This just gets more and more demonic with every disclosure.

Today’s Washington Post is running an article written by staffer R. Jeffrey Smith entitled "U.S Tried to Soften Treaty On Detainees".  Essentially the writer found while combing through paperwork recently released as a result of the CIA detainee investigations that we tried to get our interrogators off the hook relative to prosecution for war crimes. We claimed that we were somehow exempt from this.

In academia, that approach is called special pleading.  What that means is essentially this:  if you do it, then it is a crime but if I do it, then it is a necessity. As soon as any academic uses special pleading to make his case to professional peers he is essentially called a charlatan.  His work is seen as useless.  Essentially he is saying, "accept the results of my scholarship without proper peer review because my case is different than all the others." 

In fact, Christian theology and scholarship is chock full of special pleading cases, and that is essentially the tension between traditional and modern Bible scholars.  Traditional Bible scholars use special pleading all the time, modern scholars see it as fakery.

Your career as an academic would end at the point of special pleading.  Your books would be seen as trash.  Your point of view from that point forward would be seen as useless to the body of knowledge. Using scholarship as a metaphor for what has just happened here, our insistence that we are somehow "different" is the very essence of the reason all others see us as fakes, liars and manipulators. 

What we have done here through our insistence that our intelligence people have a right to illegaly detain and then torture people is set ourselves apart from the world community.  We have embraced the methods of our traditional fascist, totalitarian and communist enemies and then claimed that it is alright for us to use these methods because we are us and not them. 

The problem with this sort of thinking on a practical level is this: if one uses the methods of his enemies, then in fact one has become his enemy and can expect no support from people of good will and pure intentions.  To some degree, this is inevitable in a war.  Wars are not pure things waged with clean hearts and sound minds, they are struggles for survival.  I understand that.  Wars are ugly things and normal rules of conduct do not always apply.

But saying one is engaged in a war is not the same thing as saying that all rules are off, that I am allowed to decide whether or not torturing you is acceptable or not.  If I am in fact making that decision for myself with no oversight, as seems to be the case in so many of these instances, then I am a criminal, not an intelligence operative. 

If I kill you while interrogating you, I have not served this republic with honor and integrity. What I have done is commit a murder and then wrapped myself in the flag and a false sense of duty and patriotism in order to shield myself from prosecution.  To state this simply, if I kill you while interrogating you or falsely imprison you without proper judicial oversight, I am an active member of a criminal underground that is attempting to take over the government.  I am a fifth columnist who happens to have a government job.  I am a fascist who is hiding behind my GS rating.  I am responsible for my actions and in a federal republic based on law, I need to be prosecuted.

Period.

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)