It profits a man nothing to sell his soul for the entire world...

...but for Wales?

I'm having a hard time saying anything coherent at the moment because my mind keeps circling the sewer drain of torture that is the national honor of my country, the country I served for 22 years as a soldier, the country I pledged to defend from all enemies foreign and domestic.

Because the domestic enemies who committed these crimes shat on that honor, and all for nothing.

Why do I say that? Given that the "defenders" of these crimes are raging and swearing that the crimes were done to protect me, that the crimes DID protect me in that they obtained intelligence that defeated nefarious plots and evil plans.

To which I say: bullshit.

Let's stop a minute and think about this.

Let's say that all this went down like the torturers and their buddies say it did. Let's say that the heroic CIA torturers knew that Evil Abu Badguy knew where the nuke was hidden. Knew it. Let's say that was you, or me, and we knew that the goddamn dune coon was holding information that could save lives if we just electrified his nuts long enough.

Would you be crankin' that generator?

I would.

Yes, I would. I know because I had to think about the possibility that I might end up with enemy prisoners of war that I knew had intel that could save my troops if I could get it quickly enough, and what would I do then?

Here's the thing, though. I'd be a criminal, a war criminal. My guys would be alive, so to me it'd be worth it. But I couldn't - and, I hope - wouldn't try to deny what I'd done.

I hope I'd have the guts to hunt up the nearest provost marshal and turn myself in.

So ISTM that the thing that sets off my bullshit detector is that the torturers and their masters went to such lengths to hide and destroy the evidence of what they did. If this really was "worth it", if I'm the torturer and my torturing really had produced some sort of valuable intelligence?

I'd have kept those cameras rolling.

Rolling through every horrific thing I did, every vile atrocity I worked on some helpless sonofabitch, every sob, every scream. Rolling as the broken bastard choked out the address of the hidden nuke, the name of the contact, the details of the murderous plan.

I'd present myself and that tape before a judge, or a jury, and say, look, here is what I did to save you. Here is how I did save you.

And then I'd throw myself on the mercy of the court.

Because I would be guilty. I'd just know that no judge, no jury, in America would convict me and if they did no President would be able to refrain from pardoning me. Because my guilt was their guilt, too; they lived because I did horrors in their name.

And yet...there is none of this.

So I know there was no hidden nuke. No contact, no plan, no secret. Just what torture does best at producing; what the torturer wants to hear.

These people tortured because they wanted confessions, for the same reasons that the Inquisition and the NKVD tortured. They wanted confessions. They wanted what they needed for their auto-de-fe, for their show-trial, they wanted to hear that we needed to fight them there so we didn't have to fight them here, that the smoking gun was going to be a mushroom cloud, that they hated our freedoms, that they were coming to kill us.

They wanted to make us afraid, and they did.

So these fucking bastards sold our honor, my honor, for nothing. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. For worthless fucking bullshit to support their goddamn lies. For a mess of goddamn pottage.

And I think I'm as furious about the worthlessness of the reasons as for the infamy of the torture itself.