December 14, 2005
A Christian Perspective in the Torture Debate
By Maggie
Gallagher
The White House announced
that President Bush and Sen. John McCain are close to an agreement
on interrogation protocols for all U.S. personnel.
I certainly hope so.
I have found few things more distressing than discovering so many
of my fellow citizens support not just harsh interrogation techniques,
but outright torture.
For example:
A May 27, 2004, ABC
News poll found 35 percent support outright torture if necessary
to protect us from attack.
In a July 2004 Pew
poll, 43 percent of Americans said "the use of torture against
suspected terrorists in order to gain important information"
can be "often or sometimes" justified; 21 percent said
rarely justified and 32 percent said "never justified."
In a Fox News poll
in March 2003, 44 percent favored and 42 percent opposed "any
means necessary, including physical torture, to obtain information
from prisoners that might protect the United States from terrorist
attacks."
A Nov. 10-11,
2005, Newsweek poll asked, "Would you be willing
or not willing to have the U.S. government torture suspected terrorists
if they may know details about future terrorist attacks against
the U.S.?" Thirty-eight percent were willing, while 56 percent
were not willing.
An AP
story reported that a November poll found that 61 percent of Americans
said torture was at least "rarely justified."
As Instapundit.com
summed up, "Majorities say torture should be safe, legal,
rare."
Critics accuse the
Bush administration of verbal games for the careful, lawyerly
memos drawing lines separating harsh interrogation from torture
(well, if you are going to forbid something, you have to define
it, and defining it requires drawing lines).
Even Sen.
McCain acknowledges that on rare occasions, a president may need
to step outside the moral boundaries to defend the nation, but
he argues the moral lines themselves should be plain and bright:
Not just torture, but anything cruel or degrading is forbidden.
Charles Krauthammer, who in the Weekly Standard makes
a reasoned, morally serious and good-faith (and therefore especially
chilling) effort to codify the morality of torture, calls McCain's
approach "moral hypocrisy."
Well, there are worse
things than hypocrisy.
The Wall
Street Journal opines: "A strange code of morality would
allow the killing of (a known terrorist) but not his stressful
questioning to prevent further murders he might plan against innocent
civilians. "
Let me tell you about
that strange code. It used to be called "Christianity."
For centuries it chiefly justified deadly force only in self-defense,
or the proper defense of another. When a terrorist is out there
trying to kill you, you may be justified in using deadly force.
But once you capture him, then different moral rules apply. Others
once referred to this strange moral code as "civilization."
Its veneer over the human heart is razor-thin. Under threat, most
of us revert to the primitive ethic: Hurt the bad guy.
I understand the dangers
of excessive and distracting legalism, of inviting the ACLU to
run America's war effort. I understand as well the temptations
of moral purity -- the vanity of thundering moral denunciations
from bystanders.
Still, I hear the
many voices now say that the only way we can protect the United
States from attack is to engage in torture. I recognize the moral
logic: It is the same voice that justifies, say, forced abortions
in China to deal with overpopulation, or creating new human life
in order to destroy and dissect it for medical research.
As someone who (along
with millions of other New Yorkers, nothing special) spent hours
on Sept. 11, 2001, wondering if my son and husband were still
alive, I say: Satan is a liar and the father of all lies.
There has to be a
better way. On that, I will take my own and my family's, and my
country's, chances.
Copyright
2005 Maggie Gallagher
