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ANDY McCARTHY; THE TORTURED CONSCIENCE….THE DEBATE CONTINUES

Posted By Ruth King on February 19th, 2010

NRO — The Corner
Friday, February 19, 2010

Re: Torture, Conscience, and the Tortured Conscience [Andy McCarthy]

Mike, I’m left wondering what your catechism says about bearing false witness. Your seeming generosity of spirit doesn’t alter the fact that, from the very first sentence, your post is a smear. And a careless one, at that. “[N]ot having followed his work in detail”? How do you not bother to look at someone’s work before labeling that work the advocacy of torture, which you proceed to decry as a “great evil”? If you’re going to indict someone for a great evil, oughtn’t you at least have your facts straight about what he’s saying and what he’s not saying?

Marc has not advocated torture. He has defended the practices that were used by the CIA in its interrogation program. If you had actually “followed his work in detail,” you would know that his book discusses, at considerable length, why the practices employed by the CIA were not torture. There is, for example, a chapter in Courting Disaster called “Tough, Not Torture”, which explains what torture actually is and why the CIA tactics, including waterboarding, did not approach the legal line.

This is not analogous to legalistic hocus-pocus by which killing an unborn child somehow becomes not killing because the law denies the child’s personhood. Our law and our practices did not dehumanize the handful of jihadists who were subjected to forcible interrogation tactics. They recognized the personhood of the terrorists, recognized the evil and criminality of torture, and therefore grappled with the reality of torture in order to make certain that our tactics did not cross into that reality. By contrast, you and the angry declaimers at the parish are demagoguing. You convict first and have the trial later — or not at all. “How to stop U.S.-sponsored torture”? “Resort to [torture] in the past decade is a black spot on America’s record”? Do you ever ask, “Should we first examine whether what the U.S. did amounted to torture” before we start calling people torturers? That’s what Marc did, and after an exacting analysis he concluded it was not torture, and that is why he is defending it. For that, he gets called a “torture advocate”?

It is certainly a principled position to say, “I don’t think we should ever engage in forcible coercion.” I doubt it is ground that you’d be able to defend in a coherent way — we inflict many things on people that are a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding (e.g., killing, harsh physical restraints, lengthy prison sentences) that present little or no moral hand-wringing if the provocation for inflicting them is severe enough. But at least calling it “forcible coercion” would be an argument rooted in fact. Your argument, instead, is in the nature of “Are you still beating your wife?” The accused is presumed guilty and then the accuser gets to feel good about himself by magnanimously listing all the reasons why the wife had it coming.

Torture is the infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering. The physical kind must be excruciating and the mental kind must cause profound and lasting psychological harm. The law has always taken care to distinguish torture from lesser forms of abuse because it is the most heinous of acts. It is important not to trivialize it by applying the explosive label torture to acts that don’t warrant it. Moreover, there has always been a demanding standard of criminal intent: the accused must specifically intend to torture his victim. The police officer who shoots a murder suspect in a gun fight may inflict severe pain, and know full well when he fires his weapon that severe pain is a certain result, but he doesn’t commit torture — indeed, he doesn’t commit a crime of any kind.

And as too often happens in discussions of “torture,” your concerns about morality are entirely one-sided. Officers of the executive branch have a solemn obligation to protect the American people. It is their highest responsibility. They are not good Samaritans. If there is a serious threat of a mass-murder attack, they are obliged to take all reasonable steps to stop it — and what is reasonable depends on the circumstances and the exigency. It is immoral to assume that obligation and then fail to carry it out. Unlike your angry fellow parishoners, these officials don’t get to be detached Monday morning quarterbacks. You condemn them for acting, but they will be just as vigorously condemned for failing to act if a preventable catastophe happens.

What exactly did the CIA do that you think was “torture”?

02/19 08:57 AMShare

Thursday, February 18, 2010
Torture, Conscience, and the Tortured Conscience [Mike Potemra]

The question has been raised, Was it appropriate for a Catholic TV network to provide a platform for a torture advocate? In my view, the answer is yes. Marc Thiessen, who appeared on Raymond Arroyo’s TV show The World Over, defends the practices of the past decade because he believes that these practices are necessary to defend innocent lives. Not having followed his work in detail, I have no reason to believe that he is acting in bad faith. He was a government official with some knowledge of the issue. His conscience tells him that there is a moral necessity to disregard the Catholic Catechism in this particular case — and, as Newman reminded us, conscience has sacred claims. Furthermore, if the polls are to be trusted, he speaks not only for the majority of Americans but for the majority of American Catholics. His is, therefore, a view that it would be unwise to omit from the discussion. The fault was not in giving Marc a platform; the fault, if any, was in not having a guest who defended the official teaching, and thus perhaps leaving a misimpression of what the official teaching is.

