c. 2006 Religion & Ethics Newsweekly
(UNDATED) After six months of stiff resistance, and faced with an overwhelming and embarrassing political defeat, President Bush last month reversed himself and reluctantly agreed to a law banning cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners in American custody.
The agreement capped a year of legal and policy debates on torture. However, a recent stream of new revelations _ the abuse of U.S.-held detainees, secret CIA prisons with “unique” interrogation methods and the “extraordinary rendition” of prisoners to other countries that practice torture _ suggests that the issue of torture is not resolved, either morally or politically.
The proposed law, authored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., extends the torture ban to specifically include cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners overseas by military and intelligent interrogators; such treatment is already banned in the United States.
“We’ve sent a message to the world that the United States is not like the terrorists,” said McCain, a former POW in Vietnam. “What we are is a nation that upholds values and standards of behavior and treatment of all people no matter how evil or bad they are.”
Much of the debate over torture has focused on legal questions, not religious or ethical considerations. There has been little thoughtful examination of the historical complexities, nuances and ambiguities that can be found even within religious traditions when it comes to torture.
A conference at Princeton Theological Seminary later this month (Jan. 13-15) hopes to change that by launching a “National Religious Campaign Against Torture.”
“While some progress has been made with the recent passage of the McCain amendment, it is sadly surrounded by loopholes that will allow torture by the United States to continue,” said the Rev. George Hunsinger, a professor at Princeton seminary and a convenor of the conference.
Two days before Bush announced his acquiescence to McCain’s torture ban, Pope Benedict XVI issued his first World Day of Peace message and declared that “international humanitarian law ought to be considered as one of the finest and most effective expressions of the intrinsic demands of the truth of peace. Precisely for this reason, respect for that law must be considered binding on all people.”
At a news conference releasing Benedict’s message, Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Pontifical Council on Peace and Justice, said “torture is a humiliation of the human person, whoever it is. The church does not allow these means to extract the truth.”
The New York-based National Council of Churches sharply denounced the administration last November for its resistance to the McCain measure. An ad hoc coalition from across the religious spectrum _ including evangelical Christians, Unitarians, Muslims, Quakers and lay Catholics _ told Bush that the nation’s ban on torture “must be restored in U.S. policy and practice.”
Nonetheless, much of the torture debate continues to focus on legal and human rights issues. That’s partly because the ban on torture and on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment is written into law _ international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions and U.S. laws that implement the treaties and make them applicable in the United States.
Much of the Bush administration’s efforts at explanation and justification has been legalistic, as well. As the now infamous “torture memos” from the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel and the Justice Department indicate, the issue never reached a discussion of the morality of torture. Instead, they dwelled on the search for a legal rationale for exempting the United States from the provisions of the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution.
Joyce S. Dubensky and Rachel Lavery, staff members at the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding and contributors to a new book, “The Torture Debate in America,” said it is not surprising that religion has not been more dominant since “modern concepts of human rights are largely defined in terms of ethics and law.”
“In fact, none of the central international human rights conventions mention God or a spiritual inspiration as a basis for protecting the welfare of all human beings,” they note.
Dubensky and Lavery argue that “shared values in world religion” can aid in reaching beyond legal principles to support human rights and a ban against torture. “While all religions worldwide do not identify the same theological basis for human rights, there are basic values across religious traditions that offer a powerful rationale for a shared condemnation of torture,” they observe.
At the same time, their survey of world religions _ principally Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Baha’i _ notes that religious systems have justified torture in the past as “the lesser of two evils.” The Inquisition, carried out by the Roman Catholic Church, they note, is a well-known example of “how members of one religious community came to support the use of torture for what it believed were rightful ends.”
In another new book, “Torture: Religious Ethics and National Security,” the Rev. John Perry, a Jesuit ethicist at the University of Manitoba, notes how the Catholic Church’s position on torture has changed over time but still is not, he insists, as robustly anti-torture as it should be.
He cites as one positive sign of change the “Confession for Commission of Sins Committed in the Service of the Church” led by Pope John Paul II in 2000, in confessing the sin of “the use of force in the service of truth.”
The crux of the issue (in both the overt and implied religious debate on torture) turns on the question of the humanity of the person to be tortured _ whether a possible terrorist, an enemy combatant or any of the other thousands detained in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay or the CIA’s “black site” prisons.
One of the strongest recent arguments for the use of torture has been made by neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who argues it is legitimate to torture someone who is aware of a terrorist act to be committed _ the so-called “ticking bomb” scenario.
“Not only is it permissible to hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty,” he wrote in the Dec. 5 issue of The Weekly Standard. As such, Krauthammer says that “torture is not always impermissible.”
For Krauthammer, detainees (he assumes them all to be terrorists) “are entitled … to nothing. Anyone who blows up a car bomb in a market deserves to spend the rest of his life roasting on a spit over an open fire.”
He is also outraged that the United States gives Qurans to detainees: “That we should have provided those who kill innocents in the name of Islam with precisely the document that inspires their barbarism is a sign of the absurd lengths to which we often go in extending undeserved humanity to terrorist prisoners.”
In essence, Krauthammer raises _ and then rejects _ the essential humanity of the detainees as a moral dimension to be considered in their treatment. It’s a view that flies in the face of much religious thought as well as the secular views of classic democratic theorists.
In a powerful rejoinder to Krauthammer, Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor at The New Republic, insists that respecting the humanity of a terrorist is “critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit.” To reduce them to a subhuman level, he writes, “is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder _ just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing.”
It is worth noting that for an administration steeped in the public rhetoric of religiosity and staffed with people of deep religious commitment, White House explanations about the use of torture have been curiously devoid of ethical reflection or moral reasoning.
For the administration and for many Americans, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks represented a turning point in the history of the United States, if not of all humanity. It was as if history began anew.
Former CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black, testifying on Sept. 26, 2002, about the CIA’s operational flexibility on torture, explained it this way: “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know: there was a before 9-11, and there was an after 9-11. After 9-11 the gloves came off.”
The debate over the McCain law and the strong bipartisan political and public support it enjoyed suggest there is a broad moral consensus against the use of torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of those the United States holds in captivity.
At the same time, just how that consensus is put into law and then parsed into policy _ from definitions of torture to permissible techniques for interrogation _ and whether public deliberation might yet be cast in the language of religion and ethics, remains largely unresolved.
KRE/JL END ANDERSON
(David E. Anderson is senior editor at Religions News Service. He wrote a version of this story for Religion & Ethics Newsweekly.)
