies”), and the only amendment in the Bill of Rights they seem to be concerned about is the Second.

Progressives like myself are supposed to deal in facts and altruism. But we have seemingly ignored the entire issue of governmental overreach since we got our guy into the Oval Office for two straight terms; despite our well-staked moral high ground, we’re no less guilty of shamefully consistent ignorance with regards to torture than the right. Instead of shouting from the rooftops about civil liberties and demanding that Cheney and CIA officials are held accountable for their criminal activities, we’ve stayed silent.

If we ever want to regain our standing in the global community, the U.S. needs to repent for its faults on a much greater scale than it has. President Obama and Congress need to close Guantanamo, modify their legal treatment of enemy combatants, and apologize profusely and constantly until we have ingrained a gut-level repulsion toward torture.

Then, and only then, can America be the shining example of the democratic republic that we once were.

Adam is a freshman in LAS. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter

@hercules5.