THE WAR ON TERROR HAS DISPLACED THE COLD WAR AS THE DEFINING framework of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. An ironic consequence is that the most infamous penal colony in a Communist country is now located at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. We have come a long way since Solzhenitsyn. To Cuba, it turns out, the United States has spread not the blessings of liberty but the rule of manacles, stress positions, cages, and hoods. And Guantánamo Bay is merely one internment facility in a worldwide archipelago of U.S.-administered detention centers where terrorists, real and alleged, are incarcerated with little or no access to the outside world. Legal responsibility for what happens in these camps remains uncertain. But inside them detainees have been, and apparently continue to be, interrogated in a cruel, inhumane and degrading manner. We know that at least twenty or thirty prisoners have died in captivity, apparently from wounds inflicted by their American jailers. The sordid details have been widely publicized. Less evident are the reasons why the U.S. government has created such a system. The most paradoxical justification for what would otherwise be an odious violation of America's system of values is that such behavior alone makes it possible to protect America's system of values.