In the years that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. officials debated internally how hurtful the pain, how humiliating the degradation, how frightening the sense of drowning that American interrogators could legally inflict on a suspected enemy.

The predictable outcome turned up in photos of prisoners and uniformed Americans giving gleeful thumbs-ups. U.S. soldiers posed alongside inmates undergoing various forms of humiliation or, in one case, on ice after a fatal beating.

The pictures seemed to lay bare U.S. hypocrisy on human rights. A hooded inmate standing on a box, his outstretched hands attached to wires as if on the verge of execution became a recruiting poster for al-Qaida.

No more.

In his second full day in office, President Obama lifted the shame conjured by the words Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding and extraordinary rendition.

"I can say without equivocation that the United States will not torture again," Obama said at the State Department, after signing executive orders to make sure of it.

At Guantanamo Bay, detainees have been held for as long as seven years without the protection of international or constitutional law and no fair chance to prove their innocence, providing more fodder for the enemy's propaganda.

And when reports emerged of secret CIA prisons and suspects being flown to countries to be more effectively tortured, the U.S. lost any credible claim as a promoter of human rights.

That's about to change. With 16 retired generals and admirals behind him, Obama banned cruel, coercive and humiliating interrogations. He revoked presidential orders and legal memos that conflict with the new rules and declared permissible only those methods spelled out in the Army Field Manual.

"We are willing to observe core standards of conduct, not just when it's easy, but also when it's hard," Obama said.

He set a one-year deadline for shutting Guantanamo and closing the CIA's prisons. He called a halt to the bogus military commissions set up by his predecessor to win convictions — regardless of evidence — against detainees. And he established a commission to recommend what to do with the 245 detainees still there.

In these orders, Obama declared an end to some of the darkest events of the BushCheney-Rumsfeld administration and began the long, difficult task of restoring American ideals of humanity.

I am beginning to recognize my country again.

He signed the orders while literally backed by military leaders, who gave heft to the notion that U.S. security is enhanced, not endangered, by the change.

One of those leaders, retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, said in a conference call recently that the Abu Ghraib scandal "immediately undermined me, my moral authority" as he worked in Iraq with eight other nations to build up Iraqi security forces.

"It created a far more dangerous environment for every soldier, every Marine we had in Iraq," Eaton said. Human Rights First, which has been working with retired military leaders who have been pushing for a change in policy, set up the conference call.

Eaton places direct blame for Abu Ghraib on the Bush administration's embrace of enhanced interrogation techniques.

For all the damage that embrace inflicted on those being questioned and on U.S. credibility among its allies as well as its foes, has it really produced reliable intelligence that made it worthwhile?

We know torture is a good way to get false intelligence. And we also know it is possible to get critical information without it.

Bribery, standard police techniques and building rapport are more effective, according to a former senior interrogator for the Air Force who uses the pen name Matthew Alexander as co-author of a book on the topic that was published last month.

The book, "How to break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq," tells how Alexander and others in his command learned the whereabouts of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. It wasn't by waterboarding.

There are those who believe it an unwise gamble to give up any tool that could prevent a repeat of Sept. 11.

And yet, to do otherwise would be to continue down a path that was changing the very essence of America.

"We intend to win this fight" against terrorism, Obama said in signing the orders. "We intend to win it on our terms."

It's time to lift the hood and let the man under it step off that box.


Ann Woolner is a Bloomberg News columnist.