We are in a dark period of our national history, in which we have lost our moral compass and have abandoned the constitutional structure carefully built to prevent governmental abuses. We seem to have forgotten the lessons learned from previous crises.

Our government's recent actions to restrict our constitutional rights, and to ignore the principles established by international law, have been taken in the name of the war on terror, which is said to present grave threats to our nation's security. This open-ended "war" is unlikely to come to any early end, and there will probably always be those who seek to hurt us. But certainly the best way to spread our values is to practice them, not to abandon them when the going gets tough.

Our Constitution was drafted during a hot Philadelphia summer 220 years ago.

This visionary document, which has been amended only occasionally, has provided the framework enabling us to govern ourselves as free people and to develop into a prosperous and cohesive multicultural country. The restraints our Constitution imposes on governmental activity and its guarantees of equality and fairness allow each of us to live together peacefully and productively and to develop our individual potential. No other country has a constitution with such a long life span; in fact, no other country has a written constitution that is even 100 years old. Our Constitution is based on a concept of individual human dignity, which has played a key role in the spread of democracy to other countries.

But today, our constitutional values are under severe stress. The undermining of these basic principles began with the enactment of the Patriot Act (and its more recent amendments), and has continued with the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the recent changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The Military Commissions Act, passed in October 2006, could very well be the worst bill ever passed by Congress. This wide-ranging bill restricts the rights of detainees to examine evidence against them, sharply limits their ability to challenge their incarceration, and allows the government to use against them evidence obtained through coercion. It perpetuates the culture of impunity by granting retroactive immunity to intelligence personnel who have engaged in interrogation techniques that violate U.S. and international law. Most disturbingly, it eliminates the writ of habeas corpus for noncitizens who have been declared by the administration to be "unlawful enemy combatants." The writ of habeas corpus is a person's ultimate protection against governmental abuses, because it allows an independent judge to evaluate whether a person is being properly imprisoned. Now, however, even noncitizens with permanent-resident status can be jailed indefinitely if an executive-branch official views them as "unlawful enemy combatants." During the intense fighting on our soil in the Civil War, the writ of habeas corpus was suspended, but it has never been suspended in the states since then, and certainly never for a vulnerable group.

The language in the recently enacted amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is so ambiguous that no one truly knows what it means — but it seems to transfer broad powers to the executive branch to sort through telephone calls and intercept messages. This dramatic change to our constitutional fabric was enacted by the Congress a month ago without serious debate. Most members of Hawai'i's congressional delegation voted against these amendments, but it is deeply disturbing that Congress would have passed such a serious and complex statute without understanding how it might be used and abused.

And in a continuing display reflecting the perception that it is above the law, the White House Office of Administration is now arguing that it is not covered by the Freedom of Information Act, even though it has an officer in charge of responding to requests under this act and has been responding to such requests up until the present. The vice president also claims a unique immunity, refusing to respond to public requests for information under the bizarre claim that the papers of the vice president are not part of the executive branch of the federal government. Some 5 million e-mail messages have suspiciously disappeared from White House computers, many of which are relevant to the firing of nine U.S. attorneys by the Justice Department.

On June 29, 2007, the very last day of its 2006-07 term, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review during this coming year the case of Lakhdar Boumediene, one of about 350 men who have been held at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for more than 5 1/2 years. When he first arrived there, he was deprived of sleep for 13 straight days and subjected to intense interrogation. To protest his mistreatment, he has been on hunger strikes and has been force-fed through intravenous fluid by his captors, but he has never had a chance for any judicial review of his long imprisonment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled last spring that Boumediene was not entitled to file a writ of habeas corpus because of the language in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and because, according to its view, the right to invoke the writ does not apply to persons outside the territorial boundaries of the United States.

When similar cases have come before the courts of other countries, they have issued strong opinions recognizing the rights of detainees. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in February that the Canadian practice of detaining foreign-born terrorism suspects indefinitely (using secret evidence and without charges) was unconstitutional, explaining that "The overarching principle of fundamental justice that applies here is this: Before the state can detain people for significant periods of time, it must accord them a fair judicial process." In a series of decisions in the late 1990s, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that "sleep deprivation" and similar interrogation practices were impermissible under Israeli and international law, explaining that "human dignity also includes the dignity of the suspect being interrogated ... These prohibitions are 'absolute.' There are no exceptions to them and there is no room for balancing." We have yet to see any comparable decisions from U.S. appellate courts.

When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson served as chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II, he explained that the trials were not simply "victors' justice" and were based on rules of international law that apply to all: "We are not prepared to lay down a rule of conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."

Our current president seemed to follow that lead in his Oct. 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati — which laid down the subsequently discredited arguments for invading Iraq — when he said that "all war criminals will be pursued and punished." But despite that bold statement, the United States continues to reject the International Criminal Court (which every Western European democracy has joined) and continues to hide behind a culture of impunity.

Our Constitution was written in a time of crisis, when we were a small nation trying to find our way in a world dominated by larger powers engaged in endless destructive warfare. The Constitution served our country well then, and if we remember and return to its fundamental principles — the separation of powers, guaranteed access for all to federal court review, and respect for individual human dignity — the Constitution should continue to serve us well now.

Jon M. Van Dyke has been teaching constitutional law and international law at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa's William S. Richardson School of Law since 1976. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.