We Can’t Be ‘Sanctimonious’ About Torture

Last updated on: August 14, 2014 at 2:14 pm by Leah Libresco

We Can’t Be ‘Sanctimonious’ About Torture 2014-08-14T14:14:09-04:00 Leah Libresco

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I’m at First Things today, discussing the unpleasant rhetoric that still surrounds the United States’s torture program, and the way the President managed to acknowledge its existence while minimizing the gravity of the abuses:

As the Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation program comes closer to publication, truths are finally being extracted – not from suspected terrorists, but from publishers and politicians.

The New York Times announced last Thursday that the paper will finally drop the euphemism “enhanced interrogation” in favor of “torture” to describe “incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information.”

That puts the Times only a week behind President Obama, who conceded the debate himself at a press conference, when he admitted, “We tortured some folks.”) He quickly followed this admission with a warning not to draw the wrong lessons from the abuses.

…Forced by the facts to talk in terms of “torture,” Obama still managed to keep obfuscating the issue in his statement. The specific weasel words change, but the sentiment remains the same. If Obama means to reassure us that torture was a hard, but necessary choice, he still shouldn’t be warning us about the danger of sanctimony.

Sanctimony is what we feel about other folks’ sins – people who are far enough away for us to scoff at. But the abuses that Obama has finally correctly described as torture weren’t committed by anyone far enough away to allow us to feel a Pharisaical pride that we are not like these tax collectors and torturers.

Read more at First Things…

No justice, no peace.

Today is the feast day of St. Maximillian Kolbe, who gave up his life to save another prisoner in Auschwitz, and I’m beginning his novena today.

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