Get a grip on reality. Seriously. Despite Mark Shea's outrageous hypothetical about genitally mutilating a 9-year old boy (but not a girl, why?), that wasn't in the memo Mark Shea wishes to make notorious.

I'm disappointed that Mark Shea chose to argue as he did.

Mark:

How about some intellectual honesty? It's crystal clear to any objective reader that Gaudium et Spes is not providing a technical definition of torture, but is speaking in very general terms. The very same passage condemns "deportation," without any qualification, when obviously a nation may have any number of legitimate reason for deporting someone.

Ditto with "torture," whatever that means.

You really should know, Mark, that any serious intellect knows that when you refute an opponent, you're supposed to try to refute the strongest form of his argument. You don't take the most blatantly egregious caricature of his argument and refute that.

You speak as if ALL "torture apologists" are of ONE mind, as if they ALL defend EVERYTHING and ANYTHING the Bush administration did to captured detainees.

For what it's worth, clearly it would be immoral to inflict pain on a child for the crimes of his parent. But am I against ALL infliction of pain on a child criminal? Not at all. I got my butt kicked by my parents a bunch of times when I was nine, and I deserved it! Crushing of testicles is probably a disproportionate sentence for anything short of rape (yes, nine year olds are capable of it!). Again, it's difficult to draw moral absolutes with regard to the specific application of moral principles whose moral absoluteness we can establish.

How about we get an answer to this question from Mark:

1) May the state EVER inflict pain on someone as punishment for the commission of a crime?

2) May the state EVER criminalize the intentional and malicious withholding of life-saving information by terrorists?

Discuss.

Mark, Thank you for your interesting article.
I didn't understand the phrase "If you are a normal person, and not John Yoo..." Why isn't John Yoo normal? Are normal people incapable of inflicting torture? Are you, Mark, capable of inflicting torture?
You brought in the abortion business. As American voters we are all responsible for the abortion business. In a democracy it is difficult to separate the people from the government. So, then, in the spirit of your article: Is Pres. Obama a normal person? Is Sec. Clinton? Is Fr. Jenkins?
I hope to read your comments, and your response to the other contributors.

I have read that the use of certain drugs and carefully carried out interrogation techniques are much more effective at obtaining information than torture. The goal is to get the information, not inflict punishment, and it is curious that the CIA, Army etc did not focus more on the goal of obtaining good intel rather than just punishment of the detainees. It sounds like we had people handling detainees who were not only immoral, but did not really know what they are doing. It's bad enough to be immoral, but to be stupid about it as well is very wrong. Unfortunately, we seemed to have bushels of stupidity with both the old and new Administrations. We have gone from a closed minded Fundamentalist to an arrogant agnostic. it would be nice to have a President of both judgement and moral standing, but perhaps that's asking too much.

Micha,

If you bothered to read more carefully, you would have noticed that he never said it was in one of the memos -- he said it was John Woo's response to a question. And if you further bothered to follow the link, you would have discovered this:

I don't think Mark is the one who needs to "get a grip."

It's a horse race between Micha, LexEtLibertas and Dan (so far) for the most absurd comment award. Micha and Dan both make a strong bid with their inability to click a link and discover that Yoo really did believe that the President had the right to crush the testicles of a nine year old if it seemed right to him.

However, the prize really has to go to LexEtLibertas for this contribution to Catholic Thought:


Wow. Just wow. And the best part is: this guy regards himself as one of the Last True Defenders of the Catholic Faith against heretics like the Fathers of Vatican II and the last two Popes.

Mark, well done. Other than speaking about rights in the Lockean (instead of classical) sense, this shows how dissent is entrenching itself on the Catholic right.


Which means that unless we're going to start treating those Catholics who argue for "enhanced interrogation" as "Catholics in name only" (the favorite catch-phrase of the Catholic blogosphere), we really need to stop doing the same to the Catholics who dissent on abortion as well. Everyone of us is occasionally a little bit off, either in act or deed.

Mr. Shea,

Thank you for articulating a point that I could not. The hypothetic "ticking time bomb" is like the oft-heard, "...So you mean to tell me if Mother Teresa committed a mortal sin on her death bed, she would go to hell?" And of course, the answer to the hypothetical is "Yes, if she was unrepentant.." and then they've got you with God must be unjust. But nevermind the fact that the hypothetical scenario is so hypobolic that it becomes internally inconsistent. In the death bed example, they overlook that the likelihood of Mother Teresa, a long suffering servant of God being abandoned to sin at her hour of greatest need is zero. It just doesn't happen. The fact that the hypothetical is framed as it is shows one of two things: Either the poser of the hypothetical has a weaker grasp of the issue than he thinks, to overlook such facts as the action of grace in the life of a saint, or secondly, the poser of the hypothetical is not searching for an answer, but ridiculing an inconvenient opposition.

God bless you Mr. Shea, you have helped me greatly.

Yes, there must be a line which interrogators cannot cross, that is, in a Christian civilzation. We aren't living in a Christian civilization. And even when Christendom did exist in the Holy Roman empire and Catholic Europe, were certain tortures not employed by states to exact information or even induce a confession? Did Rome ever condemn these methods at that time? Did the Inquisition ever make use of them? After abandoning the Faith, England used torture habitually against Catholics, that is history. In the case of John Hus, did the Holy Office not defend his burning at the stake as just? That's certainly a very painful way to execute someone. I mean there was more justice in Christian countries than in pagan ones, but it seems that torture was common. Or was it? If you tour the museum at Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome are there not instruments of torture on display there?

For certain crimes, like theft, Saint Thomas argued that pain was the best deterent for future crime. Flogging was the norm. I know it was punitive, after a conviction, rather than to exact a confession. Interesting subject, especially in the light of history.

Still, I agree with Mark Shea. I would not trust our military leaders to be just with prisoners. They've proven they are not trustworthy. Some military officers have resigned in protest over such abuses. One Colonel killed himself, only a month before his tour in Iraq was to finish. He opposed the brutal policies that were in place and dared to question General Patraeus.

This statement ridicules the valid observation that torture needs to be defined.
This statement acknowledges the valid observation that torture needs to be defined.

The fact that some people use the difficulty of creating such a definition to simply muddy the debate does not change the fact that such a definition absolutely has to be made.

In this regard torture is nothing like abortion, where nature has drawn a very bright line for us; for torture, like pornography, we have to draw the line ourselves. Nor do I believe we need to seek the exact spot where coercion ends and torture begins - that really is a fruitless quest. I may not know precisely where in the middle of the St. Lawrence River the US ends and Canada begins but I can be certain I'm still in the US if I'm on the south bank. We should be able to come up with a "this far and no farther" definition for torture if we recognize that to some degree it must be arbitrary.

http://tinyurl.com/d5w6et

Inasmuch as the founder of this website (Deal Hudson) has advocated that torture is NOT a "non-negotiable", I'd like to see him actually engage Mark Shea on this topic.

I've enjoyed reading Mr. Shea's writings over the years but the tone and form of this piece is beneath him, and is not worthy of this forum. This is the kind of reasoning one expects to find on the sundry minimally-moderated forums where those with nothing to say say it often.

Critical distinctions are glossed over or ignored altogether, including the overiding question as to where the line sits between harsh interrogation (allowed) and torture (not allowed). It should have also been made clear that the abusers at Abu G went beyond what they were allowed to do.

This is an important discussion for our nation and if good Catholics continue to take the low road of painting those who don't fully agree with them as "torture defenders," then we've lost our ability to genuinely defend our faith, regardless the issue.

Mr. Shea's track record in service to the Church is such that he deserves a Mulligan on this one. I suggest he take it.

This statement ridicules the valid observation that torture needs to be defined.

No. It ridicules the fact that torture defenders love to play the games of saying "If we cannot place every single human act on one or the other side of a non-existent bright line dividing torture from legitimte coercion, then it is utterly impossible to ever say what torture is."

The solution to the definition game is to pay attention to the teaching of Holy Church instead of asking "How close can we get to torturing prisoners without it technically being torture?" This is known as "avoiding the near occasion of sin".

The way you do that is by obeying the Church's command to "treat prisoners humanely". Do that and you will never torture anybody.

In the same way, if you live chastely and love your wife, you will never have to spend endless words quibbling about whether oral sex with your secretary is really, technically precisely sex and whether is 'crosses the line' into adultery.

In both conversations, the itch to get as close to sin as possible while avoiding a technical foul is, itself, clear evidence of a corrupt will.

Critical distinctions are glossed over or ignored altogether, including the overiding question as to where the line sits between harsh interrogation (allowed) and torture (not allowed).

What's wrong with the regs in the Army Field Manual (the ones Bush unsuccessfully tried to change in order to make it easier to order torture and from which he exempted the CIA so that he could continue to order torture)? It's not like the question of legitimate police technique came into existence on 9/11. It's that the Bushies started trying to figure out a way to introduce illegitimate techniques. "Harsh interrogation" is just BS code for torture. As I say, the Church doesn't say "get as close as you can to torture". She says "treat prisoners humanely".

For two reasons. First, because torture is intrinsically and gravely evil and the consequentialist arguments infecting the Right on this matter are every bit as deadly to discipleship as the consequentialist arguments made by the Left for abortion.

Second, because when the history of this time is written, what will be seen as a major contribution to the destruction of the pro-life movement will be the rank hypocrisy of alleged disciples of Christ who made every excuse they could think of for the torture and murder of prisoners (many of them innocent) while trumpeting their superior Christian virtue over the pro-abortion Left. Self-described conservative, pro-life "faithful" Catholics have statistically supported torture by a great percentage than the general population. That's a scandal. And it's not just a sin: it's stupid. The supposedly pro-life Right who supported Bush no matter what will be recalled at every opportunity by the pro-abortion media as War Criminals for Jesus. Remember that the next time some brainiac argues for the goodness of torture with rhetoric like "Crushing of testicles is probably a disproportionate sentence for anything short of rape (yes, nine year olds are capable of it!)." Come up for air. Get out of the Bubble. Think.

I do not pretend to know where the line is, that we should not cross regarding torture, but I think that we crossed it. I wonder if the information obtained was valuable? Did it save any lives? The Bush Administration implied that it did, but I wonder? Are they trying to justify what they did, or were they able to actually get valuable information which saved lives?
Torture is wrong, but some are trying to make a case for it as a necessary evil, provided they get valuable intelligence: if they engaged in torture and did NOT get valuable intellience, then they [Bushies] really look bad. if you are going to make moral compromises, then you had better get something in return for losing the moral high ground. I doubt that we did, or Dick Cheney would be crowing about it, to justify his decisions.

Hmmm...Shea is way off base on this one.

First, coerce and torture are two totally different things. Torture involves grave bodily harm. For example, Al-Qaeda's manual of torture includes chopping off hands, eyeball removal, dragging person down street with car, blowtorch to the skin, clothes iron on skin, drilling drill bits through hands, and crushing head in vice. (See: thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2007/0524072torture1.html )

Historically speaking, those are methods typically called "torture," and the United States does not practice such torture of any kind. I repeat: the U.S. does not practice any such torture of any kind.

As to harsh coercion methods which do not involve personal bodily harm, the important question is whether or not the suspect is known to have information on terrorist plots. If it is known that the person does have information on terrorist plots, a good and moral people *must* apply harsh coercion to get that information and thus save dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of innocent people from death and maiming.

As Shea would have it, we should spare the one terrorist from coercion and thus allow the ghastly killing and maiming of dozens, hundreds, and perhaps thousands of innocent people who will die during the terror attack. Such a decision is completely immoral and evil, and Shea should be able to see this. Shea prefers the mass torture of terror victims to the harsh coercion of terrorists.

Be careful about referring to the Army Field Manual. As I understand it, this allows isolation and fear up techniques which most, you included, would call torture.

the United States does not practice such torture of any kind. I repeat: the U.S. does not practice any such torture of any kind.

This is a lie. We used to hang Japanese for waterboarding. We waterboarded one prisoner 183 times in a month. Only a complete kool-aid drinker can deny that is torture. And, of course, he was not the only one.

That's not all. We have actually murdered prisoners by torturing them to death (and shielded the murderers from prosecution). No informed or honest person can claim that the Bush Administration did not authorize torture, not when actual corpses are turning up, hypothermia cases are being documented and the ICRC is keeping tabs on the whole charade.

As I say, get out of the Bubble of apologetics for Bush torture policies and start see the effect it is having on your witness as a Catholic.

Shea is having a tough time distinguishing between severe bodily harm and psychological tricks like waterboarding, which scares a person into thinking he's about to lose his life.

Again, the U.S. doesn't cut off hands, pluck out eyeballs, apply blowtorches to skin, or drag people down the street behind a car.

Shea talks about our "witness as Catholics." I can't think of a more evil witness than to prefer, as Shea ultimately does, the mass torture and death of terror victims to the harsh coercion of individual terrorists. Amazing moral blindness.

Here's real moral evil: to know there is a plot to blow up your child's school and to fail to coerce the suspects to get the information needed to save the schoolchildren. The innocent schoolchildren all are maimed and die, but at least you didn't coerce one of the evil conspirators of the plot. Feel good about that decision, Mark? I didn't think so.

Be careful about referring to the Army Field Manual. As I understand it, this allows isolation and fear up techniques which most, you included, would call torture.

Thanks for that attempt at reading my mind. In fact, however, my suggestion to the people playing the "Golly, I'm so confused about how to define torture" game has been to refer them to the professional in the field of interrogation and police work, not to claim encyclopedia knowledge of all interrogation techniques. In discussions of torture, I have tended to focus on three unambiguous examples of torture (all used by the CIA): waterboarding, cold cells, and strappado. There are lots of other techniques as well, but the thing about them is that they tend to exist in the grey area where they can be used for torture while allowing torture apologists to claim they are no big deal (sort of like the champion of Chinese water torture who can always say, "Hey! It's just one drop of water on the forehead". So, for instance, a nightstick is a common intrument of coercion in police work and has a legitimate use in subduing an intransigent criminal--but it can also be used to beat a man to death.

Rather than get involved in endless semantic quibbles with those invested in making the case for fog, I have focused only on the most extreme examples of torture. So the fact is: I have not discussed isolation or fear up techniques.

But good job continuing to evade the main point!

This is a little frustrating. You yourself recognized there is room for debate on the definition of torture but whenever I bring it up you respond as if my intent was to game the system. As someone already mentioned, the US Army has a field manual on acceptable interrogation techniques which clearly lies somewhere between what is acceptable in criminal investigations and waterboarding. That would be a good place to start.

As I tried to make clear with my analogy, I am not looking for certainty that something is torture before ruling it out, rather I am looking for that point at which I lose certainty that something is not torture before ruling it in.

What is wrong with holding ourselves to higher standards of treatment of prisoners? I for one would not want to find myself before the seat of judgement saying, "But they'd have done it to me and mine!" as my defense. Nor am I willing to ask the men and women who serve this country (in and out of uniform) to do it for me or in my name.

Mark,

With all due respect, your position on this is very easy to accept if we also accept your premise that water-boarding never yielded any information that helped protect our country from future terrorist attacks. If I believed that, I would agree with your take on this. I certainly do not support torture for torture’s sake, but I absolutely believe our government has a duty to protect its citizens from another terrorist attack, including harsh interrogation (again, define torture) of captured terrorists. Should we not have water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to find out what he knew?

Your outright dismissal of the ticking time-bomb scenario as fantasy weakens your stance. You dismiss outright the possibility that water-boarding did in fact yield information which helped stop terrorist attacks. Why? Is Dennis Blair lying about this? With all due respect Mark, me thinks you doth protest too much. It seems you cling to this dismissal for no other reason that you wish not to discuss the possibility that water-boarding might have actually prevented another attack. If it did, then we have true moral dilemma.

You say that our country did not do such things in past wars? What do you call our daily carpet-bombing of Germany during WWII, which resulted in thousands of civilian deaths? Those bombings were designed to destroy Hitler’s ability to continue the war. Should they have been halted because of the harm and terror they inflicted on innocent civilians? How many times did our bombers miss their targets and end up hitting private homes instead? Is this not a moral dilemma? Should we have resorted to sanctions instead of killing innocent civilians, or because they weren’t our prisoners, we don’t consider the ‘torture’ we put them through? These are NOT easy questions to answer.

I do not come to my conclusions lightly. But the question that you are refusing to discuss here is this: Is it morally acceptable to water-board terrorists in order to prevent their cohorts from carrying out terrorist attacks that could kill thousands of people? If we had information that Zacarias Moussaoui knew about the plan for 9/11 prior to the attacks, would it have been morally acceptable to have water boarded him in order to find out what he knew, for the purpose of preventing those attacks? My answer is yes. If your answer is no, I respect that, but I would hope you would accept that others, especially some of those who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks, just might see things differently. But to dismiss this possibility as outright fantasy dodges the moral dilemma.

In coming to my conclusions, I break this argument down to a personal level. As a husband and a father, I am charged by God with loving, providing for and protecting my family. If I were ever put in a situation that I needed to defend my family and in the process hurt, torture, or even kill someone who intended harm to my family, what would God expect of me? Would it be my duty to protect my family from harm, by whatever means were available for me to do so? I believe so. If I behave immorally in the process, then God will be my judge. Most of all, I hope that I never have to face that situation.

Gee, someday I’ll have to sit down and watch my first episode of 24.

And one more thing: note that the photo Shea uses with this article depicts an array of terror devices and tools that the U.S. doesn't use! How dishonest is that?!?

To make this article interesting, Shea depicts REAL torture implements that the U.S. does NOT use so as to trick readers into associating such devices with U.S. policy, when in fact the United States does not use any such torture implements shown in the photo. Amazing dishonesty.

This is total propaganda. Shea is using an association technique wherein the reader subconsciously sees real torture devices and associates them with Shea's argument that the U.S. tortures. In this way Shea hopes to trick the reader, for the U.S. does not use any such torture implements.

The real takeaway from Shea's article is this: Shea prefers the mass torture of terror victims to the harsh coercion of individual terrorists. Shockingly immoral. Absolutely shameful.

Thanks for that rehash of some of the standard forms of dissent from Church teaching on this matter. There's the "It's not torture if there's no scars" lie. So I guess it's okay to sodomize prisoners (or terrify their children, as we apparently did with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed). Rape leaves no lasting physical damage either, so that must be okay too.

You've also got the standard "30% less evil than the other leading brand" excuse, whereby we measure moral acts, not according to the commands of Holy Church, but in comparison to monsters.

And finally, there is the ticking time bomb fantasy, which never actually happens, but which is the absolute favorite argument for justifying doing evil that good may come of it.

News flash: 9/11 could not have been prevented by torture. It could have been prevented by standard police work, properly done. You are living in a fantasy world, not in reality. In fantasy world, you have an all-seeing camera that has watched the bad guy plant the bomb. In the real world, you torture people to find out of they are worth torturing. You also create a state in which it becomes very important for the torturer to create a criminal if his victim happens to be some schnook who doesn't know anything. Stop allowing 24 and your fear-driven fantasies do you thinking for you and start listening to the Church which condemns torture and commands that prisoners be treated humanely. Or at least have the good grace to stop trumpeting that you are a "faithful conservative Catholic" and not a dissenter from Church teaching just as much as Catholics for a Free Choice.

Actually, the question of the efficacy of torture is quite beside the point. Murder is sometimes very efficacious too. Men and nations have sometime profited from it greatly. It sttill damns you to the everlasting fires of hell where you can contemplate the words of our Lord, "How shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul."

However, that said, I would not be *too* quick to pass from acknowledging "Okay, so Bush/Cheney totally lied to us when they said 'we do not torture' to totally trusting them when they assure us, "but it worked!"

In fact, what we are seeing so far is an accumulating pile of evidence that they are also lying about that. So for instance the claim that torture foiled a plot to attack LA has now been shown to be a lie. Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that Zubaydah was tortured (using methods borrowed from the Commies for eliciting *false* confessions) *after* he had given up actionable intelligence by normal interrogation methods. Why? Because the Administration wanted to use him to establish a link between Saddam and al-Quaeda so they could have an excuse for attacking Iraq. In short, it appears more and more likely that even the "it works" fig leaf has a big price tag in lies, misinformation and disinformation attached to it.

It's hell's method really: to rob a man of his soul and give him *nothing* in return. Has nobody here read Faust?

Hi Dena,

While I appreciate your comment, that simply isn't true. Historically popular torture methods, such as the Chinese Water Torture and the Little-Ease (which did not always involve starvation) cause no "grave bodily harm," and yet have always been considered torture.

On the other hand waterboarding (known historically as the Water Cure, Water Treatment, Spanish Water Torture, etc.) does sometimes cause damage to the lungs and intestines, and occasionally unto death, even under ideal conditions. While it was often a part of medieval interrogations, it was always considered torture (torture was an accepted part of interrogation at the time).

Since you opted for the historical argument, let me make you a challenge: Please identify one instance prior to 2002 when waterboarding was not categorized as torture. To be fair, I'll give you the entirety of recorded human history.

P.S. I chose the article image, not Mark. To the degree that it was sensational, you can blame me.

This is the kind of thing plaguing the west; political correctness, humanism, and hyper-sensitivity, the fact remains those prisoners were not entirely innocent. A just society can't sustain if there are no punishment for crimes.

But Mark, the Church already allows the ultimate "torture" of killing a person in self defense. And since it is lawful to kill a man in self-defense, it is certainly permissible for the lesser harm of psychological coercion in self defense.

