Sort of amazed by this, but by now I shouldn’t be.

O’Reilly and his ilk continue to maintain that waterboarding isn’t torture, despite the fact that after WWII the U.S. prosecuted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding U.S. servicemen. It was a war crime then. So what’s changed?

Well, obviously the fact that the “good guys” are using the technique, and thus it’s a lie to call this thing we have prosecuted as torture “torture.” But there is a certain strain in American thought, and O’Reilly is representative of it, that would excuse anything. It’s not that he doesn’t belive waterboarding is torture; it’s that he resents that anyone would accuse the U.S. of torture, even if we are torturing; he especially resents that an American politician might acknowledge this to strangers, Europeans, selling out the tribe.

The tribe must be protected at all times, and whatever the tribe does in pursuit of this is permitted; and because the tribe is itself moral, whatever the tribe does to protect itself is therefore also moral, or at least serves moral ends.

For while the tribe may formulate rules that apply to the rest of the world, those rules - like the Geneva conventions - don’t always apply to the tribe. To insist that they must - or worse, to disclose to those outside the tribe that we broke the rules - that is the worst betrayal of all, a betrayal of the tribe itself.

There have been O’Reillys in every society; and those who have treated their foes in a less than humane manner as a matter of policy (that’s the important part) are always motivated by the same rationale. The U.S. has not tortured anyone even if we have - and what’s your loyalty, to those “rules?” Or to the tribe itself?