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
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-12_14_05_MG.html