And to say 9/11 could not have been prevented is nonsense, for our waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammad saved Los Angeles from being a crater like Ground Zero. See: "Waterboarding 9/11 Mastermind Led to Info that Aborted 9/11-Style Attack on Los Angeles"
(Article available at cnsnews.com)

That's not a TV series, Mark. That's thousands of lives saved in Los Angeles. (And Khalid Sheik Mohammad is doing fine as well.)

You're way off on this one. You prefer the killing of thousands of innocent citizens in Los Angeles to the harsh coercion of Khalid Sheik Mohammad. Shockingly immoral. Totally appalling.

For the sake of your own credibility, change the photo of your article. The U.S. does not use any such implements of torture. If you do not change the photo of this article, all readers will be forced to conclude that you are a propagandist, not a serious seeker of truth. Do the right thing, Mark.

I'm with John Yoo, pal.

Appreciated this article, Mark, thanks.

While torture needs to be defined for the purposes of real life application and accountability, the approach by a Catholic should begin with not with how far we can go, but what it means to treat a suspect/prisoner humanely as we seek justice and aim to protect innocents.

I'm always shocked at how many Christians don't actually believe that you may not do evil that good may come. I'm not sure what brand of Christianity they're practicing, but it sure isn't mine.

The underlying point in regards to the Authority of the State and its ability to inflict bodily harm to the point of death on its citizens boils is this: are we or are we not utilitarians? Catholics, of course, are not, and Mr. Shea is right to point out that we should not engage in the "how close can we get" game, nor should arguments about proportionality come up in Catholic reasoning about something that deals with the "first principles" of State Authority. Classically, proportionality can be a consideration in prudential considerations (should we conduct a Just War, should a Catholic Monarch supress another religion/heretical group within their borders, etc.), but it would never be considered a term for a foundational understanding of the authority a Sovreign has over his subjects (as is the case here in trying to define "what is torture").

However, classically, it is obvious that Catholic Social Teaching not only believes its possible, but that it is the responsibility of Sovereigns to punish those who commit evil within their realm. True, part and parcel of that is to protect the innocent, but Augustine and Aquinas are both very clear that legitimate authority is obligated to punish evil, and that this is the will of God, going off of Paul's statement that "they do not wield the sword in vain."

This being the case, it seems reasonable to punish those who, through their refusal to provide information that would save innocent lives, become accomplices to said crimes. So in the cases of people whose knowledge of the proceedings of groups like Al Queda is unknown, we cannot inflict the punishment for this crime unless it becomes known later that they indeed withheld information. In that case, we can punish them, and perhaps even "hang them" as Mr. Shea keeps bringing up. However, in certain instances where it is known that a person would have information, for instance when we captured basically the number 2 man in the entire organization, it seems reasonable to tell this person "if you do not provide us with information, we will punish you this way," and then proceed to do so if he does not comply. It is well within the funcationality of the law to work in a preventitive through threatening those with punishment who would breach it. This in no way would amount to "treating prisoners inhumanely," due to the fact that they could make a rational decision to comply or not. This would maintain their dignity as humans, because they could rationally choose to spill the beans or face the consequences, even if it be death.

The actual problem with torture seems to be a) it utilitarian grounding, and b) its purpose to "sub-humanize" the one who is tortured. It does this through actually making them unable to respond in a rational way, which is the basis of human dignity. This would be the classical accusition against torture. However, one could classically, with Augustine and Aquinas, declare it well within the Authority of a Sovereign to punish non-complient accomplices to "crimes in progress" if it is known that they have knowledge of the crimes structure, and that these punishments can be quite severe.

Crushing anyone's testicles, or otherwise maiming someone, is mutilation and strikes me as inherently incompatible with someone's dignity as an image of God. If that is 'torture', than torture is inherently immoral.

Causing pain, discomfort and fear on the other hand are not inherently immoral. We cause our children to experience all three when we spank them, but are we then torturing them or lovingly disciplining them?

Therefore, is there not a necessary distinction to be made between the 'torture' that is pain, discomfort and fear (such as waterboarding) and the 'torture' that involves inherently depraved acts (such as mutilation, rape or coercing the subject to commit any type of sin)?

Dena repeats a common meme:

If it is known that the person does have information on terrorist plots, a good and moral people *must* apply harsh coercion to get that information and thus save dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of innocent people from death and maiming.

What lies beneath all this is completely unexamined assumption that torture is the only way to get information. As the FBI guy involved in interrogating Zubaydah points out, this is false.

http://tiny.cc/jplPs

However, many people who get all their information from 24 and Bruce Willis movies still maintain that they are being hard-headed realists while they base their policy recommendations on action films.

The second fallacy is exhibited by CommonSenseGuy, who needs to get his story straight with other torture apologists. You see, the Catechism specifically condemns torture inflicted to "punish the guilty" or "satisfy hatred". Truly sophisticated Catholic torture apologists know that and instead make the case that they are not advocating torture as punishment but simply and solely to get necessary information.

Of course, what this means in practice is "Why not torture the children or loved ones of a suspect? That's way more efficient at getting the suspect to crack and say whatever you want them to." If you reply "The children aren't guilty of anything" then you reveal that, like Commonsenseguy your real reason for torture is to punish the guiltty and/or satisfy hatred, not get information. (That's assuming you aren't LexEtLibertas, who might just go ahead and crush the testicle of a boy if he looked like he might be a rapist. And I'll bet that kid will confess pretty darn quick if he's hold out on Lex.)

A word to the wise: sins that need a swirling and ever-changing kaleidoscope of contradictory excuses are usually the sort that will get you safely to hell if you stick with them through thick and thin.

So I guess it comes down to: Where is the line? What is minimum humane treatment for those who know our enemies? Many of the members of AQ and the Taliban are proudly so and do not hide it. So what do we do with them? Ask? Shout? Starve? Hit? Sleep Deprive? Give them a military tribunal and execute the guilty? Lock them up till they die?

There are a lot of accusations and condemnations, but precious few solutions. Where does a country's paternal duty to protect its citizens intersect with an enemies human rights?

Austin: Cheney has asked for memos that show productive information to be declassified along with the other torture memos. This request has yet to be fulfilled. Though I have read reports from various sources that say there was an attack on Los Angeles that was adverted. Also the hierarchical structure of AQ allowed for quicker dismantling. Not justifying, just saying what I've read.

This from an interview with Matthew Alexander who wrote the book “How to Break a Terrorist.” Note he is very much against torture. Even against the fear-up techniques allowed by the Army Field Manual.

“In Iraq, we lived the "ticking time bomb" scenario every day. Numerous Al Qaeda members that we captured and interrogated were directly involved in coordinating suicide bombing attacks. I remember one distinct case of a Sunni imam who was caught just after having blessed suicide bombers to go on a mission. Had we gotten there just an hour earlier, we could have saved lives. Still, we knew that if we resorted to torture the short term gains would be outweighed by the long term losses. I listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the number one reason they had decided to pick up arms and join Al Qaeda was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorized torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay. My team of interrogators knew that we would become Al Qaeda's best recruiters if we resorted to torture. Torture is counterproductive to keeping America safe and it doesn't matter if we do it or if we pass it off to another government. The result is the same. And morally, I believe, there is an even stronger argument. Torture is simply incompatible with American principles. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both forbade their troops from torturing prisoners of war. They realized, as the recent bipartisan Senate report echoes, that this is about who we are. We cannot become our enemy in trying to defeat him.”

He notes that he was living with the ticking time bomb scenario. I think we can put the argument that there is no such thing to rest. This is not to justify such techniques. But it does no good to argue against them with untruths.

I am still not convinced that torture is not justified under certain, narrowly-defined, circumstances. As I argued before in my IC post over the weekend, I see torture as something that might be justified as an act within the scope of a just war.

The intrinsic evil argument has several problems, here are two of them. Since intrinsic evils are allowed in the conduct of a just war, why not torture, if it was applied without causing death or permanent impairment? If the proper military authority had a high level of reasonable certainty that a prisoner has information that would lead to avoiding death, winning the war and protecting the common good, why would torture be as justified as bombing, for example?

The second problem, which I still have yet to see anyone explain satisfactorily, is the passage from Veritatis Splendor where torture is put in list of other intrinsic evils such as "deportation." How is deportation an intrinsic evil? Help me here! Why shouldn't a state have the right, if not duty, to expel someone who was a clear and present danger to the common good? If true, this seems only a step away from saying no one should be locked up in a prison because it is an affront to their human dignity!

Do you really believe this stuff?

"Would you pull the trigger on a nine-year old boy who locked himself in his middle school and is on his cellphone with the SWAT Team and is telling them he is about to push the button and take out all the bullies and himself" ???

Didn't have time to think of something more provocative.

Really, like someone else wrote: Grow UP,
and be a Catholic man.

Mark,

Sorry, but I’m not ready to accept your premise that everything we’ve been told is a lie. Dennis Blair does not work for the Bush administration, he’s Obama’s director of National Intelligence.

You also haven’t taken the time to answer the point that I and many others here are asking about, namely that your assertion of the ticking-time bomb scenario as a fantasy just might be wrong. Nobody has to remind anyone that September 11, 2001 was not a fantasy, and the possibility exists that it could have been prevented if more information about it had been known before hand. Your automatic rejection of this possibility is the Achilles-heel of your argument.

Have to side with Deal Hudson on this on.

Regarding torture, based on the activities of the present Obama administration, you, me, and all our American neighbors are funding not only torture of innocent women and children but as well their deaths.

This is because your tax dollars and mine are now being sent overseas to support the taking of innocent human life through abortion. Not a simulated death of dipping in water, but real death. And this is but one example of the proliferation of secret torture under the new administration.

Some may recognize all the recent talk of torture as rhetorical "them too" sanitization of evil.

One of the things Catholics understand best is proportionality, or at least we should.

Thank you for that post and I think fits the frame of the kind of torture we discuss here.

Historically, the Church has understood justice as an equal punishment to the crime committed. This is how she understands the atonement in that it took the Son and the sufferings of the Holy Cross to acquit the whole world. No mercy is even remotely possible without first incurring justice.

Hi Deal,

I'm not as bothered by this one. The term deportationes (quoted from Gaudium et Spes) has a range of possible meanings beyond its English counterpart -- everything from simple deportation along the lines you describe, to exile or banishment (St. John to Patmos), to the mass expulsion or removal of an entire population (as happened with Eastern European ethnic cleansing). Since context determines meaning in situations like this, the context of VS -- deeply evil actions -- would suggest a more extreme definition.

Having said all that, it is definitely ambiguous. A clarification from Rome would be really nice.

Either torture is intrinsically evil or it isn't. I think Deal misstates when he says that intrinsic evils are allowed in a just war. The killing of innocents is not intrinsically evil unless that was the intent, which is why terrorism is intrinsically evil but war is not. If anyone can make the case that torture (we'll ignore for the moment the debate about what that really means) is intrinsically evil then - for Catholics - the argument is over.

Debate over all the other aspects of torture are interesting and entertaining but are irrelevant and really only serve to send the discussion off in unhelpful directions. E.g. you want to use the "George Washington wouldn't do it" defense? Fine, then let's use GW's solution to the problem of irregular combatants and hang the inhabitants of the Gitmo Hilton just as George hanged Major Andre for spying.

Dena:

Waterboarding 9/11 Mastermind Led to Info that Aborted 9/11-Style Attack on Los Angeles

Actually, that's a lie too:

http://tiny.cc/Za6aH

I recommend basing Catholic moral reasoning on something besides lies.

Baron:

So I guess it comes down to: Where is the line?

No. It does not. As blogger Tom Kreitzberg points out, the whole attempt to find a bright line between legitimate coercion and torture is an exercise in futility. As he says,"'bright lines' don't exist.

They do not exist.

Of existence they have none.

There are no bright lines. There are no dim lines. There are no lines.

The lines you insist on do not exist. They are not.

I recommend against constructing laws based on these bright lines, since they don't exist."

That does not mean it is impossible to know if torture exists and impossible to not do it. It does not mean that legitimate coercion used by law enforcement authorities every day is the same thing as torture.

Instead it means what I've been saying: aim to treat prisoners humanely (as we have done throughout our history) and you don't have to play the Bush Administration game of trying to legitimate torture. You also don't have to try to figure out how to square prisoner abuse with Catholic teaching. In short, do pretty much what was policy before Bush authorized torture. We got lots of intelligence that way.

Deal:

The theologian who has worked the hardest to square torture with Church teaching is Fr. Brian Harrison. The best he could come up with as a conceivable justification was that it might be an open question, but only in the case of the ticking time bomb.

Permit me an analogy: Suppose a pro-choice Catholic were to argue that Dan Maguire's appeals to extreme examples such as, say tubal pregancines in incest victims leave the Church's apparent teaching on the intrinsically grave evil of abortion open to discussion and therefore not truly "non-negotiable". Would *any* prolife Catholic take that claim seriously? Yet ticking time bomb scenarios, which are the backbone of Fr. Harrison's possible torture loophole are, in fact, far less statistically likely than tubal pregnancies in incest victims.

Appeals to ambiguities such as deportation are beside the point. If you want to know what the Church is getting at on such matters, you look to the rest of developed magistterial guidance for context. In the case of deportation, it becomes clear that the Magisterium has in mind stuff like the ethnic cleansing and uprootings seen at the hand of 20th century tyrannies. It doesn't mean (obviousLy) deporting Adolf Eichmann back for trial.

In the case of torture, the Church has by its subsequent actions and statements made clear that it condemns, well, essentially the sort of stuff we are doing (among other torture regimes). It doesn't say, "go ahead with enhanced interrogation, but don't cross the line into torture". It says "treat prisoners humanely". It teachers remark that our use of torture is a greater blow than 9/11, because in embracing it we harm ourselves.

Y'see, we have no ticking time bomb we can appeal to as a fig leaf (because TTB scenarios are fantasy, not real). We torture, and it is every bit as intrinically and gravely evil as the Church says it is, because what we are doing is precisely what the Church condemns. Instead of calling us to try to figure out how to tiptoe up to torture, the Church says, "Stop it. Treat prisoners humanely" just as she says to all the clever justifiers of abortion "Stop it! Reverence human life."

Torture may be a negotiable in the fantasy world of ticking time bomb scenarios, just as abortion might be an open moral question if every pregnancy was an anencephalic baby lodged in the fallopian tubes of an incest victim on the brink of death. But hard cases such as that make bad law. Entirely imaginary cases like the ticking time bomb scenario make even worse law. Since that's the only conceivable case Fr. Harrison (who was really looking hard for justifications) could find. I have to conclude that torture is every bit the non-negotiable that abortion is.

9/11 was not a Ticking Time Bomb scenario. Ticking time bomb scenarios are fantasy in which we project ourselves into imaginary scenes where we possess the godlike omniscience of the audience member (who knows the bastard is going to blow up the orphanage because we saw him plant the bomb) with the human ignorance and rough-hewn courage of the action hero who knows that he can torture the information out of the Bad Guy.

None of that was true for 9/11. What would have saved lives on 9/11 was what has saved lives on countless other ocassions: good police work and normal interrogations. Instead, the INS was asleep at the switch and the Feds were not paying attention to guys who were, ahem, taking lessons in how to fly without taking off or landing.

Torture is about vengeance, not about getting information. The apologetics for it are driven by fear, not by the teaching of the Church and, often, not even by reason. That's why the justifications for it are so self-contradictory ("We don't torture and besides they have it coming and it works.")

It is not a consequentialist position to support these methods. The methods are themselves not morally objectionable which I, unlike Mr. Shea can state from personal experience, now that they are declassified and public knowledge. They are also not offensive to the teachings of the Church cited, which Mr. Shea takes egregiously out of context. I have been subjected to the methods at issue, in the course of training leading up to the first Gulf War. They are neither physically nor psychologically damaging. The naked political casting of them as something else is a very dangerous thing, and has cost us both a moral and practical tool against those who are actively engaged in "intrinsic evil."

What they do accomplish is to play on fear of the unknown,and thus make the prisoner supply his own vision of what happens "if this goes on ..." For someone like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that would be a very frigthening thing, but the techniques elicit that vision, they do not directly coerce his will to avoid what he actaully is being subjected to. Rather the interrogations gain useful information in relaxed settings where he has the opportunity to conjure, for himself what unknown horrors his own imagination puts at the end of a progressive series of methods, and to avoid not what he has been subjected to -- but what he himself has envisioned he will, eventually be given to endure next, since that is what he imagines he would do in their place...

But all of this moral and psychological subtley (in the realm of dealing with violence) is lost now that the techniques are disclosed, to who knows what ultimate price. May God repay those responsible.

The portions of Gaudium et Spes and Veritatis Splendor are seriously quoted out of context, and I expect much better of Mr. Shea's able mind and keen spiritual insight. Both present lists of things "opposed to life itself" and "hostile to life itself." As such, they must be construed according to the principle of ejusdem generis or "things of like kind.

What Mr. Shea omits in his selective quote is the immediately preceding word appearing in both quotations, just before the phrases "physical and mental torture", and "torments inflicted on body or mind." The word is "mutilation", in both cases. Thus, if what is done is not subjectively intended nor objectively likely to result in physical or psychological mutilation or impairment to "life itself" -- it is not what those teachings are condemning. If it were as Mr. Shea suggests by taking it out of context, every good Catholic who spanks a willfully disobedient child is a torturer, which is nonsense. One can disagree with the practical or collateral effects of that method, but they don't make one who uses them under carefully considered circumstance a moral monster.

We have reams of data from our own soldiers undergoing these methods in training and so it is neither objectively likely nor subjectively intended to cause physical or psychological mutilation, or to impair "life itself" in any way. Indeed they are intended to preserve life by imposing some discomfort and the contemplation drawn from the prisoner's own imaginings -- which are wholly the reflection of his own impaired conscience. I am here to state from personal experience that they do not cause such mutilation or impairment. The argument against them cannot be supported from the Church's teachings cited.

I expect better of Mr. Shea.

This is where your argument starts to fall apart and why others stop taking you seriously. As noted above, an Army Iinterrogator who is opposed to torture, notes that he "lived with the ticking bomb scenario" daily.

It does not good to argue otherwise when someone with such experience, who agrees with you on torture, says otherwise.

If anyone can make the case that torture (we'll ignore for the moment the debate about what that really means) is intrinsically evil then - for Catholics - the argument is over.

Veritatis Splendor 80.

The Pope calls it intrinsically and gravely evil. End of story.

Now a separate question can be raised (as Deal has done) about other items on the list such as "deportation". But that goes back to the definitional question of what the Church has in view concerning what constitutes "deportation" or "torture". But it does not effect in the question of whether torture or deportation are called intrinsically immoral. Bottom line, what she means by torture, like what she means by deportation, is gravely and intrinsically immoral. Veritatis Splendor actually delineates (to a degree) what she means by torture. But, of course, the purpose of Veritatis Splendor is not to give a one-size-fit-all perfect detailing of every conceivable human act that could be construed as torture, any more than it is to detail every conceivable form of sexual perversion.

Mr. Shea, do you believe that a legitimate authority has the right to punish those who perpetuate evil within or towards the common good of which they are responsible?

Do you believe that a legitimate authority is in fact obligated to punish those who perpetuate evil within or towards the common good of which they are responsible?

If you answer either of these negatively, I would like to hear how you square this with Catholic tradition (and indeed, Magisterium, if not the infallible magisterium) and where you think a definitive break was made. I know some act as if the Church radically switches gears on things like this (ie slavery, democracy, etc.), but I'm afraid Church social teaching is not so blaringly illogical or prone to modernist revisionism. For instance, Leo XIII in the encyclical against slavery points out how exactly the Church was against slavery, and how it was not, and how it could make the stand against the slave trade of the 19th century without abbrogating the Catholic understanding of such issues in the past. Leo XIII does the same when it comes to democracy, especially in light of his immediate predecessors in Gregory XIV and Pius IX.

So if you do indeed think the Catholic Church was historically wrong for such a broad swath of its history, I would like you to tell us how it has come to this decision to break with the past and how this doesn't disrupt the continuity of the deposit of faith. Again, this isn't a question of prudential judgements (ie, we can argue whether Urban II should or should not have launched the crusades and not put into question the entire traditional teaching of the Church, but to question his authority to do so would)...you seem to be on the verge of saying what was accepted in the past is wrong now, and like someone mentioned above, its seems more for Lockean understanding of rights rather than "classic" understandings. Even John Paul II squared his negative judgement of the death penalty in a prudential light, that in modern times, the need of the past to put to death is abrogated by modern imprisonment, and even then he is no way pretended what he said fell into infallible magesterial teaching.

So there you go. Please answer these questions if you would.

By Haaretz Correspondents and Staff , By Barak Ravid and Avi Issacharoff :

"Israeli officials expressed surprise yesterday at reports that Washington would continue providing aid to the Palestinian Authority if Hamas is included in a unity government.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the Obama administration has asked Congress for minor changes in U.S. law that would keep aid flowing to the PA should Hamas-backed officials join a government with rival Fatah." - April 28

So we are replacing the harsh interrogation of terrorists with financial support. Well done liberals.

Once again, Mark's infamous lack of charity obscures his arguments.

These torture apologists, with their 'what if the terrorist knows something abotu an attack that may be about to take place? What if he knows actionable intel' etc... made me remember a quote from G. K. Chesterton:

"Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice."

Is it really worth losing our souls for?

http://tinyurl.com/cb5rr9

Now can we get real on this topic

Mr. Shea, do you believe that a legitimate authority has the right to punish those who perpetuate evil within or towards the common good of which they are responsible?

Of course.

I think that even extends to war criminals.

So if you do indeed think the Catholic Church was historically wrong for such a broad swath of its history, I would like you to tell us how it has come to this decision to break with the past and how this doesn't disrupt the continuity of the deposit of faith.

