What Would Jack Bauer Do?

Last updated on: January 1, 2015 at 3:05 pm by Mark Shea

What Would Jack Bauer Do? 2015-01-01T15:05:00-07:00 Mark Shea

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In which I point out the bleedin’ obvious to some amazingly reality-resistant readers at Inside Catholic. Fave rave comment so far from a torture defender:

Crushing of testicles is probably a disproportionate sentence for anything short of rape (yes, nine year olds are capable of it!). (Highlights mine)

Since the release of the torture memos, one notices a certain flop sweat desperation in the apologetics being mounted on behalf of torture. After six years of lying and denial from torture defenders, they have had to admit to, well, lying and denial.

So since only total Kool-Aid drinkers can now continue to maintain that “we do not torture”, the emphasis in defending Bush-era torture policies has to go elsewhere, namely on a really robust consequentialism (“Hey! You have to admit it *works*!) that totally ignores the teaching of Veritatis Splendor (and the rest of the Catholic moral tradition) that the ends do not justify the means.

Several different routes are attempted in doing this. The first is the Brutal Pagan route which simply laughs at Church teaching and tells the bishops to mind the next world while Real Men with Laptops attend to this one.

A less tried, but still ingenious, route is to charge that since critics of torture focus their fire on conservative torture defenders, this proves that they are secretly Democrat partisans. The argument goes that many Democrats (notably Nancy Pelosi) apparently were briefed on Bush’s torture policies and made no complaint, so failure to have spent the past six years arraigning the non-existent phalanx of Dems torture apologists along with the Administration and its shills is proof of partisanship.

Overlooked in this new ploy are several things. First, and foremost is that neither I, nor any critic of torture I know of believes that anybody involved in making torture the policy of these United States should be above the law. I think anybody, Dem or GOP, who authorized this should be prosecuted. The news about Pelosi and others is, for the vast majority of Americans (including me) news. On a day to day basis, the torture apologetics have (with the exception of Alan Dershowitz) come exclusively from the Right. But I have no problem with prosecuting Dems if the news stories are true that they were passive enablers. I merely have trouble taking seriously the zealous torture defender of the past siz years who is now busily adding another Orwellian layer of hypocrisy to the sediment of lies he has accumulated. For at the end of the day, to make this new accusation of “partisanship”, he is saying, “It’s not torture, and the victims deserve it, and Bush did the right thing in ordering and engineering it all—and the Dems were wrong to passively support such a grave evil.” Good luck with that.

Still another creative use of Catholic moral teaching is the attempt to press Just War theory into a defense of the condemned theory of consequentialism. It goes like this: one of the criteria of ius ad bellum demands that a just war have some prospect for success. According to the torture defender, that is the same thing as saying “The ends justify the means”. Therefore, Pope John Paul was wrong to condemn consequentialism in Veritatis Splendor. It therefore follows, according to this argument, that consequentialist defenses of torture have merit.

What this laughable analysis fails to note is that “likelihood of success” is not the only criterion for a Just War. If a war fails to meet any of the other criteria of Just War theory, it is not magically rendered “just” simply because an aggressor thinks he has good odds of winning it by nuking his neighbor during treaty negotiations and pouring a million troops over his borders in a surprise attack. All the other criteria for Just War must be met before a nation can justly contemplate war. All the criterion of “likelihood of success” adds is the stipulation that, even if you are in the right on every other criterion, throwing your people into an unwinnable war is to fight an unjust war since you will bear the responsibility for thousands of pointless deaths.

Finally, we come to the “You’ve gotta admit it works!” defense. Though some of my readers are willing to claim that “torture never works” I tend not to put much weight on such an absolute claim. I’m willing to believe it might “work” just as I’m quite certain first degree murder “works” quite well at times. That is, it achieves the goal that was sought by eliminating a problem at a certain cost. One can point to highly successful murderers who got away with it and profited mightily from the transaction. Richard Rich’s perjury worked too. He died in his bed, old and wealthy. All sorts of evil acts “work”. So I don’t see why torture can’t “work” at times too.

It’s just that, well, it sends you to hell and ultimately makes you into a creature which you meet, if at all, only in a nightmare–*especially* if you go to your grave congratulating yourself with “It worked! Damn, I’m righteous!”

That’s the *core* case against torture, not the side issue of whether it works. However, that said, it’s also worth pushing back just a bit on the Rubber Hose Right assumption that, say what you will, brutal efficiency is efficient. Because there is evidence to suggest that the same people who lied about torturing in the first place are also lying when they tell you that “it worked”.

So, for instance, we find them caught in a naked lie that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed foiled a plot to attack LA. We find Bush torturing prisoners *after* they had already obtained all the information he had without the use of torture (and in nothing like a “ticking time bomb” situation which was constantly used as the all-excusing rubric for torture). And most sinister of all, we find them deliberately and consciously using Commie techniques designed to elicit false confessions. Why would somebody deliberately try to get false confessions? There are only two reasons I can think of. The first, of course, is that once you start torturing people, you have to have a justification for doing so. Torturing innocent people looks rather bad, so just in case you wind up torturing somebody like Maher Arar, it’s always a good idea to get them to admit something, even if they are innocent. Then you have a fig leaf for the war crimes tribunal.

But there is another reason as well. the evidence is now piling up that the Bushies *wanted* false testimony so that they could claim a link between Saddam and al-Quaeda and use it as a justification for war.

That’s the thing about embracing grave moral evil: you tend to become a liar. You also tend to delve further into evil, such as the torture of children with the concommitent need to lie still more to cover up that.

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