Fred Clark — a/k/a Slacktivist — opens his most recent post with this:

It was an experiment. The Initiative represented the government’s interest in not only controlling the otherworldly menace, but in harnessing its power for our own military purposes. The considered opinion of this council is that the experiment has failed. … The demons cannot be harnessed, cannot be controlled. It is therefore our recommendation that the project be terminated. … The Initiative itself will be filled in with concrete. Burn it down, gentlemen. Burn it down and salt the earth.

The context is a late 4th season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; the speaker is a high-level Pentagon type after the project went wildly wrong (big surprise). Fred’s using it to talk about Gitmo and our national experiments with what may charitably be called our less supernatural darker impulses in the wake of 9/11.

We’re supposed to be the good guys. Detention without charge, torture, abuse, extraordinary rendition, disregard for the Geneva Conventions and the unadorned murder of prisoners are not things that the good guys should tolerate, let alone actively embrace.

In fact, it’s at least part of the laundry list of post-WMD reasons Bush gave for invading Iraq. It isn’t enough to say we stand for freedom and justice. We have to actually act like it, too.