I don't think Holy Church was wrong. I think some Catholics have been wrong. That's because I don't think torture is part of the deposit of faith. Neither, apparently did the Holy Father when he described it as "intrinsically immoral". In the same way, I don't think that the long history of Catholic anti-semitism and Jew hatred is part of the deposit of faith, so I have no big problem Nostra Aetate condemning hatred of Jews as foreign to the mind of Christ.

One of the functions of the Magisterium in developing the Tradition is to help us distinguish the deposit of faith from old sin. Hostility to Jews is very ancient, but not part of the deposit of faith. Acceptance of torture and slavery are similar. The Church put up with it while laboring to destroy it.

G.R.:

If I understand you correctly, you appear to be saying "It's not torture if it doesn't mutilate". Good to know you are alright with electrodes to the scrotum, sodomizing people with cattle prods, and simulated drowning. Of course, there are those trouble dead guys in our custody, but as long as the corpse wasn't mutilated, I guess have to conclude that torture never occurred.

Rape typically doesn't entail mutilation too. Is that okay for female suspects? As the masters of the Definition Game always say, "I'm just asking because I need clarity."

"Acceptance of torture and slavery are similar. The Church put up with it while laboring to destroy it."

Alright, that is reasonable. If you accept that those in authority should punish evil, that is in line with the Catholic tradition, as you well know.

What gets sketchy in your argument is your "fleeing from the near occasion of sin" metaphor, away from a definition of torture, and into the arms of "treat prisoners humanely." I think some of us here think this leaves the issue on the table in the same exact manner. All good Catholics rightly should avoid torture and treat prisoners humanely. That is a near truism. What is up for debate is what constitues torture and what constitutes humane treatment. What I am saying is not that anyone ever tortured with the expressed consent of Holy Church. What I am saying is that various expression of coercion and punishment have been used by Catholic monarchs and have been deamed as "human treatment" by the Church. The tradition leaves well in play punishment even unto death, and more than simply saying that these are "necessary evils," they say they paricipate in divinely ordain punishment for sins, which IS NOT merely a necessary evil, but a good, particularly for the one punished, according again to such luminarie as Augustine and Aquinas.

So even though I understand the "spirit" of your argument, that instead of dealing sophistically with the distinction between torture and none torture, we should instead aim our vision at "humane treatment" and "err" on the side of caution. That is fine and good. However, being that it is an imperative of the state to defend the innocent and punish evil, it still comes down to the fact that we must define torture and what punishments constitute "humane" punishment, as much as some contemporary liberals would shutter at such a thought.

I have provided what I think is the basis of torture as opposed to punishment, outlined above, in regards to rationality as the prime dignity of humanity, and thus torture is actually that that's goal is the destruction of a person's use of his reason, and thus his dignity. So it is true, if fear is employed to such a degree that, even if it doesn't "leave" long time bodily scars, but impairs the function of a person's reason, it is torture. However, if the threat of punishment deters a crime, it is acceptable coercion, because the person rationally chooses to divert their behavior.

I guess what I am asking is if this is not an acceptable definition of torture as opposed to punishment, what grounds would you provide?

Mark Shea,

Your arguments are simplistic and incorrect. JPII was referring to the torture of innocent people, not terrorists.

Unless of course you think that St. Robert Bellarmine and St. Thomas Aquinas, two Doctors of the Universal Church, were ensnared by the devil!

Peace and God Bless.

I have to say Mark, your work over the past has gone a long way towards "converting" me from supporting torture.

I must say, however, that your tone is so uncharitable at times that quite frankly, you often come off as a real jerk.

As Bob Farrell states above, it obscures your arguments. Stick to the facts and you'll be far more effective in your efforts.

I salute Mr. Shea for writing this, and for his patience in responding charitably to his critics. It is both surprising and salutary that it appears here. Perhaps that is an indication that more Catholics are thinking as Catholics, and not as members of a particular political party.

It is clear today that both major parties have supporters of torture in their leadership. that is too bad, but no torture we've heard of in the post-9/11 context even remotely approaches the torture of abortion, or the torture of Christ in His Sorrowful Passion.

So many in both political parties, in the terms of the safe-environment sex-educators, have been "desensitized" to the reality of torture. Let's not let that happen to Catholics, too!

The troubling note of so much "Catholic" advocacy of torture is the notion that "the war on terror" requires it, or at least justifies it. Christ told us that there will be wars and rumours of wars until the end of time. Tyrants -- and torturers -- will always want to avail themselves of the fear of war to obtain a moral seal of approval for all sorts of sins, torture foremost among them (witness O'Brien in Room 101 of Orwell's 1984).

Of course, if men and women of good will are persuaded by the tyrant's insistence that torture is "necessary" for security, survival, or whatever, so much the better -- for the tyrant. But not for the truth, for charity, or our pursuit ever to be more Christlike.

Dear Mr. Shea,

I'm very disappointed in your sloppy visceral argument here. You appear incapable of treating this issue with honest critical analysis.

Very sad.

By the way, he isn't President any longer.

I would challenge you to write this same article without reference to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or the contents of selectively released memos. Bet the comments would be different. No one (in their right mind, and not under oath in front of some witch hunt) will support torture.

Problem is not Bush lied or anything else like it. It's about the political agenda grinding up our intelligence capacity. Again. It's 1976-1980 all over again. Wait until 2013 and whatever party is in power goes after Obama for crimes against humanity for destroying the industrial capacity of this country...or whatever. This behaviour solves nothing and certainly does not enhance our security.

Finally, there has got to be some workable definition of torture that we can agree upon. You have yet to show anything that cannot be easily picked apart.

I really enjoy your pieces here and elsewhere. This topic gets threadbare, though. We need something other than the same saw.

The next time I hear bagpipes, I'll call 911. That's torture to me. It even makes me cry, for real, big tears of pain. Maybe I can get the piper arrested and dishonorably discharged.
I'd much rather hear Celine Dion or Barbra Streisand.

The next time I have to suffer a politician or other ignoramous blaspheming or performing other hate crimes against the faith and misrepresenting it, I'll call 911. That too is torturous to my sensibility and dignity, as much as it is to a Muslim who claims the Koran has been desecrated.

I love being tickled by caterpillars, always have, but when my ex used to run his big tow across the bottom of my feet while I was sleeping (he knew I hated that)I know now, from your comments, that he was my chief torturer. I suppose my home life was worse than Abu Graib. I had to do many things against my will, faith and sense of morality for his enjoyment/benefit. Far worse than having a female soldier deliver dinners at Club Gitmo. That particular "torture" made me laugh out loud.

Mark, I've seen worse "tortures" in college and high school hazings than anything the govt. is accused of or has admitted doing. Cheerleaders make human pyramids wearing far less than the prisoners of Abu Graib and it sends the crowds into raucus cheering. Water boarding for 40 seconds ain't nothing. Since my eldest child was born 22 years ago, I've been holding my breath for all my babies and now grandbabies.

For the record, Mark, torture requires physical pain and damage. Sell your tortured arguments somewhere else. It really doesn't make sense in this society, not the one I know. I just can't whip up any sympathy for anyone not renditioned. That's the only corporate responsibility for torture that this country will have to admit to. Rendition is a Sin with a capital "S"!

Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark.

You missed the whole question. Perhaps a rephrasing will help.

Define Humane Treatment.
Define Legitimate Interrogation.

Really, inquiring minds want to know. There have to be lines otherwise they would be without limit.

"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."

M.Shea says: Torture may be a negotiable in the fantasy world of ticking time bomb scenarios

Dena: Ticking time bomb scenarios happen all the time in law enforcement and elsewhere. We intercept plots often, and it's then that we *must* coerce a suspect, if we are to be a godly moral people that is. To do otherwise is to choose the evil of watching dozens of innocents killed, all the while knowing the event was in the making (yet being too concerned with the well being of one of the bombers to act). Coercion is *not* about vengeance: it's about saving lives--lots of lives.

And when is Mark going to change the photo, in which he uses a propaganda technique of association to trick readers into thinking that the U.S. applies such torture implements when it does not? Shame on you, Mr. Shea. Change the photo.

JPII was referring to the torture of innocent people, not terrorists.

No. He wasn't. Similarly, in saying abortion is intrinsically evil, he wasn't referring only to babies in the second trimester.

I must say, however, that your tone is so uncharitable at times that quite frankly, you often come off as a real jerk.

*****

I salute Mr. Shea for writing this, and for his patience in responding charitably to his critics.

I never know who to believe.

I'm very disappointed in your sloppy visceral argument here. You appear incapable of treating this issue with honest critical analysis.

Is it just me, or was that a sloppy visceral statement devoid of critical analysis? Can't tell, since you brought no substantiating facts, and indeed, nothing at all to bear on your fiat. Duly noted, though.

No one (in their right mind, and not under oath in front of some witch hunt) will support torture.

This is manifestly false, given both John Yoo's statement and the enthusiastic support you can find for it right here in these comboxes. Most of the contributors here are enthusiastic supporters of other forms of torture too (such as waterboarding) too.

Problem is not Bush lied or anything else like it.

Yeah, it pretty much is. Or more particularly, it's that he lied about ordering a program of war crimes.

You have yet to show anything that cannot be easily picked apart.

On the contrary, I have defined torture numerous times, for instance, on my blog. I suggested such things as "try the dictionary", or "If the Army Field Manual says "Don't do that" then consider it torture" or the Interrogator's Golden Rule: "Don't do to prisoners what you would consider abusive toward you or a buddy." The fact that these common sense definitions can be picked apart by people determined to justify abuse and torture is not really a reflection on the definitions. It's merely a reflection of the fact that the torture apologist is looking for a way to justify torture and will pick apart all conceivable definitions in the zeal to make the case for fog. What is remarkable is that the picker-aparters never seem to propose a definition themselves. They just sit there in feigned helplessness. Why it's almost as if they aren't really interested in finding any definition at all!

This topic gets threadbare, though. We need something other than the same saw.

Yeah! And who wants to keep hearing all the boring crap about abortion and contraception, either. Same old, same old. Dittos with the crucifixion and resurrecion jazz. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times. The Church needs to stop repeating itself and find something else to talk about besides the deposit of faith. Just the same stuff over and over! Let's just agree that we don't torture and besides it works and move on. Some things, as Peg Noonan says, should remain mysterious. Like war crimes. Ho hum.

Dena:

Learn to read. As IC's fearless editor pointed out above, I have no control over what picture goes with my article. Not my webzine.

Mark Shea's account of the facts:
Are there any circumstances when it would be okay for the president to order an interrogator to crush a nine-year-old boy's testicles?..Yoo's answer to this question was: "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that."

What Yoo is quoted as saying in the link provided by Mark:
Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him? Yoo: No treaty.

Yoo may have been wrong about the non-existence of such a treaty, but he was not saying that it would be morally permissible or "okay" in any other sense of the word. Why not discuss the Bush-Cheney policy rather than some fantasy scenarios that were brought up rhetorically by opponents of that policy?

Bush/Cheney permitted the limited use of waterboarding under controlled circumstances--something that thousands of Americans experience every year. Even the not very healthy Hitchens survived waterboarding unharmed. On the other hand, neither Hitchens nor any Marine would voluntarily submit to a 20 year prison sentence. If it's wrong to use waterboarding on someone guilty of a crime in order to protect the public, then isn't imprisonment even worse?

The big story about the Bush/Chene torture policy is that it was rather mild, and nothing like what the critics alleged. Remember when Mark Shea alleged that prisoners were routinely being thrown out of airplanes?

"It does not mean that legitimate coercion used by law enforcement authorities every day is the same thing as torture."

"I suggested such things as "try the dictionary""

Coerce
–verb (used with object), -erced, -erc⋅ing.
1. to compel by force, intimidation, or authority, esp. without regard for individual desire or volition: They coerced him into signing the document.
2. to bring about through the use of force or other forms of compulsion; exact: to coerce obedience.
3. to dominate or control, esp. by exploiting fear, anxiety, etc.: The state is based on successfully coercing the individual

Torture
–noun
1. the act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty.
2. a method of inflicting such pain.
3. Often, tortures. the pain or suffering caused or undergone.
4. extreme anguish of body or mind; agony.
5. a cause of severe pain or anguish.

So by a dictionary definition fear and anxiety are coercion and pain and anguish are torture. But isn't fear and anxiety 'mental anguish' and can't you get 'anxiety pains'. It would seem less clear cut than first advertised.

My friends, those of you who ask Mark to be charitable or rational on this issue are wasting your time. He can't see the other side as anything except stupid or depraved and that, from his perspective, frees him from all sorts of obligations he might otherwise acknowledge.

"Okie," for example, wastes his time above by trying to look at the matter seriously; but we're past that. We have been for some time now, since this site simply refuses to employ anyone who can edit Mark -- maybe they worry that, edited, Mark will have absolutely nothing to contribute. They could be right about that.

But I guess I will have to live with the judgment that I am a liar and one who rationalizes evil. Who knows, I might eventually learn to like being an evil liar.

Talk of "Bush Administration" torture is the rhetorical condom preventing the public conception of what is being done to the innocent by the present administration.

It is not Mark who is being dishonest about the article. If you read just two more lines, you would find that his ellipsis cuts out none of the actual content:




Yoo is clear: there is no law or treaty preventing the president from ordering such a thing, and Yoo himself would even allow for theoretical circumstances himself in which a child's testicles could be crushed. He is absolutely saying that there are circumstances in which it is permissible.

If you're going to try to refute Mark, at least get the story straight.

Bravo, Mark, for telling the moral truth about torture, and defending basic Christian and Catholic morality.

We must never give in to the arguments of moral simpletons. Torture is intrinsically evil, the ends do not justify the means, and even bad guys have rights in the eyes of God.

Most of the people here seem to be using your 'style' as an excuse to reject your arguments, and I find that pitiful, not to mention embarrassing as a Catholic.

I've been making similar arguments at American Catholic :)

... Which is exactly what the application of the SERE techniques detailed were -- we did, in fact, perform them on thousands of occasions to our own men, for their own training, and for which reason we know their objective effects, and their moral significance.

You keep ignoring that in this endless supply of straw men, throwing in irrelevancies like rape, sodomy, cattle prods to genitalia, etc. in place of the real debate and the actual methods used and their moral significance. I don't care what John Yoo was enticed to opine about in a hypothetical, adversarial bating session, I care about what was actually authorized and done.

If torture is intrinsically evil, it doesn't matter whether it saved lives. Joseph Mengele performed great experiments on concentration camp inmates such as keeping them in freezing water to see how long it would take them to die. These studies were scientifically very good and have saved lives. That doesn't make them okay.

Of course we have the right to defend ourselves and the right to punish criminals. We don't have the right to do evil.

Reading both Mark's and Deal Hudson's essays, I have to say I'm more convinced by Mark's view that torture is intrinsically evil. The question isn't even, "What would Jesus do?" You might better ask "What would St. Agnes do?" Or, St. Stephen, or St. Maximilian Kolbe, or any of the other martyrs for the faith.

The fact that Al Qaeda would kill us if it has the chance is almost beside the point. We are Christians and our duty is to obey God.

In the end, I believe the Bush administration's dishonesty answers this question for us. If torture is permissible for a Christian, then we wouldn't need to hide it from the world. In fact, widespread knowledge would be a deterrent.

The fact they tried to hide it shows it was something to be ashamed of. In the end, it may be a close call, but it is still wrong.

Your text was too long to wade through. After reading you for a few weeks now, it's apparent that you are not a Bush fan. At least he's not evil. Question - what do YOU suggest our government/military do to protect the country? Play nice? What part of 'the east and middle east HATE us and want to see us destroyed' do you not understand? They are not going to 'play nice' with us. In any case, I sincerely hope that you nor I nor anyone I know is ever put in the position that President Bush was put in when our country was attacked. It's easy to sit and pontificate from this side of the Oval Office.

This does not define your utopian view of just torture. Waterboarding on the other hand is a specific interrogation technique so it seems the fog is on your side. I've experienced many near-drowning experiences throughout my life (I swim competitively) and I do not think they've left me an everlasting psychological impression like you seem to believe. My take is waterboarding is not as bad as you and many liberal media elites have hyped it up to be.

Mark Shea has yet to intelligently respond to my point.

Two doctors of the Church taught that torture of the guilty was morally licit. Indeed, St. Thomas Aquinas taught that a public authority could maim a guilty individual.

Mr. Shea acts as if the presumption is that he is right. But without a more serious and in depth treatment from Mr. Shea, I'll have to stick with St. Robert Bellarmine and St. Thomas Aquinas. They may seem like simple minded consequentialists to some, but I like them just fine.

http://firstbringthemreason.blogspot.com/

it's not about torture, it's about Bush. We need a psychological study of those whose hatred of Bush is so profound, it makes them unreasonable.

#2. One man's torture is another man's pleasure. We call something "torture" and presume to know what it is we're talking about with absolute certianty. One thingfor sure though is that listening to MSNBC, CNN, most liberals, and O'Bama is torture to me.

Abortion is undeniably legal; that does not make it right. He is not absolutely saying that it is permissible -- that implies that anyone "permits" the President to do anything. The President is empowered, not permitted, to do anything within the Executive Power of Article II of the Constitution of the United States, including as Commander in Chief of the Armed forces to wage war against its enemies. Anyone who does not understand the breadth and awful nature of this power has not studied war. Presidents, including several Democratic presidents, have authorized firebombing civilians, because it is in their power to do so in the prosecution of war. "War crimes" are a legal novelty, but Dresden and Tokyo have not been made the subject of such proceedings, in which several thousand nine-year old children surely burned to death in horrible agony. The President can pardon anyone of any crime save only impeachment, and seems to have the power to abrogate treaties as well, although this is not as clear and perhaps remains a political question, since Carter's term.

Despite the plainly inflammatory premise of the interview, the question was technically asking for a legal opinion. And, as a legal matter, the answer was correct. That does not mean that the premise of the question was a right or moral thing to contemplate -- it simply would not be illegal, like abortion is not illegal, though both are reprehensible.

Mark,

Thank you for your great article and responses to all the posts that seem to think torturing any human being is somehow furthering the dignity of our nation or the human family.

I am surprised by all of the arguments that try to justify torture by saying security is of paramount importance. Security is an illusion, and yet is rapidly becoming the altar at which I find a number of people worshipping these days.

I also find it sad that there are a number of people who are posting here saying that your "tone" or style is somehow uncharitable. I suppose Jesus and John the Baptist's excoriating remarks to the Pharisees or Sanheddrin might have been cast in that light too.

I often tell my students that the role of a prophet is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. You, Mark, are living your baptismal call well as you play the prophet here. You do your Christian vocation justice as you are excoriated even moreso on this site, and receive it with charity. Nowhere have I seen Mark act uncharitably in this thread. Nowhere.

But, the prophet's words can hit home sometimes, and if they do, those who receive them might be a bit UNcomfortable. My guess is that there are some in this country who are quite comfortable in their "secure" homes and will go through any mental contortions necessary to justify tortorous actions that perpetuate that comfort and "security."

As for me and my part, I am glad Mark is championing this cause.

Well done, sir!

"What part of 'the east and middle east HATE us and want to see us destroyed' do you not understand?"

Over 30% of Lebanon is Christian, and there are millions of Muslims in the Middle East - not to mention North Africa, Central Asia, Southwest Asia and many other parts of the world - that do not 'hate us' to the point of wanting to commit acts of terrorism.

My ancestry is Middle Eastern, I still have relatives there, and I don't appreciate at all your attempts to narrowly define an entire region of the world. Militant Islam is the threat, not 'the Middle East'

It is important that Catholics talk about this. At time rhetoric gets pretty strong. I have been trying to sort out the truth about all this myself.

As Catholics we do know torture is wrong and cannot be justified by circumstances since we cannot choose an evil for a good end.

It seems to me that of all the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" waterboarding can most likely be classified as torture. It seems that there are both domestic US law cases and international war crimes tribunals that have defined waterboarding as torture. Some accounts of waterboarding, esepcially on persons untrained in counter interrogation methods, seem to produce permanent psychological damage or temporary excruciating pain. This makes me lean toward thinking waterboarding is torture. The fact that Sen. McCain, who personally experienced torture and spent a career promising to do everything legal in his power to defend this country is very telling, though he is not an absolute barometer. McCain's comment that waterboarding amounts to simulated execution, which is generally accepted as torture is pretty daming. Then again if you can waterboard someone 183 times it also becomes clear that these people are probably not going to kill you this way. As i said the whole idea of revealing whether these methods worked may be helpful for the Administration and Congress to protect themselves politically it is morally abhorrent to justify torture by results achieved.

I DON'T Believe our country went on a massive torture spree. We have convicted members of our military services for prisoner abuse. It is clear we applied waterboarding to approximately three people very many times. As far as I know these men are still in custody. Have these men been evaluated? Can an honest psychological and medical exam be given them to see if we have caused them permanent mental or physical harm.

Is it possible that waterboarding my neighbor to determine who stole my lawnmower may be torture but that applying this technique to resistance trained terrorists may not cause the same level of permamnet psychological harm? I am NOT trying to be an apologist - just earnestly seeking to determine whether my country, that I love, committed torture.

Not everyone who questions whether something is torture is trying to justify immoral behavior or using consequensalist morality.
It seems to me that we do not intend to torture anyone. If permanent damage was done to these men then regardless of whether it gained info or not then we can let a court decide who is guilty of what crimes. If they suffered no permamnet damage then we need only to ensure that our policies do not include torture which probably, to be morally certain would be to exclude waterboarding.

