The Unicorn Defense

We understand what the Nuremberg defense is. You kill a thousand children, and then, when you are tried for the offense, you say, "My boss told me to do it."  The CIA is not using the Nuremberg defense. Instead they are saying, "There is a legal justification for torture."  And it is true that a legal justification exists in the sense that unicorns exist. They exist as fictions on paper. We can draw a unicorn on a piece of paper and point to it and say, "Dick Cheney  told me to insert vegetable matter into the prisoner's rectum and the unicorn said it was legal." The three branches of our government may or may not agree with the claim. The rest of the world will continue to think the claim is delusional, but only because unicorns do not exist in the same way as zebras. Zebras are as real as the treaties we sign.