Do We No Longer Practice What We Preach?
Weekly commentary by CBS Evening News chief Washington correspondent and Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer.
Edward R. Murrow was one of the first to understand the power of worldwide communications.
But it was the message, not the power to reach so many, that concerned him.
His biographer Alexander Kendrick said that, like Thoreau nearly a century before him, Murrow asked himself "whether Maine had anything to say to Texas," and when he became head of the U.S. Information Agency, whether the United States had anything to say to the rest of the world.
Murrow concluded the answer was 'Yes.'
I thought about that as we learned more about the CIA's use of what our own Army and the Geneva Conventions define as torture, and how officials destroyed evidence when a federal judge demanded tapes of the interrogation episodes.
Is that our message to the world? That we are a government of laws except when it is "inconvenient"?
If so, then what was done in the name of security has greatly harmed security.
Weapons keep our enemies at bay, but our real security rests on whether the rest of the world comes to share our values, or the values of those who oppose us … and whether all people are better served by a government of laws or what someone decides the law ought to be at some particular moment.
Have we helped our cause witht he rest of the world when they come to believe we have sunk to using the tactics of those who hate us, when we no longer can be trusted to practice what we preach?
Is this what we want the world to know?
More importantly, is it what we want our children to know?
By Bob Schieffer
