I do not consider myself naïve, or at least in the last sixty-four years I have lost my naïveté about many things. For example, I long ago disabused myself of the notion that the United States was the only decent nation on the earth. I have long since learned that the history books that I was forced to read in my youth neglected to mention a number of shameful aspects of the American story: the treatment of the native Americans, the lynchings and segregation in the south that lasted well into the last century, our unhealthy fascination with firearms and prisons, the Trail of Tears, rampant graft and corruption, massacres of labor unions and protesters, and countless overthrows of governments in smaller nations that were not sufficiently friendly to American businesses. So, I have long since recognized that the American omelet was not created without the breaking of a few eggs.

Furthermore, I am not a pacifist. I think that some of the nation’s wars were justified by circumstances. I wasn’t happy about it, but I served in the army during the tail end of the Vietnam War. I am not bragging about this. I was a horrible soldier, and I never saw combat. In fact, I spent almost all of my short military career punching a typewriter, and I never went overseas.

For the first time in my life I feel ashamed of my country. Two articles that I recently read have led me to believe that the United States has completely lost its bearings. The first was a short piece by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation about the murder by the CIA (using drones) of three American citizens in Yemen. I was not outraged so much about the fact that they were American citizens as I was that the United States was engaged in cold-blooded assassinations of a citizen of any nation who is suspected of associating with “terrorists.”

When did this become acceptable behavior? Is the rationale “9/11 changed everything”? Did we not vote out of office just about everyone who used that as an excuse for eight years of boneheaded policies? Three presidents — Ford, Carter, and Reagan — signed executive orders banning assassinations. Nevertheless, in the last few years the United States has made many hundreds of deadly drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, two countries that have only the most tangential associations with 9/11 or any other such act. What has changed? Aside from the fact that bystanders are inevitably killed along with the person who is the target, what is the difference between a drone and a bullet fired from a gun? Yes, the person operating the drone need not be standing on the soil of the same country in which the target resides. Why in the world is this an important distinction? Maybe it provides political cover, but what about the morality of the act itself?

Two of the three Americans killed were not even the intended targets of the drone strikes that ended their lives. The other one, Anwar al-Awlaki, was supposedly a high-ranking terrorist mastermind. The only specifics that I have been able to uncover indicated that he was associated with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the moron who tried to blow up an airplane by setting his underwear on fire in the lavatory two years earlier. Are we really terrified by someone who (allegedly) came up with this mode of attack?

What happened to the concepts of trials, standards of evidence, and “innocent until proven guilty”? Of course, it is difficult to capture someone like al-Awlaki, who changed residences frequently in the hinterlands of Yemen. So what? It was difficult to capture Al Capone, too, but they finally did it. This is what we do in the United States — we capture bad guys, and we put them on trial. Or, at least that is what I had always thought. What is there about the War on Terror that has prompted the United States to abandon its most longstanding and precious principles?

The other article was in some ways even more disturbing. It is a synopsis of the memoir of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a man who has been in custody since Nov. 20, 2001, and has been held at Guantánamo for more than eleven years. He was tortured, but he never admitted to anything even when the American authorities threatened to bring his mother to the all-male detention center at Guantánamo. And he is not alone: 166 men are still detained at the prison (at a cost of over $1 million per year each); 86 of them have been cleared for release since 2009, but they are still interred!

The United States should be better than this. We did not need these reprehensible tactics to defeat Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini. What makes the Muslim extremists more frightening than these monsters? I just do not get it.

During the Bush administration I was angry, not ashamed. I had no respect for the people making the decisions in those days, and I trusted that they would eventually be ousted. They were, but nothing much changed, at least not in these two areas.

Here is a fact that Americans need to face: There are seven billion people on the planet, and some of them hate us. That should not give our government an excuse to kill them (and hundreds of bystanders) or to detain them (and dozens of others) without recourse to the judicial system.

Here is something else to consider. Our strategy in the War on Terror, as I understand it, has been straightforward: kill all suspected terrorists. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars and sacrificed the lives of many thousands of people implementing this strategy for over eleven and a half years. Are there more terrorists now or fewer? Is it not conceivable that this approach, which I like to compare to trying to kill mosquitoes with a shotgun, is counterproductive?

There is a choice. Europe dealt with a serious threat from terrorists in the eighties. It took a long time, but using traditional police procedures and courts of justice, the Red Brigades were eventually wiped out completely. Does anyone really think that the approach that the U.S. is now using has any remote chance of being so successful?