Last Friday was Veterans Day. It is easy to recite platitudes about the sacrifice of veterans and expound on how much we appreciate their service, but that’s not what this column is about.

It’s about how we, as a country, are in danger of failing not only those veterans, but the principles they fought for.

The United States sees itself as an exceptional power in the world, and with good reason. We are certainly the most military dominant force the world has ever seen.

We are among the most economically powerful as well; those positions have often reinforced one another.

But these are superficial attributes; they do not distinguish our republic from the empires of the past. It is our commitment to the principles of limited government, personal liberty and individual dignity – now shared by many countries in the world – that define us.

Many Americans see our country as a force for good in the world. I am one of them. But a marauding empire is what we are in danger of becoming, if we are not one already.

America, an empire? So say the men in the corridors of power.

In a New York Times piece last year, journalist Ron Suskind met with an unnamed presidential aide who gloated, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

While being cautious not to fallaciously ascribe one official’s feelings to the whole administration, the facts in this columnist’s reality tend to bear out such a generalization.

The Bush administration is one of the most secretive and mendacious in the history of the country. It has sought to create its own realities many times over, substituting industry dogma for environmental science, asserting executive privilege in place of the rule of law and offering self-serving propaganda as truth.

It has lied its way into a disastrous war that will only incite more anti-Americanism in an already volatile part of the world. It has looted the people’s treasury with giveaways to cronies, sycophants and corporations. It has sought executive powers far beyond those granted in the Constitution.

One development above all others has made it difficult to recognize the America I love: our country, ostensibly a beacon of hope and liberty, has become an illegal jailer and torturer.

Last week, two of this paper’s columnists wrote eloquently about the CIA’s archipelago of secret prisons scattered throughout the world.

It is hard to imagine that Washington and his troops fought the Revolution so that a future president could arbitrarily declare who is and is not an enemy of the state.

It is an accident of history that our current president, whose administration has sought such a power, shares a name with the King the colonists so rightly defied.

Let us presume with certainty that the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy and defeated Nazism did so to oppose torture, cruelty and inhumanity, and not to enshrine them in law, as our current vice president has asked Congress to do.

And for the oft-maligned Vietnam veteran, who was told he was fighting a war to stop the spread of Communism – what becomes of his struggle now that we’ve adopted the “disappearing” tactics of the old Soviet Union we used to say was evil?

We are a good and decent people, but we are being governed by indecent men. If we continue down this path, we may become the very thing we are fighting against.

If that happens, we will have betrayed every sacrifice those veterans made in the name of defending this nation.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.