In short, from a Catholic perspective we need to set policies that are morally just and not be afraid to try those guilty of crimes. That said such a process need not become a spectacle of revenge. After our Civil War many former conferedates suffered but for all the shenanigans that happened politically and constitutionally, former slaveowners were not sentenced for crimes against humanity. While today as Catholics we can acknowledge that firebombing or nuking truly innocent civilian populaiton centers is morally wrong we have never gone back and prosecuted those that implemented those raids nor those that made the decisions to set them in motion. Even in those cases the facts would have to be determined. Legitimate ignorance plays a true role in determining culpability; feigned ignorance or gross indifference to suffering would increase guilt regardless of the memos produced by legal counsel.
As Catholics and as a country we must seek true justice and true right action not politically motivated carnage.

Go ahead - savage away ;-)

I read the "Rules for Posting" after I read all of the posted comments. What an interesting contrast!

I will start by saying that I agree with Mark that torture is intrinsically evil and therefore cannot be justified. I reserve judgment on whether the Bush administration ordered anything that can be defined as torture, waterboarding included. I challenge the "we hanged Japanese for waterboarding" posters to produce a cite to a single case in which that occurred, absent aggravating conduct by said Japanese (e.g. starving prisoners, forced marches unto death, ala Bataan, etc.) I am disappointed that you continue to resort to the ad hominem of calling everyone who disagrees with you a torture defender. It smacks of the same arrogance of which you have accused Bush, and which Obama seems intent on delivering on a daily basis. Seriously, you are in the process of changing my mind here, Mark, don't blow it.

I am not Catholic, yet, but I am considering conversion, and I read you often. You are affecting my thinking. Now I need to know that this is a good thing.

Let's see...Joe H, Rich, Mark Shea and a few others are defending mass torture and maiming of innocent civilians. We see this is so, for if these people intercepted a terror plot and had a suspect in custody, they would not compel the suspect to give information that would save the innocent civilians from grave maiming and death. They would refuse to coerce to get the information.

The result of their immoral and reckless behavior? Dozens perhaps hundreds or thousands die and are maimed in the terror plot.

And Mark Shea calls that "Catholic."

For sure, that is not Catholic. It's despicable, reckless, immoral, ungodly behavior.

Those reading this blog should, may I suggest also read the memos actually released by the government.

Mark,

Come on you want to go all the way, go all the way - that means you support the Abortionists point of you. The evildoer rejects torture of this kind but pulls apart babies and you are saying that these abortionists have the duty to openly reject torture and now torture those who tortured.

Abuse is abuse all the way around, but we are not in heaven and we must deal with the great argument. Essentially the world makes the argument that a baby is the torture of women if the women decide its torture. The Media day in and day it tortures human beings to the extent of destroying human lives.

Go ahead take it all on as to not contradict yourself.

It's all torture all the time under the definitions laid out before us. Pope John Paul II was tortured by an assasination attempt and did not treat the criminal in the same way you just did the past administration who will be saddled with every ill of Obama's - think clearly.

...look, you are making an argument on utilitarian grounds. Catholics cannot defend moral actions in this way. In fact, Just War theory calls on us to lose wars or even not engage in them if we cannot succeed without violating those principles. Even none Catholics have believed in such things in the past. That is why the South was so horrified by General Sherman's actions, for instance. Total war is not worth the victory it provides, and the security won through the violation of human dignity is not worth it either.

However, legitimate authority can punish evil within measured means, and protect the innocent as well. It is better to die for the right reason than live for the wrong one. That is the basis of Martyrdom, and that is the basis of all Catholic Statecraft as well...

What are you talking about???

Actually, no small part of my criticism of the folly of the Catholic torture apologetics on display here and throughout the conservative Catholic blogosphere is *precisely* that Bush has handed to his successors incredibly dangerous power and they appear to be in no hurry to relinquish it. The fools who have spent the past six years cutting down every law in England to get at the devil are only now dimly beginning to realize that when the devil turns round and them and calls *them* potential enemies of the state for Thoughtcrime regarding abortion, gay marriage and other matters, they will have nowhere to stand in the winds that will blow then.

"I give the devil the benefit of law for my *own* safety's sake." - Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons

Mark do you believe in Hell? Wouldn't that be the ultimate torture? Should 'good' Catholics reject that notion?

Your comment to Cy:

Actually, no small part of my criticism of the folly of the Catholic torture apologetics on display here and throughout the conservative Catholic blogosphere is *precisely* that Bush has handed to his successors incredibly dangerous power and they appear to be in no hurry to relinquish it...

Summarizes my problem with the Bush administration. Once you take away some liberty for somebody, everybody has lost it. Maybe we haven't lost it just yet, but we will be losing it, by degrees, because we have destroyed our moral authority to argue in its defense.

Father Calabrese please be assured that waterboarding is not torture as you mean it and I think your analysis i spot-on. Though the slippery slope argument is very real and Sen. McCain makes it admirably, people engaged in war do not have the benefit of the wide margins that exist in civil society. War is not civil. For this reason our nation wisely places the civilians in charge, for the logic of war needs check and challenge from the logic of other, gentler teachings, to be sure.

And they need the assurance of protected and carefully drawn legal opinions, in difficult moral terrain, on necessary actions, so as to allow those margins to be as close as law and morality allow -- otherwise people die who did not need to die -- which is why the disclosure is so appalling to those who actually have to protect the people of the country. The tolerance of those called to protect does not long admit of enduring unreasoned and unnecessary limitations or posturing in political pretense where the threat is real, and the proposed response is a fantasy. The alternative is generally to begin to ignore ineffectual civil limitations in favor of strict protection, disregarding those checks, which is a very dangerous state of affairs for everyone, historically.

But closer to your lawn-mowing neighbor's perspective is this from self-described "59 year-old scribbler" Christopher Hitchens, who while giving due allowance for the slipperiness of the slope in even justly waged war, voluntarily underwent waterboarding and came away with this impression in Vanity Fair, consistent with my own experience:

In taking a quick glance it seems waterboarding was the worst method in these interrogation techniques, which was shown as an escalated form of interrogation and not to be given each time. Not to mention, it specifically mentions there is 'no intent to inflict severe mental pain or suffering'.

Now the question becomes, is waterboarding torture? Thus far I have seen no substantial evidence as to how simulated drowning can have irreversible psychological effects on a person. No data that shows that if a person almost drowns there are imminent consequences for the rest of their lives.

It all seems a hyperbole to me.

Peace.

Those reading this blog should, may I suggest also read the memos actually released by the government.

Mark do you believe in Hell?

Yes.

Wouldn't that be the ultimate torture?

Yes. That's why "torture works!" arguments which do not take it into account are quite short-sighted, like the argument that abortion solves problems.

Should 'good' Catholics reject that notion?

No. They should fear it and not commit or support grave and intrinsic evil, lest they go there. This includes making sophistical arguments like "Since God permits us to sin mortally and damn ourselves to the torments of Hell, he therefore approves of our committing the grave sin of torture."

This tommyrot, like the argument, "God holds in his hands the life of every human being, therefore I, who am in the image of God and am commanded to imitate him, have the right to decide who lives and dies and celebrate my power to choose to end my unborn child's life" is the sort of sophistry that is frowned on at the Pearly Gates. Do over now. Because at the Pearly Gates there won't be a do over, just the Everlasting Fire.

And now, I really have to do other stuff. Sorry I can't reply to *every* crazy argument and sophistry being mounted to defend the indefensible, but I'm sure folks can find plenty to talk about without me.

And yet I was ignored the most. I am sorry, but I am dissapointed that you ignored some of the people attempting to make more subtle arguments, and instead yelled at the wackos...

G.R., It was mighty disingenuous of you not to mention that Hitchens's article was titled, "Believe Me, It's Torture," and contains this important point:

The entire thrust of his article is that waterboarding IS torture. So why did you fail to mention that?

"Crazy argument and sophistry." Cute. I guess I'm stuck at "I'm against torture, but I'm not sure waterboarding is torture."

"Crazy argument and sophistry." Cute. I guess I'm stuck at "I'm against torture, but I'm not sure waterboarding is torture."

Joe H - the militants are the ones who matter. Those Christians and others who do nothing to stop or curb terrorist activities are just as guilty as those who are perpetuating those actions. Sort of makes one think of the tripe that a lot of Americans have conveniently bought into - 'I'm personally opposed, but...'.

I'm sorry you took offense where none was meant.

Because the point was whether it affected him, as concerned Father Calabrese, in any way that was permanently damaging physically or psychically. It wasn't. He said so. For that matter, the legal memos, that Father Calabrese urged those here to actually read, confirm that the use of the waterboard thousands of times on our own in SERE training has never resulted in any harm -- nor in any harm to the three (3) detainees upon whom it was performed, according to the Office of Medical Services charged with their oversight(and obeying their own oath, I might add.)

His standard on the margin for "torture" is plainly wider than that declared by those who were given the difficult task of answering the question for real, with real consequences. But Christopher Hitchens is not called upon to fight wars. He gives due allowance for those who do, while maintaining a more guarded opinion. I respect his opinion. I stated that his views tended the other way (and I disagree) but that was not the point in issue. The issue was the lack of actual harm to someone undergoing the procedure, to which I add my own confirmation.

I would suggest a few things to consider regarding torture as punishment:

First, the wages of sin are death. In an absolute objective sense, any time a person knowingly and willfully violates the law of God, they earn death for themselves, eternal torment in hell, and even death for their children (see original sin).

Which laws of God are appropriate areas for man to legislate and enforce?

On what matters may man legislate that God has not?

What means are appropriate and just for man to use in executing the law?

Clearly torture is just from a certain point of view as part of final Divine punishment, but is it just for man to inflict torture upon another man? God has given us a great deal of authority, but did He give us that authority? If He did give it to us, is it just or wise to use it in general? In particular instances?

Natural law has written on my heart that if St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas were to witness the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, they would conclude that waterboarding is closer to Baptism than torture.

And to add one final point -- if those now expressing opposition to the practice that prevented a repeat of 9/11 in Los Angeles had the manly (or womanly) fortitude to stand firmly behind moral opinions -- as he does (and him a committed atheist for God's sake) than do certain nominally Catholic vacillating, windvanes who are stampeding the herd in Washington, I would have much less doubt about the ratio of moral weight to political fetish in their opinions.

Bushie,

"Those Christians and others who do nothing to stop or curb terrorist activities are just as guilty as those who are perpetuating those actions."

I hope by 'those Christians' you don't mean the beleaguered, encircled Maronite Christians of Lebanon, who are always just one political incident away from an ethnic cleansing campaign.

Somehow I can't help but think of Erica Jong's equally insane remark, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."

Yeah, crazy. Absolutely crazy. And the majority of people responding here have no problem at all with this Orwellian verbal act of desecration of the sacraments.

Disgraceful.

However, the question of torture as part of war is a different matter from crime and its punishment.

Many things are permitted, even at times morally required, in the defense of innocents under ones protection that would in other circumstances be immoral.

Is torture one of those things? (I don't think so, but I am not completely certain.)

Apart from the moral question, what, if any, limits are there within our law to the war powers? (Practically none that I can see if we only take the positive law.)

We do all sorts of things as part of military training that we would never allow as a normal means of enforcing our laws. If any of these things are actually an intrinsic evil, we must not ever do them to our own people, even for training. Correct?

There are ticking time bomb scenarios in the real world (or at least what appear to be to those involved at the time). In the real world a detective in a cell or a soldier at the front usually decides to either follow the law and orders, or do something terrible that seems necessary to prevent something else terrible. For the most part national policy is made in the bright light of day, not the heat of the moment.

Should our war powers and police powers both contain the same set of restraints legally? (I would argue against this.)

Is there any moral difference between the domestic application of the police powers of the state in times of peace, as opposed to the use of war powers externally? Are there ever things that are immoral for our police, but moral for a soldier or a secret agent? (I do not have an answer to this, beyond stating the obvious that intrinsic evil is always evil, but that leaves much open for debate.)

Is water boarding torture? (I don't really know. Therefore I would, in the bright light of day, think it should be avoided.)

Those things being said, I can understand how very easy it would be to decide to use torture to protect someone under my care. If faced with the hard choices, how many of us would really make a good moral judgment? Hard cases do make for bad law, and that is even more the case in the heat of the moment.

For my part I can very easily imagine doing far worse than water boarding, stress positions, or cold temperatures if it even had a slim chance of saving someone I know and love. (I should say, that like Chesterton's Fr. Brown, I find it rather easy to imagine myself doing some very terrible things. The darkest place I have ever been in life is the dark part of my own mind.)

While Mark prefers to stick with the fuzzy (and correct) notion of "human dignity" and seems to think there are no lines at all between proper interrogation and torture, I think we must eventually establish some lines, even if imaginary, and even if only as laws of man. We must at some point have the courage to venture to say that some body of things is permissible and moral means of interrogation. We must also have the courage to say that some other body of things is torture and totally forbidden. This will certainly leave a great deal that is uncertain, and will with new developments require that both lists be expanded, but I think we must do this. Teaching principles is great, but general principle does not make for either a good public policy or an executable law.

I wonder, must torture be declared an evil for the sake of the torturers? Does torturing do such harm to the torturer, his moral reasoning, and his sense of human dignity that it must never be allowed? Or is it for the sake of the tortured that we must never torture?

To my mind the arguments regarding taking human life seem to fit reasonably well with torture too. Yet, if torture is an intrinsic evil both as means and ends, then the reasoning must not in any way be the same or even similar. I also have a problem squaring current thinking on torture with those of certain respected figures of the past. How can we square our differences with such august figures? How can we square the very different reasoning on two extreme measures (torture and taking life)?

G.R., I appreciate your clarification, but that still isn't accurate to Hitchens' article. In quoting that paragraph and presenting it as Hitchens' view, you neglected to include the section that introduces it, which makes clear that he's presenting the waterboarder's view, not his own:

This is obviously not Hitchens' opinion, since he goes on to say that waterboarding is absolutely torture.

You also missed the disclaimer he was forced to sign:

Those are exactly the things you said don't happen in waterboarding!

And finally, you may not have seen this, but contrary to what you said, Hitchens did say he was affected psychically. In the video of his waterboarding, at the 5:10 mark, he says:

If you want to say that waterboarding isn't torture, Christopher Hitchens is not going to help you.

Okie,

I was disappointed to see you defend Mark Shea's position of protecting mass murderers and their mass murder plots at all costs.

I hope you won't slip over to the dark side with those who, upon the capture of a conspirator to a mass school bombing, refuse coercion and knowingly allow the impending death and maiming of schoolchildren---all so they can say "hey, we were nice to the bombers."

Silly dangerous wicked stupid stuff there. Totally immoral. Grossly so. Christ and Our Lady weep for such innocent victims and for the cowardice of those who refused to defend them.

Gadzooks, G.R.! I don't mean to pick on you, but even that isn't true. Maybe you didn't see this?

Do many people take the time to think about these arguments lucidly, placing down their biased behaviours and think from a neutral position?

Mark Shea spoke at the parish where I received, not four months prior, the sacraments of Baptism, Holy Communion, and Confirmation ... on this exact same topic. So obviously I was anti-torture going in right? Wrong! I remember chatting with a friend about the talk a day previously, telling her I didn't want to go be indoctrinated with some "hippy-liberal-BS"! I'd never really *thought* about torture from a lucid and unbiased position.

I don't believe in coincidences at all. During the talk, in Seattle mind you where it never get's too hot, large booms of heat lightning started nearly right near the chapel. I'm not saying Mr. Shea has the voice of God, but it got my attention in a very real and dramatic way.

I think it's important to realize that none of us (99.99%) of persons will every be in the position of being tortured or administering torture to an individual directly. We have so much bias on something we've never experienced. So many people are ignorant of the solid magisterial teachings, and ignorant of how out of line our American views of pro-torture are with the fundamental teachings not of the Magisterium, but Christ himself.

Thanks again for taking the hard issues straight on.

Thanks Mark for a courageous article. The bottomline is that all intrinisically evil acts are grave, immoral, and therefore mortal sins. I am sure that you won't win a popularity contest for telling it like it is, but kudos to you for stepping up to the plate.

Joe - don't you think people should take care of their own back yards? Good and moral people have an obligation to stop the very things you are complaining about. You make it sound as if those folks should just lie down and die. Well, guess what? This country fought a revolution once and won, and now this country is bordering on those 'political incidents' you mention, and I for one am not going bury my head in the sand over it. I will fight like hell to preserve the American way of life. No I'm not famous, no I'm not rich, but I have a little, I give a lot, and I feel privileged to be a part of this great nation. Be damned if I am going to be intimidated by this administration or anyone else who threatens it. And, if it takes water boarding to worm terrorist plots out of the BAD GUYS then I'm all for it.

Bushie,

I don't even know what you're talking about anymore.

"You make it sound as if those folks should just lie down and die."

No, you made it sound that way.

Whereas the previous administration may or may not have been "for" torture (which is highly debatable), the present administration is very definitely for abortion.

That is what I was referring to when I said that this administration's release of "torture" documents (and all the discussion it has provided) may indeed be good cover for it's own dedication to evil against the innocent.

Mr. Shea I think you have misunderstood. It's not that Bush made us less secure now that we are under Obama. It is that humanity itself is less secure under Obama than we ever would have been under Bush.

PS - Before you get into a frenzy I did not vote for Bush.

Yes, of course, because "unnamed FBI officials" relied upon by the L.A. Times could not POSSIBLY have any political axe to grind -- CERTAINLY not against the CIA. Heaven forfend.

Zubaydah was captured in March 2002, and waterboarded. The West Coast plot, we now know was originally part of the 9/11 plot until OSM scaled it back (hence your first quoted statement, taken out of context). KSM then reinitiated that component after the success of 9/11. Zubaydah as OSM's lieutenant knew of it, and the connection to the Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia. It states that in 2002 KSM's PLOT was foiled, not that KSM himself was the source of the information that foiled it; he was then very much at large.

Salon's eliding of the persons, interrogations and events is highly -- what was your word? -- disingenuous. Apart from getting the dates, persons and events correct, the CIA's memo is, under the circumstances, far more credible (a TS/NOFORN memo that the authors had no reason to suspect would ever become a public, political document in their lifetimes) and far more so than the L.A. Times's "unnamed FBI official" with who knows what political irons in the fire ...

Mark Shea: Your comments are very distrubing. It almost seems we live in different countries/ worlds. Let us look at what has transpiried in a little over 3 months under Obama.

PART 1 OF 2: Source: Human Events - April 28, 2009 - Obama wants to prosecute the Bush administration... or at least leave the door open to prosecuting Bush White House attorneys.

This is what we have come to: an elected President [actually “alleged” President until America sees his Birth Certificate] of the United States hinting that he will criminally prosecute the previous occupants of the White House for working to protect the United States from terrorists.

We now have a President who believes he can spread his ideas of weakness and appeasement toward America's enemies back into a political prosecution of a previous administration to further increase his standing among liberals in the United States and in the world. [Obama wants to prosecute the Bush administration for fighting terrorism and keeping America safe…. ]

[Obama has been a disgrace to the Country. {First and foremost because of his promotion of a culture of death and immorality.} Now his irresponsibility is putting the United States in danger of terrorist schemes, who would love to kill us. More and more it seems he is determined to make everyone that disagrees with him pay and pay dearly.] Source: Newsmax - April 21, 2009 - Obama's Justice Department published previously classified memos that described the Bush administration's LEGAL justification for CIA interrogation techniques. On one side, Republican lawmakers and former CIA chiefs have criticized the memos' release, contending that revealing the limits of interrogation techniques will hamper the effectiveness of interrogators and will compromise critical U.S. relationships with foreign intelligence services. [ I feel much safer now, don’t you?! ]
Source: Human Events - April 28, 2009 - Obama bowed in front of a Saudi King. Obama stood on French soil and called United States actions arrogant. He has smiled while shaking hands with Hugo Chavez.

Now Obama wants to send another message to liberals around the world by opening up to the political prosecution of Bush administration officials. To further the Democrat’s hypocrisy, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who is trying to deflect criticism from the left that she knew about and approved the techniques before she started calling them torture. In fact she was even given a personal tour of the interrogation facilities when she was briefed before the questioning took place.

.... Cont'd on PART 2 OF 2

PART 2 OF 2:

...Contd. Source: Human Events - April 28, 2009 - The prosecution would be based on the Obama administration re-defining the terms of terrorist interrogations. He wants to re-define the questioning of terrorists who come from a tradition of blowing up buildings, suicide bombings and unbridled attacks on civilians. Obama wants to re-define the interrogations of terrorists whose goal is to eliminate our society and replace it with one like the Taliban where "honor killings" are conducted against women who do not ascribe to pre-arranged marriages, where public expression is banned, television is outlawed and where they are told what clothing to wear.

The Obama administration would go as far as to re-define the interrogations that took place of terrorists who wanted us to die just because of our basic traditions and beliefs so they can politically prosecute their predecessors.

As far back as October 2007 the Obama campaign statements alternated between the terms, "interrogation techniques," "brutal interrogations," and then "torture." He said, "No more ... methods like SIMULATED drowning." Simulated actions - i.e. fake actions - now became torture to the media and the far left under the tutelage of Obama. Fake actions that Vice President Cheney said gave us valuable intelligence to protect American lives. These fake tactics were allegedly used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that produced the killings of thousands of United States citizens. The killings were REAL. [ THE 9/11 KILLINGS WERE REAL! ] The men and women who went to work at the World Trade Center on September 1, 2001 and the men and women who put on their fire, police or EMS uniforms were not suiting up for war; they were going to work to feed their families.

