Why Catholics Have to Reiterate the Church’s teaching on torture

Last updated on: December 31, 2014 at 3:48 pm by Mark Shea

Why Catholics Have to Reiterate the Church’s teaching on torture 2014-12-31T15:48:22-07:00 Mark Shea

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It’s really this simple: the barbarization of the conservative movement is being pressed forward by people like Dick Cheney (whose is zealously promoting his legacy of war crimes as a positive good) and organizations like CPAC are falling in right behind him. Now we have Marc Thiessen selling this poison in EWTN and Raymond Arroyo eagerly assisting.

More than this, we have Thiessen now abandoning any pretense that the Rubber Hose Right advocates torture only in extreme situations like the suspense movie Ticking Time Bomb. M.Z. Forrest explains:

5 years ago, plus or minus, those that wanted to remain respectable made a big deal about torture not being illicit in the case of a ticking time bomb. They did this in part to avoid having to defend each and every instance that our government used torture. In particular, the revelations of Abu Ghraib were fresh, and there was no need to defend what went on there, because the dominant narrative was that the acts resulted from individuals acting on their volitions. Additionally, an absolute prohibition of torture (or torture-like acts, since they didn’t wish to concede that what they were describing was torture) had the unpleasant effect of leaving us impotent in the face of very constrained scenarios. This condition has a long history of being shocking to American sensibilities as was shown when the Vatican wrote that they did not find embryo adoption to be the best solution to embryos leftover from IVF. It was generally conceded at the time that ticking time bombs would be exceptional, since they had the requirements both of immediate general knowledge and having a known conspirator in custody with immediate and specific knowledge. It was always conceded that raping the conspirator’s wife, for example, would be wrong in an effort to coerce a conspirator.

Now the 2nd generation of torture defenders are using these same arguments except they have removed immediacy from them. In fact, the time no longer even needs to be finite. Lives saved no longer has to be concrete, but is now an abstract device. Thiessen’s post on Abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber, is illustrative. A portion is:

What Obama officials don’t seem to understand is that the intelligence Abdulmutallab has is perishable. He was supposed to be vaporized with the plane when it exploded. As soon as al-Qaeda learned he had survived, they began shutting down e-mail accounts, bank accounts, moving and hiding operatives, and closing the intelligence trails he could lead us down. Every second, every minute, every day he did not talk resulted in lost counterterrorism opportunities. If he starts talking three months from now, that’s not good enough. [emp. original]

These are the things Thiessen proposes we should have tortured Abdulmutallab in order to gain: e-mail accounts, bank accounts, and the locations and names of Al Qaeda members. How is this materially different from what the Soviet Union would have wanted if they had captured one of our CIA agents during the Cold War? We certainly would have called torture by its name if the Soviets had done it. In fact, at this point Thiessen has made the alleged exception so sweeping that I have difficulty recalling instances where torture has been used historically that would qualify as wrongful torture under Thiessen. While I disagree in principle with torturing one man to stop another man from killing twenty, I can at least understand the gut impulse. Thiessen and his defenders however think we should torture people over gmail accounts. Is this seriously what Catholics want to defend? Is this really the hill you want to die on? It is one thing to disagree with the Church over the illegality of abortion in the instances of rape. It is several degrees of magnitude different to claim that you disagree with the church because you think a woman should be able to have more than 5 abortions per year.

Prolifers *should* recognize this process of defining deviancy down. They have themselves pointed it out many many times as our culture moved from embracing artificial contraception to embracing abortion to embracing euthanasia. It’s the same process Charles Krauthammer underwent when he passed from saying we should torture to save a million innocents from the ubiquitous Ticking Bomb to saying we should torture if we have the “slightest belief” we could save just one.

People who are capable of thinking, as distinct from cowards who wet themselves in panic, can see where this sort of thing goes. Put Krauthammer and Thiessen together and you have an apologia which says that the state has the right to torture anybody if Caesar as the “slightest belief” that a stray email or address book might eventually lead to something or other that may or may not be useful.

In a certain way, all this is a kind of apotheosis of Generation Narcissus thinking. Having arrogantly assumeed that we invented all other aspects of morality (especially sex) we Baby Boomers are casting aside the entire system of civilized law that separates the evidence gather phase from the punishment phase because we are so much smarter than our parents. It’s the same old story. And as with our revolutionary improvements on sex, we will likewise create another huge social trainwreck in our panic and impatience for results through ruthlessness.

Meanwhile, the invaluable Zippy has been methodically cataloging the six years of pure crap arguments which Catholics–Catholics!–have been yammering at in the attempt to make excuses for the whole filthy thing. His series is summarized here. Read all the posts but, in particular, read the “Gasping Grimoire” post. Also, his methodical dismemberment of excuse-making for waterboarding is superb.

Catholics need to get vocal about this. The Thiessens of the world are not going to shut up because the GOP has committed to this as a core value just as the Dems have committed to abortion as a core value. Like it or not, we now have a Saruman as well as a Sauron to contend with.

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