Interesting interpretations of the law and the oath.
I've taken a few of these oaths myself, more than once.
The oath is to a Constitution, a system of law.
There's no override in the law.
The difference between the situation of the soldier potentially being killed on the battlefield and the torturer is that the soldier is not prosecuted for murder doing his job, if he succeeds, and is not shot by his own side for expedience.
But you are saying that the torturer should be.
Indeed, you've held up G. Gordon Liddy as a ROLE MODEL for what a good agent of the government should be!
Nowhere to go with that other than to disagree.
When one takes an oath, there isn't a "necessity" exemption from the terms of it.
And yet people don't starve in situations like Katrina -- they loot survival supplies, and the authorities let it slide (if they genuinely were looting for survival rather than for luxuries).
Similarly, someone who deals with a genuine ticking-time-bomb scenario by pulling a few fingernails would be off the hook -- the jury would refuse to convict, or the President would issue a pardon -- but the law would remain in place, and thus prevent the otherwise inevitable abusive use of a legal free pass.
Indeed, you've held up G. Gordon Liddy as a ROLE MODEL for what a good agent of the government should be!
Liddy erred in supposing that the Democratic Party in 1972 was a threat to the Republic (for one thing, they couldn't have won the election in any case). If there had been such a genuine threat, then he was a man who did what had to be done.