We have seen the real torture of American citizens - beatings and even beheading. In 1993 Americans saw images of U.S. Soldiers bodies being dragged through the streets of Somalia after a fight with militants. A British government document, PBS reported, said that Al Qaeda trained militants there. Osama Bin Laden later praised the fighters."

Cheney remarked: "Former Vice President Dick Cheney slammed the Obama administration Monday night for what he described as a disturbing tendency to criticize America abroad and embrace avowed enemies like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez while not praising the nation’s success in the war against terrorism."

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says: "President Barack Obama is making some dangerous choices in rejecting the anti-terrorism policies of the Bush administration and backing down from confronting North Korea over its threatening missile program. In a Politico forum with readers, and in several recent interviews, Gingrich has discerned a weakness in the new administration’s foreign policy that he fears is going to embolden America’s enemies. Moreover, the effort to treat terrorism as a criminal justice problem – rather than an ACT OF WAR – will only bog the country down in pursuit of enemy combatants, Gingrich fears. “Dick Cheney is clearly right in saying that, between the court decisions about terrorists and the administration actions, the United States is running greater risks of getting attacked than we were under President Bush,” Gingrich said. Pointing to what he described as a “vivid demonstration of weakness in foreign policy” the former House speaker said Obama’s actions, including his proposal for a resumption of nuclear arms limitation talks, reflect “a dangerous fantasy that runs an enormous risk. “The embarrassing repudiation of the United States appeal to the United Nations Security Council Sunday afternoon is a vivid demonstration of weakness,” Gingrich said in the Politico forum."

"The terrorists are brutal. They know no bounds and they will do whatever it takes to promote their warped ideology and end our freedoms and way of life. Let's not send a message that our nation is weak or that our leaders will criminally prosecute their predecessors for POLITICAL DISAGREEMENTS."

This would set a very dangerous precedent.

Mark is correct that the ticking bomb scenarios are "Black Swan" events: Events that are so incredibly improbable that, while they happen, they are understood to be "virtually impossible." Making practical plans for them is a waste of resources and an exercise in futility.

There is, however, something he overlooks when he dismisses such events with a "it'll never happen" rationale:

Such "Black Swan" events are postulated for two reasons:

1. They're postulated by folk who think the law should be written in a sufficiently flexible way to allow decision-makers to do "the right thing" (i.e., torture an unlawful combatant for battlefield intel) if the rare circumstances which could make it "the right thing" were somehow to arise.

2. They're postulated in order to disprove the notion that torture is intrinsically wrong; that is, by definition unable to be ever justified under any imaginable circumstances, without regard to the probability of those circumstances arising.

Now, as to reason #1, as I said, Mark is right. These things are so improbable that it doesn't make sense to expend serious resources planning for them in advance. It's not that Black Swan events never happen -- they do -- but that there are too many equally probable (but still low-low-probability) weird things which could happen for us to create laws and departments and oversight boards and committees and whatnot in advance to deal with all of them.

The correct way to "plan" for the day when torture will be justified by extreme circumstances (assuming for the sake of argument that it ever can be), is to rely on jury nullification or lenient sentencing or a presidential pardon. For most human laws cannot be written to require or prohibit the right action in 100% of cases, and excessive planning for weird, outlier cases makes bad law.

But I think Mark overlooks the potential for Point #2: If one can postulate (without contradiction) a situation where the thing is justified, then no matter how unlikely the situation is, the act is not intrinsically evil by definition.

Those Mark who say that the torture apologists are not merely mistaken, but inbred illiterate buffoons unworthy of the respect granted to a sign-language using gorilla (an exaggeration of Mark's attitude, I grant, but a mild one), are in the habit of calling torture intrinsically evil.

From a debating-convenience point of view, this is nice: It shuts down an avenue of debate which could otherwise have become complicated by gray areas and messy decisions.

But is it intrinsically evil? Well that is where the counter-examples come in, and it doesn't matter a whit if they're improbable.

Would it be wrong to extract, from a particularly nasty terrorist, by torture (forget about waterboarding: go for the rack or something inarguably torturous), the location of a doomsday device which, if it goes off, will kill every last human being on earth, without fail, immediately?

If it isn't wrong, then torture is not intrinsically wrong, but is instead dependent on intent, circumstances, and foreseeable outcome.

That's the deal.

This in no way prevents us from saying that the law shouldn't bother to account for that kind of wildly unlikely event (see my earlier point) but should just prohibit torture outright.

It also doesn't prevent us from saying that torture is virtually always wrong, and that torture apologists who hypothesize about the 0.01% of occasions covered by "virtually" are wasting everyone's time.

But it does prevent us from (honestly) claiming that torture is intrinsically wrong, under all circumstances, world without end, amen. And without that, we're obligated to debate about what would justify it, and give our reasons, and contend with shades of gray and the arbitrariness of our cut-off points.

Which is unsatisfying. Hence our instinctive preference for the "intrinsic wrong" statement, and our desire to avoid hypothetical doomsday scenarios, lest they complicate the issue.

"Desecration of the sacrament of Baptism" - Mark P. Shea

Nice try Mr. Shea. I was not desecrating Baptism and I think you know that. I was just illustrating how the word "torture" losess its meaning when applied to both the crucifixion AND waterboarding.

Oh, and man to man, as one who can empathize with the problem, you might want to see a spiritual director about the pride thing.

It remains fact that however wrong Bush, et alia were to authorize waterboarding, there is no moral equivalence possible with authorizing abortion.

The incomparability of the scale of harm involved makes the act of casually comparing them invidious, if not outright dishonest.

Let's postulate something far worse than the reality: If all 779 of the terrorists that ever went through Guantanamo had been waterboarded once a day for a whole year, and if 90% of them had been entirely innocent of terrorism or even support for terrorism, that'd be about 250,000 incidents of waterboarding an innocent: a quarter-million occasions of subjecting an innocent person to extreme fear and instinctual panic for a perhaps a minute.

Which is about how many innocents were killed -- not horribly frightened, but killed -- in utero every three months, for the last few decades.

And of course the reality in Guantanamo wasn't even one-hundredth as bad as the scenario offered above.

Now, the heat of our rhetoric should, logically, be proportional to the outrage. Which is to say: a person exhibiting the kind of heat Mark exhibits about President Bush could be expected, perhaps, to be advocating armed insurrection against President Obama. Or, put the other way, a person who merely uses heated rhetoric against President Obama's near tongue-kissing of NARAL doesn't have much call to be more than "disappointed and peeved" regarding President Bush's policy on captured unlawful combatants.

Just putting it in perspective.

I'll give you a justifying hypothetical that is real, because North Korea and Iran have plans to do it, if they can. People casually dismiss the threat of a single nuclear weapon. But a single nuclear blast and its accompanying EMP over South Dakota will wipe out technology in the entire U.S. back to the turn of the nineteenth century. That nuclear blast may not not kill a single soul directly, barring the odd unfortunately scheduled airliner. Indirectly, tens of thousand of critical care patients would die in days in non-functional hospitals and who knows how many hundreds of thousands in the collapse of the national economy and social order that results.

The reason I respect Hitchen's opinion is that I know he would waterboard someone with advance knowledge of that plan in heartbeat, because his definitional niceties notwithstanding, he understands that the only way to save the civilized position he is advancing is first to save the civilization that espouses it from those who willfully seek its total ruin. The Constitution is not a suicide pact -- doubly so the now misapplied Geneva Convention.

Torture is of course intrinsically evil. The question is whether the techniques approved by the Bush Administration constitute torture. And the answer is: They Do Not. Here's how I know: if a journalist would voluntarily submit to the procedure, it's not torture. If a college freshman would voluntarily submit to the procedure in order to enter a fraternity, it's not torture.

Some examples: would a journalist submit to having his fingernails pulled out? No? Torture. Did journalists submit to waterboarding? Yes? Not torture. Do college kids endure days of sleep deprivation during "hell week"? Yes? Not torture. Would they submit to placing their heads in a cage filled with starving rats? No? Torture.

Bush authorized enhanced interrogation techniques against enemy combatants who murdered 3000 innocent people and who were planning to murder thousands more. One of three or four men who were waterboarded, Khalid Sheik Mohammed was not only the architect of 9/11, but also personally sawed off the head of Daniel Pearl for the crime of being a Jew. I say it was worth the lives of the thousands saved to submit KSM to 40 seconds or so of psychological and physical discomfort. The people on the 90th floor of the Towers who were faced with the choice of burning to death or jumping 1000 feet to the pavement had a much harder time of it than KSM did when he was being interrogated.

This is exactly spot on:

"Here's how I know: if a journalist would voluntarily submit to the procedure, it's not torture. If a college freshman would voluntarily submit to the procedure in order to enter a fraternity, it's not torture. Some examples: would a journalist submit to having his fingernails pulled out? No? Torture. Did journalists submit to waterboarding? Yes? Not torture. Do college kids endure days of sleep deprivation during "hell week"? Yes? Not torture. Would they submit to placing their heads in a cage filled with starving rats? No? Torture."

Beautifully said. I remember thinking that when C. Hitchens decided to waterboard himself. No person would dare place a blowtorch to his own face. Why not? It's torture. No one would dare run a drill bit through his own hand. Why not? It's torture.

Yet you get all these snarky liberals lining up to water board themselves or live in a cramped cell with loud music just to make some big political anti-Bush statement. Silly kids. They'd never volunteer to be dragged down the street behind the back of a car or have their hand chopped off.

The U.S. doesn't torture.

Coercion isn't torture.

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, as they say.

It's very hard to believe our country, our government, advocates or allows torture, so we must find a way to justify what we do by calling it "coercion" or something else. But really, it's okay to admit that our country has done and will do evil things. It's a mature citizen who can allow its nation to be imperfect.

"It's a mature citizen who can allow its nation to be imperfect." - Barbara

It's also a mature citizen who can admit that America's imperfections are the exceptions and not the rule.

Comparing torture techniques to college hazing, Milesdei?

If that's all they were, then why would they even be considered effective? Do Al Qaeda and Hamas recruit men who are so weak that they could be made to talk by a bunch of rowdy frat boys?

It goes without saying that if the military is applying these methods to what are often poverty and/or battle-hardened religious fanatics, they are obviously done with far more intensity and in the context of far worse conditions than anything soft-bellied American undergraduates have ever been exposed to.

I've heard some pretty ignorant, ill-considered and plain ridiculous during the course of this discussion, but this one takes it. You win first prize.

Love the article, and it makes an excellent point not just about torture, but also about how so many Catholics just blindly follow along with whatever the Republican party tells them to believe. I honestly can't believe that so many people look at the Republicans as a Christian party; even the most basic analysis of their platforms tells that they are anything but. In fact, in many ways they're just as bad as their Democrat opponents. It's about time truly faithful Catholics got together and formed a separate party that will stand up for real morality, not the lies and immoralities of the Democrats or Republicans.

Where do we even start with this...well, with 100+ comments, I guess the "start" is well in the dust by this point.

There is a very good argument to be made against torture, and Mark has effectively made that argument elsewhere. Unfortunately, this article is not about that argument. It's about a caricature of the positions of the opposition, and it suffers from two glaring deficiencies:

-It places the opposition's arguments in a vaccuum. The saying about hammers and nails goes both ways; Mark incorrectly assumes that every argument in favor of harsh interrogations/torture addresses the same argument against it.

This is manifestly not the case. Just to use one example, the appeal to the brutality of the enemy (or, as Mark puts it, "Hey! It's not like we're beheading people like they are") makes a great deal more sense when seen in its proper context: as an incredulous response to the argument that our use of these techniques would encourage the enemy to mistreat our own soldiers.

Put more simply: the opposition is not the only one throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

-It completely ignores the political aspect of the issue. This is not a new argument here (it's been thoroughly hashed out with another regular contributor on the issue of abortion) but it bears repeating: The US has a two-party system. Because of its winner-take-all elections, it will never have anything else. (A new party emerges only by devouring one of the two old ones, as the Republicans did to the Whigs.) It's a zero-sum game: anything that damages one party will necessarily benefit the other, and vice-versa.

And that's important, because the Democratic Party is, for all intents and purposes, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Planned Parenthood. It is utterly devoted to the unimpeded promotion of legal abortion--which is, in both the nature of the act and the scope of its perpetuation, the single greatest evil in the world today (and, barring the Crucifixion, likely in all of history).

For that reason alone (and completely independent of anything the Republicans do or do not do with regards to restricting the practice) a strong case can be made that, at the present time, any Democratic setback is an objective good--and any Democratic victory is an objective evil.

That's something that has to be taken into consideration, and understanding that--and understanding that the outcry over torture was, by and large, a (successful) Democratic ploy to seize power for themselves--it's not at all hard to have seen the interrogation/torture policies in question as by far the lesser of two evils.

This is, again, not to say anything about the validity of the arguments themselves, whether for or against. But that's not really what this article is about, either.

The genital mutilation question was asked of John Yoo during Congressional testimony, and Yoo answered it just as in the article. Mark even provided a link to the citation.

I did follow the link, Mr. Shea, and read the cunningly slanted article there quite carefully. I read that Mr. Yoo answered the question of whether or not the President had the legal authority (what you misidentify as a "right") to commit the hypothetical act, he did not render a moral judgment that to do so was "okay." Nor was he "advocating" for such an action. Yet implying that he did so is the basis for the intemperate rhetoric in your article. I am pleased to see that you are now backpedaling away from at least one of the misleading implications made in your article.

Mr. Yoo in his capacity as a lawyer identified what the President's lawful powers were. He, you, and I may wish that the law was different but his duty as a lawyer is to identify what the law is and how it applies in a given circumstance as best and as honestly as he can. Perhaps Mr. Yoo's critics in the article you linked prefer dishonesty in their lawyers.

I prefer that if Mr. Yoo is in error about the President's legal authority that the specific legal text he has misinterpreted be identified. If he is correct about what the law permits, and the inability of his political show trial critics to identify the error in his legal opinion strongly suggests that he is, then I would like to see the leadership of the national legislature drop the propaganda point-scoring ploys and get busy proposing and publicly deliberating appropriate revisions to the law.

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Mark, you're kind of proving my point: that Americans have a heck of time believing their government does evil things. And if and when they can, they must quickly couch it as "the exception and not the rule." Pick up a book on the Spanish-American War... America's sins go back a long time. Human beings run this country, like any country, and they are fallen. There is nothing preventing the US from doing evil other than our work to stop it.

"I was disappointed to see you defend Mark Shea's position of protecting mass murderers and their mass murder plots at all costs."

-This is a hilarious misreading of what I said. I said that Catholics have always believed in principles of Just War, and that it is better to lose than to violate them, and thus by analogy the same can be said about situations of interogation...if we must violate our own principles in order to obtain information, we will not stoop that low. "Turning the other cheek" does not mean being a pacifist, but it does mean that there are higher principles than exacting what we deserve. Jesus Christ did not deserve to be crucified, but he told his Apostles to sheath their swords rather than be part of a lawless rebellion. We Catholics believe that there are things that are worth dying for, and doing things morally, including exacting punishment from evil men, is one of those things. I think I have been very straight forward: you can threaten a person with punishment and then go through with it if they hold information. I do not think you can psychologically manipulate them to auto-respond in a sub-human manner. I think that is a fundamental difference between punishment and torture, the first being something Catholics must believe is consigned to the proper authority, and the other something the proper authority should avoid. What counts particular things count as torture is something to be argued, and you will probably find me siding with St. Thomas and St. Bellarmine than most people now, but that is not was is at stake, we are arguing about first principles here, and the first thing we must throw out is any utilitarian conceptions of the moral universe, even if it means we are willing to lose battles and die insted of violate the natural law.

"I hope you won't slip over to the dark side with those who, upon the capture of a conspirator to a mass school bombing, refuse coercion and knowingly allow the impending death and maiming of schoolchildren---all so they can say "hey, we were nice to the bombers.""

-I think I answer fairly well above that I neither think coercion is prohibited by the use of legitimate authority, and nor do I have any delusions that "being nice" to perpetrators of evil is somehow of moral importance. But I don't think "by any means necessary" is a Catholic principle. Yes, we would rather our whole society burn to the ground than sin, we would rather see all we have worked for disappear rather than violate the revealed and natural law. That is why the Martyrs did what they did rather than launch a rebellion, because the knew that even though they were prosecuted and found guilty though innocent, it was not right for them to rebell against a legitimate authority. So they chose to die instead. If the founders of our faith, whose blood was the seed of the entire Church, would sacrifice so much, how can it be unfathomable that we should be willing to cary the Cross that comes from following the rules of the natural law rather than doing what is expediant?

"Silly dangerous wicked stupid stuff there. Totally immoral. Grossly so. Christ and Our Lady weep for such innocent victims and for the cowardice of those who refused to defend them.""

-If it were cowardice, then it is sad. But it is true Catholic valor and courage to be willing to die for what is right than to kill for what is wrong. However, you will not here me lamenting the crusades or such things as this. Only that we must be mindful of the natural law when we punish evil.

Your example is entirely consistent with the historical laws of war and interrogation. Lawful authority has the power (indeed, the moral duty) to obtain information important to protect its subjects from harm. We in the U.S have limited that power domestically by constitutional means for good and sufficient reasons, domestically, but not in war. We extend by means of reciporocity related but more limited protection to lawful combatants on behalf of signatory sovereigns under treaty. under current interpretations their is no price ot pay for not observing either that reciprocity, or the forms of engagement (including conspicuous dress) that signal their entitlement. They claim all of the benfits with none of the costs and we ahve given it to them in a misplaced sense of "principle."

In fact interrogations occur, as you describe, in the nature of punishment, and the methods used are consequences of not cooperating and for withholding information requested. That is clearly how St. Thomas understood it. Conversely, the lawful combatant prisoner has the moral duty to resist (read our Code of Conduct) to the limits of their endurance and will, but not to death or disfigurement. Just as our soldiers are not required to go beyond those bounds as prisoners our interrogators do not do so in reverse, but it is very important that the enemy, especially the present enemy not be sure of that. That is an advantage now lost, because the nebulous debate about possible "torture" directly served that interest. Disclosure of the actual methods destroys the well of ignorance and fear the enemy must deal with.

It is not an immoral act to pretend a willingness to undertake gross immorality as deterrence to prevent actual violence by an aggressor. Indeed, such an outright and calculated deception is often among the few moral ways to engage a highly asymmetric conflict.

"What is truth?" was the question. The answer was "Death on a cross and us still sinners." But that was not the last of the Word on truth, now was it? As the man said, in war everything is very simple, and the simplest things are very hard.

Having read this article, I am sorely disappointed in the views of Mr. Shea and more so, with the way he states them. While I do agree that torture is intrinsically evil, we haven't taken the time to define the parameters of torture. What constitutes torture? Are evil people who cannot be rehabilitated into society to be given the same rights as everybody else? Why is okay for the Church to say the death penalty is permissible in extreme cases (protecting the public from people no longer fit to see right from wrong), but not causing people discomfort? Why is it okay for nuns in other countries besides America to hit people on the backside, but not civil authorities?

Why is it okay for a cop to force a man out of his car and unto the ground while twisting his arm so that he can put some cuffs on him? Of course, this man could argue that he is innocent and has done nothing wrong therefore having the right to refuse to get out of his car for further questioning. The bottom line is, if the cop thinks this man is suspicious, he can put him in cuffs. It's legal in America and people are okay with it. In contrast, to pour water up a terrorist's nose so that he can confess to a plot to blow up LA is torture?

I may not be asking all the right questions,but I am not condemning anybody who may have legitimate reasons to disagree with me. You can disagree with me, but please be civil.

Like I said, torture is intrinsic evil, but how do we define torture?

I have to admit I haven't thought about the implications of "the well of ignorance and fear." My first impulse is to say no, that the principle of law is to be promulgated, so that it must be clear what actions are punished by the law and how. As an analogy, it may be more "effective" to have a world in which the rules of Kafka's "the trial" hold sway, where people don't know the rules until they break them. This may be a stronger deterent, but it would violate the very principle of law it is instituted to protect. I would have to say on first thought, the "well of ignorance and fear" would be a similar issue in my mind. It is true that it would be much more effective if the person thought just maybe you would break the law, but I think it would violate the rational basis of the law and the dignity of the prisoner.

But beyond that, even if they stack the deck, and utilize our good laws over against us with "no cost" and all the benifits, we still shouldn't stoop to their level. It is of course a reason to look at thier culture in shame and regard it as ignoble, but we should not stoop to their level.

Your discussion about truth in deception is very interesting. For instance, I know Augustine, and probably Aquinas, would disagree with you about the morality of any deception. Heck, Thomas doesn't think you can decieve someone in a jocular manner. I, who consider myself a student of the Angelic Doctor, thinks he needs to lighten up on that one! For instance, when someone uses sarcasm, even though they say the exact opposite of the common meaning, they are actually conveying the truth and are in fact NOT intending deception (so if I walk in with a shirt that I should have stopped wearing when I was 30 pounds lighter, and ask my wife "how do I look" and she responds sarcastically "great!" she is obviously not trying to decieve me, etc.) I think a "deceptive joke" would work in a similar manner. However, I think this is not simply a matter of wanting to tell jokes...it pertains to situations like yours. It is often asked "if you lived in 1940's germany, and where hiding Jews in a basement, and a nazi came to your door and asked "are there Jews in the basement, would Augustine and Aquinas indeed tell you to say "yes"? I would figure this is the type of argument you would bring up to justify the "the well of ignorance and fear" in an interrogation. It would go something like "it is not information they are legitimately privy to," for some reason or another.

