The Senate Intelligence Committee’s “Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program” is not the final word in judging the Intelligence Community’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques since 9/11. But details of waterboarding, “walling,” death threats, shackles, and rectal feeding break down the barriers that separated what was once rumor from a stark reality, conclusively proving that fear has damaged America’s moral compass.

Influenced and empowered by the ever-present, smothering fear of terrorism, U.S. intelligence officials and national security decision-makers created a wide gulf between their words and their actions. The Democratic staff report crystallizes widespread suspicions that representatives of the United States acted in ways that were at cross-purposes with U.S. statements, U.S. policy, and international human rights norms.

When America engages in torture, the country warps and distorts the rules that the rest of the world thinks it can play by. This puts Americans abroad—soldiers and civilians alike—at greater risk of mistreatment in the future, and weakens the international consensus on human rights that the United States was so integral to establishing in the last century.

Despite the release of a troubling stream of evidence since 2007, Americans until now chose to let the experts dwell on the nuances of torture. The so-called “Torture Report” forces everyone to confront the interrogation techniques they passively endorsed through inaction and inattentiveness.

Ignorance is no longer an option. If Americans do not question their national passivity on torture in the face of brutal evidence, the country has foregone the moral high ground integral to contemporary views of American exceptionalism. In short, this is not a debate just for experts. If the conversation on torture plays out solely in the halls of Congress and the sets of FOX News and CNN, the country will achieve no long-term resolution.

Americans should talk about torture. And to discuss it intelligently, Americans should read about torture. Those with intimate knowledge—the accusers and the defenders alike—should be invited and encouraged to provide their own perspective, while being held accountable if they seek to obscure facts or protect legacies and reputations.

Former Department of Defense official Rosa Brooks wrote a scathing take-down in Foreign Policy magazine last week of the notion that it is possible to focus solely on the effectiveness of torture and ignore the pressing moral and legal questions. “Once we start justifying immoral actions based on their utilitarian outcomes, there’s no principled place to stop,” she opined.

Sen. John McCain, who has been the Senate’s conscience on torture for years, reminded his fellow Senators that the debate about torture “isn’t about our enemies; it’s about us. It’s about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. It’s about how we represent ourselves to the world.”

It is attractive to plead ignorance, go home and sleep safely at night while the quiet, dangerous men and women do whatever they deem necessary to combat foes—real and imagined, foreign and domestic. But Americans have looked the other way for too long, and have become complicit. If torture can be relegated to the impersonal abstract even once its details are publicly available, it is a short trip down a rabbit hole of semantics where creeping justifications widen the divide between the moral high ground of the past and the blank check given to fear since 9/11.

Fear is a powerful motivator. It overcomes moral, ethical and legal reservations. Fear has led to Japanese-American internment camps, HUAC communist hearings, FBI investigations of civil rights leaders, and now, torture. Americans venerate the moral clarity of the Greatest Generation, yet FDR warned that “fear itself” was something to be feared, as he knew it could lead reasonable men and women to do unreasonable things.

Today Americans face a Colonel Jessup moment; they have been told the world can’t handle the truth about U.S. interrogation practices. That is false. The world won’t like the truth. It will hate the truth. But the truth is already known among the country’s enemies.

What Americans really can’t handle, and should not accept, are enhanced interrogation techniques that clearly and unnecessarily violate the nation’s ideals.