Many people have many expectations for Barack Obama. Although I generally write about economics, the issue I am most interested in hearing about from the new president is torture. And this is the speech that I want to hear him give:

Our nation today faces the most serious set of challenges it has faced in several decades. We are in the midst of a financial and economic crisis that has already cost millions of people their jobs and threatens the livelihoods of tens of millions more. We are fighting two wars thousands of miles away, with a military that is strained from over seven years of heroic efforts. We still face the constant threat of attack from terrorists who want to destroy our society and our way of life every bit as much as they did in September 2001. And on top of this, we face the long-term threats of global warming and maintaining the promise of financial security for an ever-growing population of retirees.

My most important job, and the most important job of everyone in my administration, is to overcome these challenges: to restore our economy to continued and sustainable prosperity, to bring the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to a successful conclusion, and to protect our country from the threat of attack. This will require a tremendous amount of work, focus, and dedication from my administration and from the Congress.

In this time of pressing national emergency, some have argued that we cannot afford to look backward, to investigate every allegation that has been raised about the previous eight years in Washington. And I agree that not every subject of political controversy should be made into a special investigation, especially at this time when we need unity of purpose more than ever. As a result, there may be some questions to which we will not find the answers, or that must be left to historians.

However, there is one question that I do believe it is my moral duty, my constitutional duty, and my duty as the Commander in Chief of the armed forces to ask: How did the United States come to be a country that tortures people?

It is clear to me that we have committed torture. Waterboarding, a practice that we have admitted performing on people in our power, is torture. And we cannot say that torture was committed by "a few rotten apples." It was committed on the orders of the United States government, and in the name of the American people. There is abundant evidence - including admissions by many of the people involved - that policies authorizing torture were formulated by senior government officials and given legal cover by opinions written in the Department of Justice.

Torture is a clear violation of United States law. Torture by the United States provides cover and justification to other regimes who torture their internal enemies. It reduces our moral standing in the world and weakens our ability to encourage other countries to act in our interests. And it places our own military personnel in jeopardy of themselves being tortured by our enemies abroad.

It is not enough to merely assert that "the United States does not torture people." And it is not enough for me to say, as I say now, that we will not torture people so long as I am president. We have tortured people, and to deny it would be to compound our past contempt for the law with contempt for the truth. Instead, we owe it to our victims, to our allies, and to ourselves to identify and explain how we became a nation that tortures people, both so we can hold ourselves accountable, and also so we can hope to avoid torturing people in the future.

Therefore, I will be appointing a bipartisan panel of civilian and military officials to open an investigation into the origins and development of our policies that resulted in torture. I am not interested in which CIA agents or military interrogators may have tortured individual suspects, but in how a set of governmental policies that authorized such practices came into being. I look forward to working with Congress to determine the makeup of this panel and the structure of the investigation. This will not initially be a criminal investigation, and any decision on whether to press criminal charges will be made only after the facts have fully come to light.

The United States claims before all else to be a country governed by the rule of law. In order to be a country governed by the rule of law, we must hold ourselves accountable when we fail to obey the rule of law. It is my hope that this investigation will be the first step toward once again living up to that ideal, and becoming an example for all people anywhere in the world.