Now, this may be the case, but it does not automatically follow that we should lie. For instance, some people say you should tell the Nazi to "screw off," but that will probably result in your arrest. I've actually heard other people say you should try to divert the question. In the "nazi" example, that seems quite silly, but in your situation, it sounds rather reasonable and seems to be what you are offering. If he asks "are you going to kill me," you can simply ignore the question.

However, I still think in your situation, the function of law and punishment is to promulgated. To keep people in "the well of ignorance and fear " seems to go against the foundation of the law itself. I don't know, I'd like to hear what you think, but those are my initial thoughts...

"Why is it okay for a cop to force a man out of his car and unto the ground while twisting his arm so that he can put some cuffs on him? Of course, this man could argue that he is innocent and has done nothing wrong therefore having the right to refuse to get out of his car for further questioning. The bottom line is, if the cop thinks this man is suspicious, he can put him in cuffs. It's legal in America and people are okay with it."

Actually it is not okay at all, and at least this American is not OK with it. The police officer, in order to physically coerce an individual from his property requires one of the following (at least in the old days when the US was a society of law. Funny how China and America are on opposite but intersecting courses. I fear the intersection point is not far off).
1) A warrant for arrest issued by a judge
2) Probable cause for suspicion of an offense (erratic driving, smell of alcohol or marijuana on the subject, visible possession of controlled items in car, evidence of drug use or impairment, evidence of other crime (blood stains, body in back seat, etc.), APB, etc.
3) Actual commission of offense witnessed by arresting officer
Funny how the thinking of the "citizens" of the "Land of the Free" becomes more Soviet by the day. No, sad actually.

People have come to accept what are technical violations of the law by the police themselves as normal, standard procedure.

Ultimately people don't care as much about what is legal (often not knowing what is actually legal), as they do about what seems normal. And all you have to do to get people accustom to a new way of doing things is not write a new law, but start behaving differently in increments. Little by little, over time, so that it is barely noticeable.

And you would be right, as that is the Church's position CCC 2384-85, 2491.

Again your are correct, the most effective deceptions are built entirely from truths. These menacing edifices, are however, clever, and artful dress for the gentleness within -- and difficult to manage against a foe, but bulletproof from being "found out" once established, where as the construct of lies is vulnerable to collapse. Whether a construct of truth is itself a different level of lie, is nice question the warrior leaves to those not being shot at.

The more difficult question is the outright lie, especially when it is deployed in search of an actual truth begin concealed, and where lives are at issue. The Church says that lies are to be condemned as offenses against truth, justice and charity, but what of a lie turned against a silence that is itself against truth, justice and charity.

CCC 2483 says, in part, that: "To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error." Now by lying to the man concealing a deadly truth to get him to reveal it, am I leading him into error -- or into the truth? Not so easy to say, now is it, when lives are at stake?

The catechism goes on: "By injuring man's relation to truth and to his neighbor, a lie offends against the fundamental relation of man and of his word to the Lord." Is it an more injury to the "relation to truth and neighbor" to reveal that deadly truth by untruthful means, or to not do so and leave the truth unrevealed, and people dead?

And then in 2484: "The gravity of a lie is measured against the nature of the truth it deforms, the circumstances, the intentions of the one who lies, and the harm suffered by its victims. If a lie in itself only constitutes a venial sin, it becomes mortal when it does grave injury to the virtues of justice and charity."

Plainly, the Church does place lying into a specifically consequentialist context, not merely a tripwire "all the truth, all the time." This is especially so when there are impending victims of the enemies' own deceits that we are working to reveal and prevent. If the cost of lives is a few venial sins on the truth then this is among the seven-a-day sins for which the righteous warrior is accounted -- and they are among the more worthy days for spending in Purgatory.

My first citation above should be CCc 2488-89, 2491.

Here, unlike in "Soviet Russia," there is a legal document, like a warrant, called the Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was passed by Congress that does give President Bush the authority to do what he did. The legal memoranda produced by his administration were legal interpretations used to determine the scope of that authority.

Thank you for the thoughtful response...I see your point, but "leading people to truth" through a lie would seem to be a good canidate for "utilizing an evil for the sake of a good," which would throw up read flags for most of the tradition. Some would say that Just War itself is a theory of utilizing an evil for a good, but I would disagree: the punishment we recieve for our sins although is not by nature good, is rectified into a good itself, as Thomas Aquinas points out in the Summa somewhere that I honestly can't recall off the top of my head. But it has to do with the tranformative power of Christ and the power of good. That is different than utilizing an evil for a good, which begins to fall into, as you say, consequentialism, or at least utilitarianism. I admit that I believe Thomas takes the prohibition against "deceptive" too far as I sighted above in the case of a joke (or sarcasm, or fictional novels, etc.), but I don't know if "lying someone to lead them to the truth" would count...just on an initial pass through the ole mind here, I would say know.

But again, thanks for the civil and engaging thoughts. I wish we could have got similar exchanges from the original writer of this essay...

Here in Germany, unlike in "Soviet Russia," there is a legal document, like a warrant, called the Enabling Act(Ermächtigungsgesetz) that was passed by the Reichstag that does give Chancellor Hitler the authority to do what he did. The legal memoranda produced by his administration were legal interpretations used to determine the scope of that authority.

Thanks Thomas! Wow! Are you really the same gut who is "the King's loyal servant, but God's first"! Wow! Just ..Wow! I feel so much better knowing that:
A blanket transfer of the congressional duties and powers under Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution, procedure thereto and power thereof being nowhere delineated in said document, conferring to the executive the power of legal Auctoritas both to create new law and nullify existing law at its discretion and convenience is essentially the same thing as;
A bill of search or seizure authored by a judiciary body detailing the cause, specific parties subject to the writ, specific executive parties empowered to execute said writ, and parameters of said writ (i.e. what is specifically being searched for or seized). Call me obtuse, but your assertion seems more to resemble the police being able to write their own search warrants, and modify them after the fact to seize other property discovered in the course of the search not originally authorized by the warrant. Ooops! I forgot, US police and all Federal Agencies (DEA, IRS, INS) now have the power to write their own search warrants, including post-facto amendment. I'm sure you have no problem with IRS agents being able to write their own search warrants. I'm sure you have nothing to hide right?

Mark, I so appreciate your article. You are saying what every Catholic should be saying about this subject. Thank you for defending human dignity.

One point, though: I have a problem with your example of the Thelma/Louise tubal pregnancy/abortion scenario. I had a tubal pregnancy a few years ago (it shattered me emotionally, as you might imagine). There is, however, a critical difference between abortion and a tubal pregnancy: in a tubal pregnancy, there is no chance that the fetus will live. There is no choice but to remove the pregnancy.

I speak for many women when I say that it causes tremendous pain when people call what we had to go through "abortion." If there had been ANY chance that I could have saved that child, even at a risk to my own health, I would have done so.

I understand what you were doing with the analogy, but please take my constructive criticism to heart. Please don't inadvertently add to the pain of women like me -- we've had enough of that already.

Thank you.

Let's be careful out there...

In this debate, there are about 25 active points of contention with 10-20 subpoints each. In such a big complicated debate, let's be careful how we process one anothers' arguments, huh?

I notice within the last ten posts, one person pointed out the legal authority of the president to authorize a certain kind of action. A later respondent said, in essence, "Well, Hitler also obtained the requisite documents to officially authorize his depredations, too."

That is to say, Person A answered an earlier argument by Person B which said "GWB had no legal authority to do X" by saying, "Yes he did," narrowly addressing that point and without making any defense of whether he should. Person C then stepped in, pretended that the assertion of legal authority had been intended as an argument for moral rectitude, and said, "Just because one has the authority doesn't mean one should use it that way or that authority to do such things is morally valid; e.g., Hitler." True enough; but Person A never said that.

Quite apart from the reductio ad Hitlerum problem, what we have here is, in effect, a straw-man. Person A never made the argument that Person C is acting like he made. But Person A can't easily protest, "Hey, that's not what I said," because it is what he said...just in support of a different part of the argument. Person C interpreted Person A's statement as applicable to Point Nine, Subpoint Four of this debate, when Person A had only intended it to apply to Point Five, Subpoint Two.

Healthy Debate

Part of healthy debate is to narrowly defeat bad arguments, even when they're made in favor of a position you support.

So when I pointed out some problems with the statement by some here that use of torture -- not even waterboarding, mind you, but thumbscrews or whatever -- was "intrinsically evil," I might have been setting the stage for a superior argument against torture, or I might have been trying to argue in favor of it. It doesn't matter; the correct response is to narrowly refute that particular point.

But too many in here, on both sides, jump from "he's defeating point X which might otherwise have supported my position" to "he doesn't support my position." They then leap further to "he's a blackguard, a sadist, a traitor, a moron, or a parasite."

I know getting all worked up about the end-result of this argument is more fun: We so like being angry, and a lot of folks get really brave sitting behind their keyboards.

But please, when debating a narrow point of contention, be cautious to chase that narrow point down to its honest conclusion, whatever the results for the larger argument may be. It's part of being truthful, and it also exhibits more class. Less Springer, more Charlie Rose, y'know?

We are at war TimH. The AUMF is a constitutional act of congress that gave Presdient Bush the limited authority to treat Al Qaeda and its support network as enemby combatants. This isn't even close to the blakent authority given hitler with the enabling act.

The enabling act was more about giving Hitler unlimited power to right the economic ship of Germany. Sound more like this current President than the last doesn't it?

So, I'm not convinced by your hyperbolic example. And neither should anyone else.

How much attention are folks in this thread giving to the fact that Al Qaeda terrorists are unlawful combatants, not lawful ones, and that the U.S. is not a signatory to Protocol I of the Addenda?

I ask because under U.S. law, captured unlawful combatants who aren't part of the uniformed military of a high-contracting signatory to the Geneva Conventions are not afforded protections on that basis. (If they were, we could have asked Khalid Sheikh Mohammed nothing but name, rank, and serial number, as we would of, say, a captured People's Army lieutenant.)

That being the case, it should be understood that our obligations toward a captured terrorist are not constrained except by our own morality and other existing U.S. law (such as the authorization Thomas More referred to). No international treaties are involved.

Between our morality and U.S. law existing at the time of the AUMF, our own morality is the more restrictive, and causes us to recognize the need for laws reflective of that morality.

That is where the debate takes us: What are our moral obligations, and how much of those should be codified as legal ones?

The debate does not, however, involve the Geneva Conventions in this instance, except in one way: The Geneva Conventions are intended to make wars more civilized, and to the degree which we voluntarily grant unlawful combatants more protections than they're entitled to, we undermine that intent.

By all means, lets not violate our consciences about whether waterboarding is too far.

But within the realm of what our consciences allow, it is important to ensure that unlawful combatants do not have all the privileges of lawful ones. If they do, then that is one fewer operational disadvantage imposed on those who practice terror tactics.

The result of such a system may easily be foreseen! When one lessens the cost of a behavior, its practice increases on the margins.

If our goal is to make warfare more civilized, we must hope that the difference between how we (as a treaty obligation) treat lawful combatants, and how we (limited by our moral code) treat unlawful ones, is big enough to impose a cost on those tempted to practice unlawful warfare.

If it isn't, not only will non-state actors expand their use of it, but state actors will be tempted by its operational effectiveness. Remember the film Sword of Gideon?

Having pirates and terrorists decently hanged is probably too much to ask for. But let us nevertheless not forget what the goal of having "laws of war" actually is, and install feedback mechanisms bound to promote the opposite goal.

The last sentence of the preceding post was poorly worded; for clarity, assume that I meant to say:

"But let us nevertheless not forget what the goal of having 'laws of war' actually is, and let us avoid installing feedback mechanisms bound to promote the opposite goal."

Mark, I disagree with your article. In a perfect world it might make sense.

Americans are tortured everyday in this country and none of you make a peep. Criminals are put into prisons to be brutalized, the aged are locked up in unsanitary nursing homes to die, and the mentally ill are put out of sight. If that isn't torture, what is?

And who gets the headlines? A few war criminals who were fighting in a war where they knew they might be killed. What a joke.

Rethink your priorities, please.

If it isn't wrong, then torture is not intrinsically wrong, but is instead dependent on intent, circumstances, and foreseeable outcome.

Wow! So many people still trying to square the circle. But, as the quote above makes clear, your argument is with Veritatis Splendor 80, not me. JPII is the one who says that torture is intrinsically and gravely evil. Instead of looking for loopholes based on fantastically remote hypotheticals ("Black Swans" as somebody called them), why not just accept the plain meaning of the text and start there? If tubal pregnancies do not mean that abortion is "not intrinsically wrong, but is instead dependent on intent, circumstances, and foreseeable outcome" then neither do the remote hypotheticals invoked to justify torture.

Mark:

Thanks for doing me the honor of a directly-on-point reply.

It seems our disagreement is a matter of definitions: I understood "intrinsically wrong" to mean that a thing was never, ever justifiable no matter what the circumstances, intentions, or foreseeable consequences were. (I could not imagine any other usage of the word "intrinsically"; it seemed to me that if there were any possible exceptions, then the correct terminology would be "virtually always wrong" rather than "intrinsically wrong.")

But you, Mark, cite tubal pregnancies with reference to Catholic teaching on abortion, as being analogous to the "doomsday" scenario in reference to Catholic teaching on torture. I wasn't familiar with the topic, so I checked around online.

The Wikipedia article on tubal pregnancies notes:
So this is a situation where abortion, though labeled perfectly correctly as "intrinsically wrong," is nevertheless justified to save lives.

Now, you state,

...by which I think you mean it is normal to call abortion "intrinsically wrong" even though there remains a set of intentions, circumstances, and foreseeable outcomes which can justify its use.

If you truly regard this as analogous to the torture debate then, by extension, you are arguing that it is normal to call torture (let alone waterboarding, let alone hazing) "intrinsically wrong" even though there remains a set of intentions, circumstances, and foreseeable outcomes -- however fantastic! -- which can justify its use.

Well, very well. If that is all you mean by "intrinsically wrong" then it's exactly the same as what I mean by "virtually always wrong," and we have no quarrel over the non-absolute, but virtually ubiquitous, wrongness of abortion or torture.

Having resolved that, I suppose the remaining debate is the messy, unsatisfying one that doesn't lend itself to clear rationales, but instead to exasperatingly arbitrary dividing-lines.

I mean, of course, the debate about what conceivable circumstances/intents/outcomes would be so extreme as to justify incontrovertible torture (e.g. the rack); what lesser set would be so extreme as to justify waterboarding; what still lesser set would be sufficient to justify stress positions; what slightly lesser set would be sufficient to justify playing Britney Spears or "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" by the Crash Test Dummies; what still lesser set would be sufficient to justify sleep deprivation, and so on.

There are clearly those here who feel that the set of circumstances/intents/outcomes able to justify waterboarding have already occurred; others don't. It is incumbent on each site to specify where the line is and, apart from personal preference, why it is there.

Those who think that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was an okay case for 183 pours over five or so waterboarding sessions should specify what would have made it not okay, and why.

Those who think that KSM was not an okay case, should specify what would have made him an okay case. Even if it's an absurd hypothesis (like my earlier example about a "ticking bomb" that'd kill all humanity immediately), let us know, so that we know where you put the line, and why.

No disagreement from me Mark. Torture is evil. But many more people are tortured within the boarders of the US and they have no voice. Like a Pareto chart, one focuses one's energy where you get the most bang for your efforts. The terrosists are low on the totem pole.

Rick W:



..wha?

Mark,

Some serious questions I am wrestling with. I might be willing to accept what you say if you can help me with some difficulties I am having with the list offered.

You quote Veritas Splendor, but the list includes deportations. This is a serious question, do you believe every single deportation is an intrinsically immoral act? If not, why not? It is included in the same list of items and without qualification, unlike arbitrary imprisonment.

Additionally, the list as translated in gaudium et spes, translates the phrase "torture" as torments of mind and body. Can you explain the difference of word usuage?

Also included on the list of intrinsically immoral acts are "attempts to coerce the will itself." Read literally this includes punsihment for crimes, handcuffing individuals who are arrested for nonviolent crimes, spanking of children, solitary confinement of prisoners, etc. Is spanking intrinsically immoral? It is an attempt to coerce the will of the child is it not?

Also included on the list is slavery. Taken literally this is forced labor of an individual without pay or with little pay, a.k.a prison chain gangs, prison license plate makers, etc. Do you believe that forced litter pick up by prisoners, a.k.a. slavery to always be instrinsically immoral?

Thank you.

http://www.usccb.org/sdwp/stoptorture/

Compendium of Social Doctrine on torture:

"International juridical instruments concerning human rights correctly indicate a prohibition against torture as a principle which cannot be contravened under any circumstances." (404)

Pope Benedict in 2007:

"Public authorities must be ever vigilant in this task, eschewing any means of punishment or correction that either undermine or debase the human dignity of prisoners. In this regard, I reiterate that the prohibition against torture “cannot be contravened under any circumstances”"

USCCB:

“The use of torture must be rejected as fundamentally incompatible with the dignity of the human person and ultimately counterproductive in the effort to combat terrorism”

In addition to the encyclicals cited by Mark, we have these statements as well. It's not looking good for torture apologetics.

Thomas, re: the question of deportation, Deal asked a similar question further up, and Mark answered at comment #47 above. FWIW, I'll provide my own comments.

Re: deportation. We can look toward the bishops for pastoral guidance on the treatment of immigrants. Everywhere I’ve checked, I find steadfast opposition to deportation, as Gaudium et Spes would have us expect. In Europe, nomadic tribes and gypsies find themselves needing support from discrimination. In the U.S., the USCCB and many bishops on their own have spoken up in support of immigrants. Two documents in particular are helpful. The first is “Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope” (http://www.usccb.org/mrs/stranger.shtml) which contains this statement on terrorism as it relates to immigration:

“Certain security actions are a necessary response to credible terrorist threats, such as improved intelligence sharing and screening, enhanced visa and passport security, and thorough checks at the United States-Mexico border. Other actions, however, such as reducing legal immigration between the two nations, do not serve to make the United States or Mexico more secure.”

The USCCB also released a statement on comprehensive immigration reform (http://www.usccb.org/mrs/legal.shtml) which explains Church teaching on the matter.

Deportation and extradition are not synonymous, if anyone is concerned about that.

Finally, the Catechism provides our obligations at 2241:
“The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.

“Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants' duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.”

~~~~
re: spanking. Men were recently arrested in Madison, Wisconsin (http://tinyurl.com/cxnkt3) and Minneapolis, Minnesota (http://tinyurl.com/aam2l3) for assaulting women by grabbing them on the behind, but we need not seriously be concerned that convictions might mean the end of parental use of corporal punishment.

Punishment of the guilty in general is addressed in the Catechism at 2266 requiring that it be “proportionate to the gravity of the offense.” Proportionate or not, no punishment, even in the context of a plea bargain, may not offend the dignity of the human person (see for example, at 2287).

Sorry. My last sentence intended to say something to the effect, "no punishment ... may offend the dignity of the human person."

You say that we need not be concerned about spanking, but it is an effort to coerce the will. Why is that not included in the list? And if the catechism includes and exception for proportionate punishment of criminals and St. Thomas Aquinas concluded that a criminal could be maimed as a punishment and in Exodus 21:23-25 God orders multilation as a punishment for an offense and St. Olaf used to mutilate his citizens as an act of mercy rather than killing them when guilty of a crime and the government stands in the place of God to inflict "terror" into evil doers, Romans 13:3-5, then how can the torture of the guilty be instrinsically immoral. If torture was intrinsically immoral, why does the Catechism include a list of instances explaining when using torture is wrong. Why would it not, like the abortion entry just say: torture is always wrong. It doesn't it includes of list of things for which using torture is wrong. The USCCB has no teaching authority so I'm not sold by those quotes. The Pope has teaching authority but he was not teaching ex cathedra in the quotes you found, plus the seemingly absolute nature of the quote sounds a lot like JPII's statements about the death penalty, which sound absolute but in reality are not.

The Catechism also teaches that immigrants have to follow our laws, is it instrinically immoral to deport them if they refuse to follow our immigration laws? If you abuse your invitation is it not a proportional punishment to deport you?

I need something more authoritative that the USCCB which has no authority or even non magisterial statements by the Pope, in light of the Angelic Doctor saying that maiming the guilty is permissible, the New Testament saying that the government has the same authority has God, to punish the guilty and God himself ordering maiming and mutilation as punishment in Exodus.

Joe, I've heard several priests (including Fr. Sirico on EWTN's World Over Live with Raymond Arroyo) make the claim which supports my personal position ... that waterboarding does NOT rise to the level of torture. We do not support actual torture.

Are you going to call them "moral simpletons" also?

You see, there are still some people in America who have not been brainwashed by the fallacy of modern feminism which enforces that the more "compassionate" argument is the one that is closer to the truth.

It's important to distinguish true Charity motivated by humility from the secular counterfeit of compassion which is often motivated by pride.

"If torture was intrinsically immoral, why does the Catechism include a list of instances explaining when using torture is wrong. Why would it not, like the abortion entry just say: torture is always wrong."

Pope Benedict seems to think it is always wrong, since he quoted the Compendium verbatim in a speech. See my previous post.

Also, all of this sniffing out for a loop hole is really starting to look really sad. No future statement from Rome is going to allow torture, I'll put money on it, if gambling on future moral declarations from the Church isn't a sin.

The Catechism can't say everything that needs to be said, all the time. Had the latest edition been written recently, I'm sure it would have a more clear statement. But it is also clear that what some of you want is not to conform to God's law and the Church's teaching - which wouldn't be too hard, if you go by what even our current Pope and his predecessor have said (nothing in the future is going to veer too far from that and you know it). What you want is to find a way around it.

It's tough being a Catholic some times. But we all gotta give up something when we enter this Church and follow Christ. For some of you it may well be torture. Is it too high a price to pay?

Mark,

I only called people moral simpletons those who use the bad behavior of the enemy to justify their own. I stand by that. People who deny that waterboarding is torture are simply lying, because they know that we are talking about more than one dunk under water, but dozens, perhaps hundreds. Yes, that's torture.

'Compassion' is not an invention of modern feminism, and it frightens me that you think it is. The truth is that all human beings have inherent dignity and are made in the likeness of God, and that confers upon them certain inalienable rights that Catholics at least are bound to respect. As Mark S. points out, most of the time we don't even know if the people we are torturing know anything. It still wouldn't be right if we did, but its worse when we don't.

This isn't about a loop hole it is about truth. Government offiicals fighting a war need to know the real absolute limits of their authority and power to punish wrongdoers. Plus God ordered mutilation as a punishment in Exodus and the Angeleic Doctor agreed. These are serious questions.

"People who deny that waterboarding is torture are simply lying"

LOL ... you're a regular Padre Pio, huh?

Since virtually every inmate would gladly be waterboarded in exchange for his freedom, how do reconcile the torturous practice of imprisonment? Human nature chooses the lesser not the greater form of torture. People who have been wrongfully imprisoned have been awarded multi-million dollar settlements ... much like people who have had the wrong limb amputated.

I'll try your style, Joe.

People who deny that throwing human beings in cages like animals until they die, and don't admit that it is a form of torture, are lying.

First of all,

You can't determine morality, as a Catholic, on the basis of what a person would voluntarily submit to. The Church rejects that reasoning when it comes to just wages, it rejects it when it comes to suicide, and it certainly rejects it when it comes to torture.

Only a person with a very poor grasp of the Catholic conception of intrinsic good and evil would make the argument you are making here.

Secondly, something like waterboarding may fall short of the definition of torture if done once, or twice. When it is done repeatedly, it is torture.

Thirdly, I believe the purpose of prison ought to be corrective and rehabilitative. Only a small percentage of the population is psychopathic/sociopathic to the point where they can never be successfully reintegrated into society. So outside of those cases, I don't think a person should have a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

However it is not torture to keep a man in prison as long as he is treated humanely.

Plus, prision isn't torture? Do you know what happens in there?

And by "correction" don't you mean punishing criminals to coerce their will to conform to civilized behavior? That is on the Veritas Splendor list! There is clearly some more nuanced interpretation of the list at work otherwise every single punishment meant to coerce the will of a criminal is an instrically immoral act, which would be a contradiction of Church teaching which is not possible!

Thomas, I’ve read your last several comments and I am not certain I can answer every question and concern, so I’ll just get this one:

“Government officials fighting a war need to know the real absolute limits of their authority and power to punish wrongdoers.”

On the subject of torture, Executive Order 13491 (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13491) section 3(b) requires the following:

“Effective immediately, an individual in the custody or under the effective control of an officer, employee, or other agent of the United States Government, or detained within a facility owned, operated, or controlled by a department or agency of the United States, in any armed conflict, shall not be subjected to any interrogation technique or approach, or any treatment related to interrogation, that is not authorized by and listed in Army Field Manual 2 22.3 (Manual).”

Since the manual does not permit waterboarding, officials are not wondering how many “sessions” or “pours” (http://tiny.cc/F54xS) will exceed the limits of their authority. So if the bishops’ leadership disinterests you and you can’t find the answer anywhere in the infallible teaching of the Church (http://tiny.cc/xKLcE), then everything you need on the subject of interrogation is contained in the army field manual: http://tinyurl.com/cd6ddv (large PDF file).

Deal discusses it briefly in the comments section of his article, “Is Torture One of the Church's Non-Negotiables?” at comments 12 and 33.

(My additional comments on deportation are along the lines of what I’ve already said, just filling in the gaps and providing more examples. So they are not related enough to the original article to post here.)

People still are avoiding the Angelic Doctor and the Bible itself. How are they not advocating instrinically immoral acts? Please explain.

Prison isn't necessarily torture.

Neither is correction if it is done without physical or psychological violence, but through education, humane work programs, community service, and spiritual guidance.

I quote Pope Benedict's 2007 speech:



http://tiny.cc/ts16Z

Per your "Romans 13" challenge, this is from the Catechism:



There is nothing unclear about this.

JoeH, The pope's speech was in reference to punishment not for use of force to repel aggression which is exactly what waterboarding of terrorists who are silently allowing terrorist plots to unfold is.

Punishment in on the list of things torture is not allowed for in the Catechism but defense of others is not on that list!

I don't think Pope Benedict would have said "under any circumstances" if he didn't mean what we typically mean by the word "any".

This is not a case of quoting the Pope out of context. Yes, he was addressing the issue of rehabilitation (which kind of annihilates your attempt to equate prison with torture); but that doesn't mean that the phrase "under any circumstances" becomes, "under any circumstances with regards to punishment". Context is important but sometimes even it can be abused.

Next: what is acceptable cannot simply be determined by the silence of the law. That is a negative notion of freedom, an amoral, materialistic, Hobbesian notion of freedom. The Church cannot provide at all times a full list of every possible circumstance. We must proceed from what a) the Popes have clearly said, b) what the Church teaches about the dignity of the human person, c) what the Catechism as clearly quoted above says about the use of torture in the past, d) other relevant documents like the USCCB document linked earlier.

You would use silence to justify your position - when all of the smoke and mirror tricks are finally dismissed, such as the use of past torture or the equation of prison with torture - whereas Mark Shea, myself, and many others would use the voice of Church authorities and our own God-given reason.

I'll grant you that silence is always a leg you can stand on, but it is weak, unconvincing, and ultimately contrary to what the Church has also taught about reading and respecting the intentions and wishes of the Popes. You might find this helpful:

http://tiny.cc/qfpW2

Thomas,

For Exodus 21:23-25 (“But if injury ensues, you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”), the footnote for the NAB edition (http://tiny.cc/appWj) says this:

“This section is known as the lex talionis, the law of tit for tat. The purpose of this law was not merely the enforcement of rigorous justice, but also the prevention of greater penalties than would be just. Christ refers to this passage when he exhorts Christians to cede their lawful rights for the sake of charity. Cf Matthew 5:38-40.”

Matthew 5:38-40: “You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on (your) right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well.”

And the footnote (http://tiny.cc/mzW6w) for that verse provides this: “See Lev 24:20. The Old Testament commandment was meant to moderate vengeance; the punishment should not exceed the injury done. Jesus forbids even this proportionate retaliation. Of the five examples that follow, only the first deals directly with retaliation for evil; the others speak of liberality.”

My question, does Exodus 21:23-25 still support your case?

The Exodus argument point still stands. God instructed the Isrealites to mutilate criminals for crimes, a.k.a. torture. Did God instruct the Hebrews to commit intrinsically evil acts as justice?

Something doesn't add up.

Joe:

Watch out how you use your quotes, friend.

You cite the Compendium of Social Doctrine, Section 404. That section is about the use of torture to establish criminal responsibility in a trial, not to acquire battlefield intel in wartime; it is not applicable to the question at hand.

You then cite Pope Benedict XVI in 2007; the quote comes from an address the Pope gave to the participants at a world congress on pastoral care in prisons. That is the context, the larger quote begins,

This also, then, is in the context, not of prisoners-of-war, but of criminals or prisoners awaiting trial, held under the criminal code of a nation-state. Even in the last statement is a quote of the Compendium, section 404. Had the Pope been making the statement on his own steam, we could plausibly argue that he was changing the subject away from civil and criminal law, towards a broader topic which could include war-fighting. But as he was quoting the Compendium, and as we already know the context the quote comes from, and because he prefaces it with "In this regard," it's pretty obvious that he wasn't broadening the topic, unless he himself is unaware of any distinction between them. (Not likely.)

Of the three quotes you offered, only the third is apropos:

And, within that quote, two arguments are made against using torture in interrogating captured terrorists:

1. Torture is fundamentally incompatible with the dignity of the human person; and,

2. Torture is ultimately counterproductive in the effort to combat terrorism.

Either of these may be true. I think they both are true at least 99% of the time, even when one limits oneself to captured terrorists.

But I notice that the only one which matters for this debate is the first one.

For, the first one is an assertion about faith and morals, and thus falls directly within the purview (that is, the spiritual gifting) of the bishopric.

The latter is a statement about the effectiveness of torture to extract intel; or else, about whether having this intel is less effective in the end than not having it, but holding the P.R. high-ground of not having allowed torture to obtain it.

Now that kind of statement by the bishops is well outside of their areas of expertise, unless several of them are graduates of the War College or former Guantanamo interrogators. It is outside the realm in which they're promised special guidance by the Holy Spirit.

So, even though I agree with it in nearly every conceivable hypothetical circumstance, again, it's not apropos of the discussion. Or rather, it is, but not in a way where it matters who said it. Indeed, that second-half of the USCCB statement would have mattered much more to the debate coming from someone like John McCain (who has, in fact, said similar things!), than from the USCCB.

Not disagreeing with your end-game, Joe; I just want to make sure your pieces don't make any illegal moves to get there.

Thomas, you're correct: If God orders the Israelites to do something, then the something He orders is not, obviously, "intrinsically evil."

It might, however, be "intrinsically evil."

That is to say, we're dealing with two definitions of the term "intrinsically evil." The first is the one I favor, and which I think you're using: "Never morally justified under any circumstances, be they plausible or implausible, or by any intentions, including God's own, nor by any outcome, no matter how desirable."

This is, to me, a logical reading of the term "intrinsically evil." But some of the folk with whom you're debating are using the term to mean something less axiomatic and definitional, but more practical.

They mean something like, "Something so rarely morally justifiable, by such implausibly rare circumstances or implausibly pure intentions or implausibly wonderful outcomes, as to be virtually never allowable..., and certainly too rare to bother making allowances for it in our laws."

Now your example from Exodus is tightly integrated with the salvation history of the human race; it is given by God with God's divine intentions, and it deals with the survival of God's chosen people in a world where Satan will certainly stir up all their neighbors to exterminate them (as he still does today). In other words, what we have here is implausibly pure intentions and implausibly rare circumstances, working towards and implausibly wonderful outcome. God, being competent to judge that torture is allowed under such "Black Swan" circumstances, makes the judgment that it is allowed, and passes this judgment prophetically to the Israelites.

This is in no way incompatible with Mark's understanding of the term "intrinsically evil," which is, as I said, looser than yours or mine. The stricter definition of "intrinsically evil" asserts a mathematical 100.000000000% certainty of the evil of torture under all circumstances, with whatever intentions and foreseeable outcomes. And by that definition, torture is not intrinsically evil...or else, it is, and God sometimes tells us to do evil things!

If we're going to look at context, we need to look at the context of the whole Church teaching about human dignity, the treatment of prisoners, about consequential moral reasoning, and the numerous times it has condemned torture in many specific circumstances.

It is isn't reasonable to assume that any future clarification is going to bend in the direction of permitting torture. I admit that it is a possibility, but in context, not a likelihood.

And you do know what that means to me? That until such clarification is forthcoming, we err on the side of caution and on the side of respecting human dignity, and we don't merely assume that we are free to think what we want where the law is silent.

Joe:

There's nothing in your preceding post with which I'd disagree, except perhaps the statement on consequentialism, but that is only because I'm not yet convinced anyone in the history of the Catholic church has managed to make a statement about consequentialism which doesn't crumble into illogic upon careful examination. But that's a private peeve, and one in which I freely acknowledge my own uncertainty.

But, yes: Church teaching gives human dignity a full-throated hurrah; and yes, it has condemned torture in all specific instances it has ever deigned to discuss -- though battlefield intel in war-fighting is not one of those instances. And, yes, we should err on the side of caution, and make it illegal in our law.

Which it always has been, by name. The problem for the Bush administration is whether they're correct, or incorrect, in saying that waterboarding qualifies as torture, or whether it steps right up to the line, teeters on its tiptoes, struggles to keep its balance, and finally manages to avoid falling over the line.

If it qualifies, why then the Bush administration violated its own orders saying that "everything but torture may be used, but that torture is forbidden." (Likewise, Pelosi and all the other Democratic congressional leaders who were briefed about the waterboarding for months and never raised a stink about it until it become politically expedient, are also condemned if waterboarding is torture.)

In this case we should certainly again err on the side of caution, and quit waterboarding. And, of course, there's another reason: It doesn't work so easily any more. It's been so widely publicized that the terror-masters are almost certainly training to resist it. The more resistance a subject has, the farther one must go to break his resistance -- and the more likely it is one has crossed the line into torture.

So, as I said before, we shouldn't allow for it in our law.

Now, if it ever happens that a "ticking bomb" scenario actually emerges, and if in that scenario the likely result of not torturing is the extermination of all human life, then I think it should still be illegal...and, assuming I had the training, I would still do it, anyway, and then be properly tried for it.

Why? Because this is one of those rare combinations of circumstances, intents, and outcomes which justify it. Why, then, should it be illegal? Because it's bad law to allow for things which are that rare; it tempts one to use torture in instances which are less rare, and which don't justify its use. And there's always jury nullification or lenient sentencing, if it comes to a trial.

"In this case we should certainly again err on the side of caution, and quit waterboarding."

Right! Now be prepared to have abuse hurled at you by certain people.

"It's been so widely publicized that the terror-masters are almost certainly training to resist it."

It doesn't matter to me if they resist something that shouldn't be done to them in the first place.

"assuming I had the training, I would still do it, anyway, and then be properly tried for it."

See, I respect that. In that specific, rare situation, I can't say I wouldn't do the same. I can't say I wouldn't do the same to save a loved one.

But my doing it wouldn't make it good, it wouldn't make it right, and it shouldn't set a precedent for its legality. It would be a sin that I would need to confess, and a crime for which I ought to be arrested. And then I would have to make my case before both the earthly and heavenly judge.

If people could just admit that, we may not have this debate. Circumstances don't turn manure into gold. At best they provide a 'get out of jail' card on a case by case basis.

A few years ago, a DNA test revealed that an Illonois man had been wrongly imprisoned for 11 years. He was awarded more than 5 million dollars and nobody suggested it was too much. Now, why would somebody be awarded 10 times more than he would have earned in that time span? What is the money really compensating? The answer is taking away a man's freedom and stealing a portion of his life.

Since mature people communicating in good faith should be able to agree that arbitrary or wrongful imprisonment is a form of torture, then it naturally follows that the objective act of imprisonment is a form of torture which civilized societies and the Church accept as a necessary evil. Since it has been stated that waterboarding can not be justified because the terrorist is guilty (even in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who decapitated Daniel Pearl with a butcher knife and taped it for the world to see) then it should naturally follow that just because a person is found guilty of a crime, we should not sanction the torturous practice of imprisonment.

Here in the Chicago area we have the Brookfiedl Zoo. A while back some folks got together and decided that the great apes and lions being locked in cages was mistreatment, so a new outdoor habitat was designed and built at taxpayer expense. Nobody complained because it was a noble cause.

Now I ask, how is it that keeping a lion in a cage is recognized as cruel but taking a man's freedom and locking him in a cage is not? Because he deserves it? I thought that didn't matter.

Prison IS a form of torture but the Church has always accepted it as a necessary reality of our fallen world. Oh, and the Church is okay with torture taken to the nth degree ... the eternal torture of Hell.

If you disagree with me, I won't call you a moral simpleton or a liar. I realized long ago that I'm not better than anyone else.

Mark,

Don't you routinely call me a "neo-socialist"? Is that not meant to be derogatory?

Stop getting hung up on these terms. Some arguments are morally corrupt, and saying that they are those a 'simpleton' would make is being generous.

Prison is not a form of torture. If it is then Pope Benedict made a fool of himself in 2007 when, in the context of speaking about the Catholic position on imprisonment and rehabilitation, he said that the prohibition against torture may not be contravened under any circumstances.

What you are doing is attempting to get us to accept something evil - torture - by equating it with something that is not evil - imprisonment. Imprisonment can be torture, but it is not necessarily torture. This is the position of the Church.

Do you really think that you know better than the Church does what constitutes torture, and what does not?

Your reasoning here is simply false. Just because we pay a person money for wrongful imprisonment does not mean that he was tortured. It an injustice to imprison someone wrongfully when more could have been done to establish innocence.

Moreover this argument cuts both ways. Why settle on waterboarding, when we can torture with fire? When we can torture with rape? When we can take the families of people we want information from, and torture them, women and small children?

I don't dislike you Mark, but this argument is ridiculous. And I will not hesitate to call it so. You are leading yourself and others into a moral abyss. It is every Catholic's responsibility to point it out.

An interesting and timely column Mr. Shea.

However I believe the quote below from you article
really sums everything up.

in excuse for toture "And then there was the "We can kill people in wartime, so why can't we torture them too?" maneuver"

The moment Christians fell into the trap that it was acceptable to kill for the State and stoped believing in the non-violent teachings of Jesus they started down the slippery slope.The early Christians believed that it was not acceptable to kill even during war, they required converts to resign from the Roman army. In fact they even refused to kill for their own defense. We've been off track for a very long time, which explains many of the previous comments.

I read quite a few posts intimating that we have to define torture and we can't. As followers of Christ, we can define it. If the action cannot stand side by side with Christ's commandments, it is wrong. No rationalization is needed for doing right. If the action cannot face the light of "Love your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself," then it's wrong. If you would not want to be waterboarded, or a part of your body crushed, etc. it is not right to condone the same on someone else for any reason. Does anyone think this is part of the Kindgom of Heaven, to hurt people, or turn a blind eye to it? These rationalizations are due to efforts to make man's ways and man's understanding as righteous as the Lord's ways. This is when the dilemma becomes unsolvable.

I applaud Mr. Shea's courage and faith. His article and subsequent replies to torture defenders makes it clear, there is no middle ground and no hiding place on this issue.

All torture is evil and does as much harm to the perpetrator as to the victim. It also harms its defenders by nurturing a pliable morality that is at odds with Christian discipleship.

Forgive me for being simplistic, but Christ calls us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. He makes it clear we are to love our enemy and our neighbor like ourselves. The pro-torture apologies, rationalizations, and arguments made in the posts above make a mockery of Christ's injunction. They spit on the faith and sacrifices of historic and modern martyrs alike. They turn the servanthood of Christian discipleship in to a fool's paradise of pragmatic morality.

Pragmatic morality is the morality of hell. It emanates from there and will ultimately lead you back to the source. Was Christ a pragmatist? Is our faith based on pragmatism? Is our standard of behavior the lowest common denominator? Do we celebrate when our enemy commits a new evil because that frees us to do something just slightly less evil and still feel righteous about it? Do our enemies set our standard or does Christ?

Far from being uncivil, Mr. Shea shows remarkable patience in responding to people who are clearly intent on creating innumerable moral loopholes to defend what no non-pragmatist Christian could ever wish to defend. Stop playing cute games with words. Imagine standing before your Savior and debating the supposed nuances of this issue with Him. Rediscover a sense of shame.

Thank God in heaven that you will probably never be subjected to “the water cure” or body slamming or any other form of torture devised by clever men. But don’t take that blessing for granted. There was a time when people were tortured to determine their faith. Perhaps in the not too distant future, these “techniques” will be revived to determine a citizen’s patriotism or freedom from thought crimes. If defenders of torture have nothing to hide, they should have nothing to fear if the government takes this route and subjects us en masse or just randomly to this precautionary “treatment” for our own good.

I think Gaudium et Spes effectively eviscerated the idea that waterboarding can be moral when it stated "Any attempt to coerce the will" is an "infamy" and a "dishonor to the Creator."

What is waterboarding but an attempt to coerce the will?

Some afterthoughts, to the points some have posted:

1. Anyone who is voluntarily being waterboarded is not, by definition, being coerced.

2. The effects of an evil action cannot reverse the moral quality of the evil action. We are Catholics, not consequentialist heretics.