I realize I run the risk of being accused of special pleading in this defense of Marc (and of EWTN), so I should probably point out that I disagree with him on the underlying issue. I think torture is a great evil, and that the resort to it in the past decade is a black spot on America’s record. But I am not in a stone-throwing mood against people like Marc, because I realize that the accusation that someone is not living to up to his or her religious creed is one of the lowest and least helpful arguments imaginable. For heaven’s sake, I — in religious matters — am now a rather liberal high-church Episcopalian, and I find even that pronouncedly lenient ethic hard to live up to. And, on the very issue of torture, it is easy for me to imagine a case in which I would break down and allow it: Say it’s 1942, and the Nazis, having conquered England and the U.S. eastern seaboard, have developed an H-bomb and plan to use it against St. Louis to bring the rest of the U.S. into submission. American forces in St. Louis have in custody a Nazi agent with knowledge of the specifics that would enable them to foil the attack and turn the tide of the war. The Nazi agent is being uncooperative. I concede that it would be morally wrong to torture him – but I also admit that I would more than likely sacrifice that principle. (An interrogator in Iraq, interviewed for an anti-torture video I saw recently, says he and his crew were up against ticking-time-bomb scenarios often, and were able to get the information they needed without resort to torture. I’m not sure I would have the moral courage to take the chance that he is right.)

So the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak: I accuse myself. I have been dismayed by how rapidly the resort to torture has been undertaken in recent years, in response to much lesser threats than the one in my hypothetical. (Two or three incompetent pantybombers in a decade doth not a Hitler make.) But I recognize that my difference from Marc and the others on his side of this discussion is one of degree, not of kind. And there are other reasons to ask people for generosity of spirit – notably because we may have need of it ourselves. I recently found myself in a position that makes me realize what it must be like to be Marc Thiessen, even as I took a point of view quite distant from his. I was at a meeting at a liberal Catholic parish here in New York, the purpose of which was to discuss how to stop U.S.-sponsored torture. People were angrily declaiming, How is it possible that the U.S. could permit such a heinous practice? To which I responded, basically, with the following explanation: It is a negative consequence of something that is actually very positive about our country. More than any other country, we believe that there is no limit to what we can achieve, no problem that can’t be solved, no obstacle that can’t be overcome. This is the attitude that has made us great, but it also exposes us to the risk that we can come to believe that there are no real moral limits that conflict with our desires. When we find that an unborn child is inconvenient, for example, we redefine it as not having ‘personhood,’ and kill it — problem solved! Similarly, now, when he have a real (or just suspected) jihadist in our custody, we say, he should be understood not chiefly as a rights-bearing person with human dignity that should be respected, but rather as a box containing secrets that we can rip apart at will — and now our country is safe! We figure out what we want to do, then we set talented lawyers the task of defining our new limits in accord with our desires. Harry Blackmun spent many months researching the law, consulting medical professionals and concerned citizens, before writing the legal memo “drawing the lines” on abortion – a memo we now call Roe v. Wade. The legal justifications for torture, and the widespread public support for it, materialized in a similar way.

Now, there were perhaps, in that room, some people who were not offended by what I said; there may even have been some who were in agreement. But the only audible and visible response was negative — eye-rolling, dark mutterings, and dirty looks, as if to say: Here we are, trying to have a serious moral discussion about torture, and this right-wing nut has to bring abortion into it. I’m not so naïve as to have thought there would be no pro-choicers there — but I think I know now what it feels like to have someone read you out of a moral community, even when you’re acting in good faith.

So yes, it’s important to hear Marc Thiessen’s view, expressed as well as he can express it. Only by understanding it can we start to move toward what I hope will be a happier chapter in our nation’s history.

UPDATE: Thanks to all the readers who have written. Most of them have pointed out that Marc does not consider waterboarding to be torture, and therefore cannot be a torture advocate; many have gone on to demand that I offer my own definition of torture. My response is that there were many definitions of torture in existence before the current controversy, definitions under which waterboarding would have been considered torture. But instead of trying to find a definition, and to get everyone to agree to it, I ask myself the following, about any given interrogation practice: “If agents of Fidel Castro’s regime, or of China’s laogai, engaged in this activity, would I condemn it as torture?” That, I think, is the wisest course, because asking this question prevents me from endorsing acts that might be evil simply because it may be in my own self-protective interest (as an American who doesn’t want to be injured or killed in a terrorist attack) to do so. I do not question Marc Thiessen’s sincerity in asserting that waterboarding is not torture. I say merely that I would question my own sincerity were I personally to make that assertion.

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