Torture

Nothing like finding that a post you’ve really tried hard to write well can be distilled down into ten words. As seen at the Evangelical Outpost, St. Augustine wrote, “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, love.”

The rest of the post is very interesting, and includes a good discussion in the comments on torture. In the post, Joe says,

I can’t make excuses for us on this one anymore: We have to take a firm stand against torture. Yes, there is a debate about what exactly is meant by that term. So let’s define it in a way that consistent with our belief in human dignity. And then let’s hold every politician in the country to that standard. Our silence is embarrassing.

Some responses to that are:

For instance, I don’t see how one could support the war (i.e., you aren’t a pacifist) and oppose forms of coercion such as waterboarding. In supporting the war, you are supporting the brutal and violent (and necessary) killing of enemy fighters. Something such as waterboarding which causes physical discomfort but no injury can yield intelligence that can save lives on both sides by shortening the conflict. Opposing such methods on the grounds of “human dignity” seems to be a rather selective application of that ideal.

It comes down to definitions – is waterboarding torture, for example? Evidently the U.S. said it was when the Japanese did it to us in WWII. I wasn’t aware of that, and haven’t verified it, but if true it’s very interesting. Then we have the rather facile suggestion that

If you even have to think about it, it’s torture.

There are a lot of unpleasant things in this world that do require thought to classify. For example, is listening to Susan Estrich reading Maureen Dowd columns aloud torture? I think there’s a case to be made for that, depending on the audience. What if she’s reading Noam Chomsky? Is that better, or worse? Snarkiness aside, it seems obvious to me that humiliation is not torture, it’s humiliation. Underwear on the head is not torture. Breaking someone’s fingers and manipulating the broken bones is torture. Loud music is not torture. An excessively cold room? Maybe. How cold and how long? Yes, we do in fact need to debate these things and establish clear guidelines.

As far as John McCain’s vaunted moral high ground, in order to stand on it, you first must be standing, i.e. alive. Did we occupy the moral high ground after Hiroshima and Dresden? Have we occupied it since then? Taking someone’s life is a far more serious matter than temporarily offending their dignity or causing temporary pain, and efforts to conflate the two show a lack of seriousness. The question is how far may we morally go, and what are the consequences?