3. Spanking is a punishment for having done wrong. As a punishment, it is a contradiction of the will, not a coercion of the will. The will of the child is under the natural custody of the parents, concurrent with the child's capacity to know and choose the good. Who would not agree that anyone who spanks his child until he does something is a maniac? Lastly, no adult's will or intellect is under any custody of any other adult, unless by wholly voluntary consent.

4. Coercion of the will, due to its nature as an intrinsic evil, cannot be used as a punishment.

5. "The use of force" and "coercion of the will" are not interchangeable terms. I may legitimately use force to wrest a pistol out of the hand of a madman. His will is not coerced by this action. He still wants to kill. Only his physical capability of harming others is changed. Physically taking the gun out of his hands, not coercing his will, was the means to the end. Waterboarding is a means of coercing the will to achieve the end. It is using an intrinsic evil to accomplish an end.

6. Only directly-intended abortion is intrinsically morally evil. Directly-intended coercion of the will is also intrinsically morally evil.

7. Torture is not simply "a certain amount of pain inflicted." Otherwise, a dental procedure could be classified as torture. Torture is a means to an end. The means of torture is intending to inflict suffering for the purpose of coercing the will, or any other number of illicit reasons.

8. As Dignitatis Humani pointed out, not only is coercion of the will wrong, but so is coercion of the intellect. No man may force another man to will to do something, and likewise, no man may force another man to believe anything. You may not use physical force to coerce the spiritual. Coercion starts where convincing stops.

Unfortunately, I'd read the particular passage from Gaudium et Spes before I wrote this article on torture: it would've made it a lot easier to cite some more teaching of the Magisterium.

"Torturing Terms: The Catholic View on Torture"

http://tinyurl.com/cb8ev3

-Geoff Turecek

Any good Catholic should know and understand that there is absolutely no excuse or reasoning that can justify torturing any human being as necessary or as a 'good thing'.

How about simply ending US hegemony the world over and stick to minding our own business like we used to?

This act alone would save hundreds of billions of $$$.
Recession over!

Can't have common sense in Amerika though can we?

Hm. The last part should have read, "Unfortunately, I'd read the particular passage from Gaudium et Spes after I wrote this article on torture . . .." Thank goodness for post-post proofreading!

It is clear that many of the members of this forum who endorse torture would probably have been drooling members of the crowd crying out to Pilate "Crucify Him"

"I can't think of a more evil witness than to prefer, as Shea ultimately does, the mass torture and death of terror victims to the harsh coercion of individual terrorists. Amazing moral blindness."

These people are NOT terrorists. They are SUSPECTS. Many of them were rounded up by people who sold them to the US for cash rewards. We've kept many of them in prison for years even AFTER our own people said they were not guilty. The majority of our prisoners are not guilty of any crime. Moral blindness? This information has been out there for years, yet Americans still condone torturing these people.

Try this on for size: "Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11"

This is an article about an interrogator in Iraq who claims that more American servicemen were killed as a result of our using torture than were killed on 9/11.
http://tinyurl.com/cnyebe

"Here's real moral evil: to know there is a plot to blow up your child's school and to fail to coerce the suspects to get the information needed to save the schoolchildren."

First of all, in the once in a millenium event that this MIGHT occur, do you not think that the interrogators might just decide to break the law and risk the consequences? As it happens, the Major in the above referenced news story says you'll get information much quicker and more reliably, including in the case of a ticking bomb scenario.

Here's the real moral evil: to continue to excuse the punishment of people AT ALL, nevermind without first knowing if they're even guilty. And doing this IN GOD'S NAME. Christians, who are called upon to spread the word of God, have instead made Jesus guilty by association in the eyes of people who may have otherwise been convertable.

Christian war and torture enthusiasts: is there any limit to the madness of our world?

I think as long as morals are being discussed; and often defended by some making the immoral case for torture as a means of reducing the danger of a future attack on our soil, a parallel question needs to be raised: Was the 9/11 attack a justifiable response from a group of people who have been maimed and murdered by the United States for the last sixty years? Should it have been worse?

The historical basis for the question is well documented. It's real. The most efficient task our government performs is killing people. Too often in the recent past--innocent people. As a nation, we have allowed our arrogance and greed to drive us to rationalize repeated interventions (until Saddam they were veiled)throughout Arab countries. "We the People", have simply turned our heads on the heartache, death and chaos we initiate.

So, if we are somehow due permission to waterboard terror suspects to prevent future carnage on our soil, what are
Arabs entitled to as an adequate response to our meddling and bloodshed exported to their nations?

As American citizens, we give our permission for our government to spill blood in places in which we have no business being or honorable reason to be there. Innocent blood is on our hands just as on the "Decider's", George Bush. We get exactly the government we deserve. Reading some of the comments on this website, it is easy to see why our government feels the freedom to continue justifying evil behavior.

At some point, the most zealous defenders of torture will realize that if our government has permission from its citizens to send tyranny around the world, they will have no reservation about using it at home.

1. Torture, if it is the infliction of pain, cannot be used to punish, so spanking for punishment is wrong under that reasoning

2. What happens when a child is spanked or the hand is struck as they reach for the out let or are spanked after running into the street to make them not run into the street again? My father did it to me, I don't think he tortured me by he coerced my will by spanking.

3. Adults are not under authority? Read Romans 13. We are under many authorities and must be subject to them.

4. Water boarding is not to get someone to do something but to get them to cease being silent! Much like the spanking to keep a child from continuing bad behavior.

5. Lastly, these "suspects" are terrorists. Under the rules of war, the commander in chief is the judge and jury of our enemy. If he declares that they are enemy combatants they are as a matter of law under the rules of war. These individuals are not subject to Article III courts, not is an Article III court conviction likely allowed in these circumstances, Congress is in charge of punishing offences against the law of nations, see Article I.

Torture is not the mere infliction of pain, as I said. It is the infliction of pain as a means of coercing the will or other illicit ends.



If you knock a grenade out of the hand of a child (or strike the child's hand as he is reaching for an outlet) are you really coercing the child's will? If the child knew what it would do, would the child want to do it? You are physically preventing the child from touching the electrical outlet, not coercing his will to not do it.

As for the example of spanking, as I said, as a child, your will is under the natural custody of your parents. Your will is not yet formed. You are the natural advocate and the surrogate of your child's will when the child cannot recognize the good. The will is formed not by coercion, but by demonstrating consequences.

The real question is, would you continue to spank your recalcitrant child until he ate his vegetables?




The Douay says "power." There is a difference between power and authority. If a four-year old tells me to do that which is just, I will submit myself to the authority of the four-year old, only because the four-year old is echoing God's authority. If the four-year old tells me to invade a country 4,000 miles away that never harmed me or anyone I know, or tells me to ram bamboo splinters under someone's fingernails/perform a mock drowning, I will refuse.

Pilate said to Jesus, "Do you not know that I have the authority (or power, as better translated" to crucify you, or the power to set you free?" Really? Did Pontius Pilate really have the authority to kill Jesus, as all authority comes from God? No. He had power. Jesus acknowledges his power. He does not acknowledge its use as always good. Jesus could have, as he said, called for legions of angels at any time.

As St. Paul said, "the powers that be are ordained by God." So was the plague of locusts. That does not mean we must let them consume our substance.

St. Paul goes on to say, "Do that which is good: and thou shalt have praise from the same."

This coming from the man who did more than his share of evading the "powers that be," for "doing that which is good," and not submitting.

He continues: "For he is God's minister to thee, for good.
But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God's minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil."

Well, even if you do good, he beareth the sword not in vain. He'll use it on you even if you doeth no evil. In the past, he's cloven skulls for drinking from "whites only" fountains. He's broken arms of non-violent pro-life protesters. He's deliberately dropped atomic and incendiary weapons upon unarmed civilians. It seems St. Paul is talking about a very rare person indeed. Someone who only executes wrath on evildoers. I think Paul is being a little more subtle than you perceive.



Not to get them to do something, but to get them to stop being silent. Which, in layman's terms, means, "Forcing them to speak" (or scream, as is more likely.) That really does seem like "getting them to do something" to me. If waterboarding does not coerce the will to speak, then it is absolutely useless for extracting information, isn't it?

The metaphysical composition of body and soul, the faculties of the soul, (will and intellect) the inviolability and dignity thereof are beyond the reach and jurisdiction and presumptuous claim of any powers of this world (and the Prince of this world.) God himself refuses to coerce the human will. Yet the State and its agents, in their ghastly arrogance, presume that they may do so.

As for myself, I will stick with God's law. Others may choose to subordinate His law to man's pathetic grasping at things which are not of their dominion and never will be. That is their bad decision to make.

Joe,

Cardinal Arinze was asked, "Should Catholic legislators who support legal abortion 'be refused' Communion?"

The Cardinal elicited laughter when he rejoined, "I ask you, do you really need a Cardinal from the Vatican to find the answer?"

He quipped, "Are there no children from First Communion to whom you can pose the question and receive the answer?"

So Joe, taking an innocent man by force out of his home and :

- Locking him in a cage like a wild animal for 20 years
- stealing his relationship with his wife
- stealing his relationships with his children
- stealing his relationship with his parents
- stealing his relationship with his brothers, sisters and friends
- stealing his job and his career
- stealing his freedom
- crushing his self esteem
- putting him in an institution where beatings and rapes are common
- causing his children to doubt his character
- dealing with his wife now sleeping with another man

To paraphrase Cardinal Arinze ... do you really need a Cardinal from the Vatican to tell you that this man has experienced torture?

Our Faith does not abuse common sense. To say that a man wrongly imprisoned for 20 years does not rise to the level of torture but pouring water on a known terrorist's head for 30 seconds with a doctor present does, completely lacks prudence and discernment.

I would like to say thanks for not "disliking" me Joe, but that kind of sounds like "I don't want to punch you" I can say, however, that I do like you. Though we disagree on several issues, I truly appreciate your passion.

The defenders of torture (uh, "enhanced interrogation", sorry) here have demonstrated that they are not only thinking in an un-Christian way about depersonating prisoners for (fill in the blank) reasons, but have displayed either a willful disregard, or profound ignorance of what was until recently a widely-believed cultural norm regarding torture and treatment of prisoners in general.

When the maker of a movie or a TV program in days past depicted Americans captured by, say, Communists, the norm observed with regard to interrogation was that the prisoner was required to provide to his captor only his name, rank, and serial number, the implication being that any further interrogation of the prisoner without his consent was to be regarded as against international law and the laws, customs, and mores of war.

This set of mores was underlined for us by the reports during and after the Vietnam War of the Viet Cong treatment of prisoners of war, which caused widespread, righteous outrage.

It was not only Catholics, Christians, or Democrats that were expected to adhere to these norms, they were widely regarded as applying to civilization universally. How sad, in particular that there are Catholics who now argue in FAVOR of destroying this set of mores.

Morality, particularly Christian morality (since God is the source of moral authority and operates everywhere and always) is supposed to be universally applicable. How can a society or government accord rights against self-incrimination to domestic criminals, no matter how heinous their acts, and deny those same rights arbitrarily?

How can a society demand a presumption of innocence and a fair trial for a domestic suspect, no matter how heinous of infamous his crime, and then arbitrarily deny such presumption of innocence and a fair trial for those accused of being "terrorists"? None of the people tortured were given a trial or anything like one. Their guilt was simply presumed, and punishment carried out.

The concept of "just war" evolves out of a moral right of self-defense. Leaving the lack of such moral sanction for the war in Iraq out of this for a minute, many of the people captured and tortured in this instance were arguably fighting in self-defense against an invasion / occupation. While leaving them morally responsible for their actions, there is no sanction for treating them differently because they were captured "on the battlefield" or any other reason.

With regard to the references to the SERE program - the program was put in place to teach soldiers and sailors how to deal with and survive torture methods known to have been used on American prisoners, a clearly pragmatic response to the application of immoral methods against prisoners of war covered by the Geneva Conventions and other treaties by individuals and regimes that did not care about their moral standing.

Being subjected to the techniques in a practice environment is in no way equivalent to being subjected to them for real - in training, the soldier or sailor knows the date by which the mistreatment will end, and he knows that the mission of his captors is to keep him alive. The prisoner subjected to this treatment knows none of this. Thr difference in the potential to cause physical and psychological terror is magnitudes higher.

There are lots of practical reasons not to torture prisoners of war. The moral reason is that it is un-Christian to do so. Jesus himself demonstrated the immorality of torturing and murdering prisoners with his own torture and death.

How can a person understand the moral implications of Christ's passion and death as a condenmation of immoral and unjust earthly regimes, and still condone inflicting such against others?

In other words, make your own rules and call them what you wish.

How does the "commander in chief" know enough about these cases to know they are guilty? He doesn't of course. But as long as "rules is rules" that's a-ok.

Meanwhile, how many of these "guilty before proven innocent" terrorists have we already released because they were never guilty in the first place? Were they guilty before because the commander in chief said they were and then not guilty because he changed his mind?

Shocking how willing people are to see others lose their God-given rights in the name of "war". Christ would be proud of your convictions I'm sure.

I have plowed through all of the comments to date, and it seems that the commentors who viscerally dislike America (spelling it with a "k" etc.) and those of the opposite persuasion as well have gone past debate into something else. I am not a Catholic scholar, and I admit to more confusion than before over torture now that I've read all this.

That aside, let me ask a question. Given that a CBN (Chemical, Biological, Nuclear) attack on America has been stated as virtually certain (Dept. of HS); is it immoral to accept the information on an impending attack on our country from another country that has used torture as (I think ) defined here to get the information?

Mr. Shea, where is the evidence of this? I have not seen it anywhere in the press. It seems to me that you make very serious accusations to justify your argument with the assumption that your readers will just accept your word. I do not.

Furthermore, while we can agree that the Church's teachings on torture are of course right and good, you have yet to clearly establish what is and is not torture. I accept the Church's teachings on Purgatory and justice, don't you? Is suffering necessarily a bad thing all of the time? Isn't it true that one could argue that prison is torture? It denies a person his freedom which causes great suffering, does it not? If subjecting a person to some discomfort without causing him any serious bodily harm saves the lives of thousands, can't it be justified?

I am no fan of President Bush but I do applaud him for keeping the country safe from terrorist attack during his presidency. Someone I love was there on 9/11 and was fortunate enough to walk away from it. I do not want to see any member of my family in that kind of danger again. Bush followed his Constitutional mandate in that regard and if it meant that several cold-blooded killers had to suffer a bit, I do not think God disapproves.

"Mr. Shea, where is the evidence of this?"

Which of the accusations have you not read about?

"I accept the Church's teachings on Purgatory and justice, don't you?"

So because God does it, we can do it?

"Is suffering necessarily a bad thing all of the time?"

If capital punishment is ok, then killing is not a bad thing all of the time. Does that make it ok to kill in cases of unproven guilt? Is it ok to kill innocent people along with the guilty? Of course not.

"Isn't it true that one could argue that prison is torture?"

Prison is punishment. The person is still allowed the basic human requirements such as food, sleep, and social interaction.

"If subjecting a person to some discomfort without causing him any serious bodily harm . . ."

The intention is clearly to cause great, intense suffering, not simply discomfort. Chinese water torture is called torture for a reason, even though it causes no bodily harm. Neither does sensory deprivation, which is obviously torture.

". . . saves the lives of thousands, can't it be justified?"

This has already been discussed above. However, I'll add a couple of things to the discussion.

A study recently showed that sleep deprivation causes fictitious memories. Sleep deprivation is one of our techniques. How can fictitious memories do anything but waste our time as we pursue dead-ends?

It's also been discovered that the torture was employed to prove a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. This was simply CYA for Bush.

And here's a fresh story from today. An FBI whistleblower DIRECTLY INVOLVED in the interrogation of 9/11-related suspect Abu Zubaydah has come out saying that the suspect was cooperating when using standard FBI techniques and ceased cooperating when harsh techniques were used. Despite this, Alberto Gonzales "pressed counterterror officials to use brutal interrogation techniques" AT THE EXPENSE OF GETTING VALUABLE INFORMATION.
http://tinyurl.com/prqrfo

"I am no fan of President Bush but I do applaud him for keeping the country safe from terrorist attack during his presidency."

The largest terror attack in American history occurred on Bush's watch, an attack which he was directly warned about.

The cause of terror is oppression and anger. All one has to do is read recent news stories about the thousands of people who are seething with rage in Pakistan and Afghanistan -- AT US, because we're killing untold numbers of innocent people there. Does it not strike anyone else that these are the very people who are the world's future terrorists? Does it not strike anyone else that these people love their families every bit as much as we do? These people have far more patience than we do. It took decades to finally take part in the 9/11 attacks; you may feel safe now, but perhaps you ought to worry about your children a decade or two from now.

"Bush followed his Constitutional mandate in that regard and if it meant that several cold-blooded killers had to suffer a bit,"

"Several cold-blooded killers had to suffer a bit". No amount of wordplay can reduce the level of utter evil and depravity this country has sunk to. And again, the idea that "cold-blooded killers" were the ones tortured has been thoroughly debunked above.

"I do not think God disapproves."

You don't think that God would disapprove of our servicemen sodomizing young boys in front of their mothers? Have you not read the testimonies of people who have seen the pictures and videos that our government has not allowed to go public for fear of the outrage it would cause? If not then get ready, because they are soon to release some of them.

In answer to many excuse-makers here, I'll finish with a quote from the above article about Major Alexander:

"Reflecting on his own interrogations, he says he always monitored his actions by asking himself, "If the enemy was doing this to one of my troops, would I consider it torture?" The quote of a decent man, of whom I think God actually WOULD approve.

V:

"I have plowed through all of the comments to date, and it seems that the commentors who viscerally dislike America (spelling it with a "k" etc.)"
While I don't care for the "Amerika" bit all that much, I also don't think it implies a dislike of America so much as a dislike of what our government has become. This is very much in line with the principles this country was founded on and it's very much in line with the approach that any honest person (especially a Christian) should take.

"That aside, let me ask a question. Given that a CBN (Chemical, Biological, Nuclear) attack on America has been stated as virtually certain (Dept. of HS); is it immoral to accept the information on an impending attack on our country from another country that has used torture as (I think ) defined here to get the information?"

First, the certainty of this doesn't necessarily have to be true. How we conduct ourselves in the world will determine whether or not this happens. Continue killing and oppressing others will more than likely inspire future attacks.

Next, the spector of chemical, biological, and nuclear attacks can have far greater impact than they may necessarily deserve. These methods do not automatically imply "weapons of mass destruction". In fact, the 9/11 perps induced far more damage than what a terrorist can reasonably accomplish using the CBN methods (in the case of nuclear, they're more than likely to use a dirty nuke).

As to whether or not to accept the information: first of all, we should not be responsible for renditioning these people to these countries. Outside of that, refer to my above posts regarding the usefulness of this type of information. It more than likely clouds the information if the clouding isn't bad enough already: what have we got, 1,000,000 people on our terror watch list? We've gone beyond lunacy here.

Assuming the information may be valuable, this also introduces problems for which I don't have a ready answer. Was it right for us to refuse to use valuable medical knowledge the nazis obtained on Jewish test subjects?

Sorry, Tom, but that still doesn't answer my question. Is it right or wrong to use the info? I didn't get the sense that there is an answer.

Sorry V, but not every issue is presentable on a silver platter. If you have an axe to grind on this issue then why don't you be brave enough and present it rather than playing prosecutor?

Funny thing about the ticking bomb scenario. One of those waterboarded was waterboarded for **a whole month* before he gave his interrogators what they wanted.

Do you know any ticking bombs that take a whole month to explode?

Like the old joke "Coffee is a slow poison. It has been killing me for over eighty years."

Then there was the case of the German taxist of arabic origin, Al Khaled, who was kidnapped, held in a secret prison, and tortured, until it dawned on his captors that he was not the Al Khaled they were looking for, the terrorist, but a harmless taxi driver. So, not only was an innocent tortured, not only was no valuable intelligence obtained, but for the whole time they were showing how tough and brave they were to a helpless bound man, the real terrorist was unmolested, doing what he wanted - and none of what he wanted was good for us.

The time they had spent in brutalizing the wrong man would have been better spent in doing basic cheking on the facts, and making sure of the identity of their prisoner.

(In malpractice law, any medical personnel that treats the wrong patient is in big trouble, as is very serious breach of medical ethics and competence).

So, I am distrustful of advocates of torture, whom I see only too willing to cover up their basic mistakes.

And, Mark, you are right, waterboarding is to torture what oral sex is to sex. Or as Bill Clinton said it "It depends of what the meaning if "is" is.

A few quick responses to some things in the comments.

Torturing did not endanger American lives per se, that is only true if it is leaked. It takes both together to create the back lash.

Also, it is not a good idea to imply or suggest that Mr. Bush had foreknowledge of 9/11 as one did.

The ticking time bomb continues to be misconstrued and misrepresented, and I have no idea why. The scenario as framed by both those in favor and against is so absurd to render arguments connected to it much weaker because of it. The real world example goes something like this: "Suspect X is known to be the Big Cheese in Group of Bad People A. We have reason to believe (see other sources) that Group of Bad People A is planning an attack (insert current intel about possible target and time frame). Further we have reason to believe Suspect X has knowledge of this planned attack. We have approximately D days to stop the attack. What should be done if time is running short and conventional means have not yet worked?"

The corporal punishment bit is a real issue. After all, there is some scriptural basis for corporal punishment. I don't know what to make of this, but it can't simply be ignored if you are going to take the statements of the Church and Her teachers seriously.

In any case, on to my points I want to make after some reflection.

I think there is both physical and physiological torture, and that both are wrong. It is easy to see physical torture, but difficult to know non-physical forms. Water boarding is such a problem because it is not the sort of clear cut physical torture, but rather is more of a psychological "torture"/"enhanced interrogation" through physical means.

I am fully willing to accept that Torture is evil. However, I am not willing to accept that every infliction of discomfort, bet it psychological or physical is Torture. This is like the difference between murder and killing.

Here is my prime reason for holding this position: if all of the acts that could be considered Torture in the broad sense are in fact intrinsic evil, then they are always and everywhere wrong for everyone and everything. My understanding of intrinsic evil is such that anyone or thing that does an intrinsic evil is sinning is doing wrong. These acts can never be justified under any circumstances and to even permit them is an injustice. Now let us ask, does God torture? If one takes a broad definition, you would have to say "yes", while if a narrow one could say "no". Since God can not by definition engage in intrinsic evil, this leads me to think torture is only intrinsically evil if the narrow definition of torture is used. (Narrow definition, Torture is like Murder; Broad definition, Torture is like Killing.)

Certainly under the narrow definition Torture is an intrinsic evil.

Under the broad definition, I think it likely to be evil in most cases, perhaps even in all cases for man on this earth. However, I can not find a way to reconcile the notion that torture in the broad sense, is intrinsic evil, with the understanding of certain aspects of Divine Justice and Divine Punishment.

(I would even be willing to say the US probably did torture (though not exactly with knowledge and intent, but certainly not by accident or ignorance either); and that we should not use water-boarding since it may be torture to do so.)

Someone help me if I am missing something or what. Maybe I don't have my terms quite right.

Maybe this does all hinge on definitions after all.