A Guy in the Pew

The following is a page from a heavily redacted report by the Inspector General of the CIA. Although the redactions are immense, the report does conform that waterboarding was used on at least three detainees by the CIA. The full report can be found here . Here is the ACLU's explanation of the document: After CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly admitted that the CIA has, in fact, waterboarded detainees, the agency could no longer cling to its last excuses for covering up the use of the very word “waterboarding” in CIA records. As a result, yesterday we obtained several heavily redacted documents in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the ACLU and other organizations seeking documents related to the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas. While the documents do, in fact, reveal the word “waterboarding” or some variation, they leave pretty much everything else to the imagination. The pages that haven’t been completely withheld (ma...

Aaron Krager of Faithfully Liberal has started a new campaign called Never: Religious Bloggers Against Torture. since I am a religious blogger and am against torture, I joined the Facebook group. Here is a link the the website. You can find my own past posts on torture here . Former Navy Chaplain George Clifford has a great essay at the Daily Episcopalian that argues that torture is both immoral and ineffective. Here is the money quote: People who abandon a morality founded upon firm principles or unwavering virtue for consequentialism lack a moral floor below which they are unwilling to proceed. No act is too bad to contemplate if the potential benefits are of sufficient magnitude. Torture involves acts that should lie beyond the bounds of acceptable morality – always. Fortunately, debates about torture do not have to end with neither side speaking in terms the other cannot really understand. Not only is torture antithetical to Christian principles and incompatible with Christian vir...

Be sure to read Andrew Sullivan's full post today on the morality of torture. It deserves a full read, but here are some highlights: The manner in which free societies lose their moral compass is always incremental. Step by step by step, certain core values are whittled away. There is rarely a moment at which a government stands up, and asks its people if they wish to abandon such "quaint" notions as the Geneva Conventions, the rule of law, humane interrogation or habeas corpus. These things are abandoned incrementally or secretly, slice by slice, euphemism by euphemism, the chronology always clearer in retrospect than at the time. And each incremental step is always portrayed as a small but essential temporary sacrifice for the sake of security in a time of great and imminent peril. And so defenders of torture have long argued that is is essential to make torture legal - but only in the ticking time bomb scenario. And yet, such a scenario has not yet happened and the Uni...

This is a poster from World War II, and apparantly reflects what used to be (until 2001) the official view of torture by this country. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan --who has done a masterdul job showing that torture is un-American.

The Washington Post/Newsweek "On Faith" blog was devoted to the issue of whether torture is justified. The responses are a mixed bag. On the sad side, Chuck Colson apparantly asks "What would Jesus do" and comes to the theologically bizarre conclusion that Jesus would waterboard--or worse. I am kidding of course. Actaully, his analysis makes even less sense--apparantly there is a prudence exception to the teachings of the Gospel: Centuries of Christian ethical reflection would lead to the answer "no." Inflicting bodily or psychological harm on a helpless captive would be inconsistent with the Christian understanding of human dignity. But as with all moral obligations, there may be circumstances for exception. It is well understood in Christian tradition that while we are supposed to obey the law, there may be times when there is a higher obligation (see Aquinas, Augustine, and Martin Luther King). To rescue a drowning person, a Christian would be justi...

In my experience, some of the folks most horrified by the Bush Administration's "nuanced" definition of torture are Army officers--especially Army officers who have any experience with interrogation. Here is a recent example: I served 30 years in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer, which included extensive experience as an interrogator in Vietnam, in Panama and during the 1991 Gulf War. In the course of these sensitive missions, my teams and I collected mountains of excellent, verified information, despite the fact that we never laid a hostile hand on a prisoner. Had one of my interrogators done so, he would have been disciplined and most likely relieved of his duties. . . . In a recent interview with NPR's Terry Gross, I told her that 10 years ago the notion we would even be having such a dialogue was unthinkable. Somehow, perhaps blinded by the horrors of 9-11 and its aftermath, or by that barrage of chilling video footage of hooded executioners snuffing ou...

I have written previously about my perspective on torture as the former General Counsel of the Army. (For those who don't want to read my previous posts, I am very much against it.) I was therefore fascinated by an article in Harpers that describes a sermon against torture by John Donne in 1625: Recently I asked a clerical friend whether, considering the persistence of torture as a moral issue, he had thought of giving a sermon on the subject? He looked very uncomfortable and responded saying that his congregation was bipartisan and that he would be loathe to introduce a political issue as a sermon topic. It would fragment the congregation, he thought. Really? I reject the notion that torture is a political issue of any sort. It is a great moral issue. And when those who have a clerical vocation fail to understand it and address it in those terms, they do their flock and themselves a great disservice. Consider this John Donne sermon of 1625. It was delivered as his Easter Sunday s...

When I was General Counsel of the United States Army, I had the honor to work with lots of very impressive General officers. Paul Kern was one of the best. He played a very important role in pushing the Army toward a badly needed transformation. General Kern later played another very important role. He was the investigator of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison. Today he had a letter to the editor in the Washington Post yesterday that makes a very strong case that torture is not merely morally wrong, but also very unwise: As the investigator of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison, I confronted the outcome of current interrogation policies. We undermine the values that built this country and the credibility of our armed forces when we stoop to the level of some of our enemies. The awful events at Abu Ghraib and their far-reaching consequences could have been prevented if we had adhered to the Geneva Conventions. The policies that were implemented for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ...

I was the General Counsel of the United States Army for two years. Two of my colleagues from the Army (including a lawyer who worked for me) died in the September 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon. My pain that day was not just the shared pain felt by nearly every American. It was personal and it was very real. Yet, I am stunned, and a bit puzzled, at the fact that nearly all of the Republican candidates for President are enthusiastically supporting "enhanced interrogation techniques" as a tool in the War on Terror. The major exception, of course, being John McCain, who is the only candidate to have suffered torture. Two candidates, Giuliani and Romney, announced that they intend to withdraw the U.S. from the U.N. Convention against torture! Has the Republican Party become the Pro-torture party? For decades, it was the official position of the U.S. Government that torture (defined to include the techniques approved by the current Administration) was counter-productive, wrong, a...

General Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, has sent the personnel under his command with a very moving letter on torture. Here is the text in full: 10 May 2007 Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen serving in Multi-National Force—Iraq: Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right. Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy. This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we—not our enemies—occupy the moral high ground. This strategy has shown results in recent months. Al Qaeda’s indiscriminate attacks, for example, have finally started to turn a substantial portion of the Iraqi population against it. In view of this, I was concerned by the results of a recently released survey conducted last fall in Iraq that revealed an apparent unwillingness on the part of some US personnel to report illegal actions taken by fellow members of their units. ...