Last month I confessed to the nation and the world, "We tortured some folks." And of course, I've also confessed that we use extrajudicial killing without a conviction -- what folks used to call Murder -- to support American interests and help keep us safe.
But there's a key difference between us and the savages who sow terror by sharing videos and photos of the violence they do. That's just not who we are as Americans. You'll be proud to know we're exactly the opposite: we do our absolute best to keep our torture and murder just as secret as we can.
We don't flaunt bloody videos like our enemies. In fact we illegally destroyed almost a hundred videos of waterboarding, secretly defying court orders from the 911 Commission. We routinely convince judges to dismiss surveillance, torture and even murder cases on the grounds that the crime was classified. And so much more...
This has been a long tradition, and I've done my part. In 2009 I personally, successfully lobbied both the House and the Senate to pass a new law so the formerly dangerous Freedom of Information Act could not be used to compel me to savagely reveal our torture photos. I clearly changed that law just in time -- since by today our Secretaries of Defense have so far classified thousands of secret photos of torture and abuse -- nothing much worse than the torture and murders shown in the Abu Ghraib photos unwisely released by the press without proper declassification, but it's not our nature to terrorize the world with such displays.
If professional leftists like the ACLU could force us to make such photos and videos public through a legal loophole like FOIA and we had to explain them, we'd be little better than Al Qaeda and its imitators with their brutal videos.
We've made tremendous sacrifices to prove how different we are from our bloodthirsty enemies. We even let 9-11 conspirators convicted in Germany go free rather than have witnesses testify under oath about their treatment in US detention. That's how humble we are, how reluctant we are to play the "terror" card and flaunt our treatment of hostages, or rather of our detainees. We'd rather betray the 9-11 families and free terrorists than develop a reputation as cruel, lawless people. Because it's important that people around the world know we're not the bad guys. Only with more training - and your silence - can they learn.
So when sanctimonious malcontents like Manning and Kiriakou share videos like "Collateral Murder" with WikiLeaks, or Iraq War logs that show our military cooperating in torture, or reveal ineffective CIA torture on ABC News, I treat them as the worst kinds of traitors and spies and make sure they're put in federal prison for a good long time. We put them away.
That's who we are. Who's with me?