The US should be held to a higher standard

Read this from Lawyers, Guns, and Money:

...[T]here really is a difference between the US government engaging in torture and Saddam Hussein engaging in torture, and that the former, for international human rights law and practice, is much, much worse. China, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are all dictatorships whose governments employ or employed various degrees of tyrannical means, including torture, in order to remain in power. They are not, however, considered role models for compliance with international human rights. No one points to China as a model for emulation in respect for human dignity. Although we can quibble as to the degree to which "freedom is on the march" and democracy is replacing autocracy, I think it's fair to say that China and Iran are not typically understood as representing the wave of the future. In other words, we expect that autocratic states will maintain torture regimes, we decry it, and we hope that international law, NGOs, and international regimes will put pressure on these states to modify and reform their policies.

I'm gonna lose my hate-America-first card for this but the US really is the best country. It's the best damn country ever and I love it for a variety of usual and unusual reasons. (Number's one and two? Music and the Rocky Mountains.) And the reason that the US should be held to a double standard regarding human rights (that is to say, always wearing kid gloves in these matters) is not the international legal argument, but a moral one. America is not a "beacon on the hill," but the promise of America, the real American dream is that we can try to make it so. We have the best chance of doing it, and it is morally incumbent upon the American people to do so. And the argument that we have to torture and such to keep out way of life because the terrorists will destroy us is so much horseshit. We liberalized civil rights during the Cold War, and the Soviet Union was an actual threat to the very existence of the nation. We signed the various human rights treaties that concern torture and we passed the laws outlawing warrantless wiretaps in the face of existential threats from Russia, Germany, Japan, etc. But a bunch of douchebags in ass-county southwest Asia have the dumb fucking luck to commit murder successfully and we go retarded and instead of concentrated global effort to stop religious terrorism we...invade one of the few secular countries in the region, thus ensuring we lack the reesources to engage in the actual countries that harbor terrorists...oh, and we betray the very freedoms we hold out as those things that set us apart from the murderous douchebags. Super.