What Would, In Fact, Jesus Do On Abu Ghraib And Torture?

I give Andrew Sullivan a hard time sometimes, especially on his Trig Palin tangents.  I don't often say this much, but today Sully's given us a beautiful piece on the Catholic arguments for and against the United States using torture to save lives.  Former Bush speechwriter and author Marc Thiessen makes the argument that these techniques are morally justified from not just a moral standpoint, but a religious one.   Sully absolutely destroys this argument with the best writing I've seen out of him in a long, long time.

But the Catechism is very clear about this:

Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.

Notice that torture for a Catholic includes "moral violence," in which a human being's body is not even touched - the kind of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, or crippling total isolation deployed by the US government for months at a time. Subjecting someone to weeks of sleep deprivation as was done to al-Qhatani, or freezing human beings to states of near-deadly hypothermia, let alone threatening to crush the testicles of a prisoner's child, as John Yoo said was within the president's legal and constitutional authority in the war on terror, is obviously at the very least moral violence. The idea any of it is somehow defensible as a Catholic position is so offensive, so absurd, so outrageous it beggars belief.
Moreover, the US Catholic Bishops have also made their position quite clear. From Dr. Stephen Colecchi, Director, Office of International Justice and Peace, Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops:

"Torture is about the rights of victims, but it is also about who we are as a people. In a statement on Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, issued in preparation for our recent national elections [2008], the bishops reminded Catholics that torture is 'intrinsically evil' and 'can never be justified.' There are some things we must never do. We must never take the lives of innocent people. We must never torture other human beings."

This is not a hedged statement. It is a categorical statement that what Thiessen is defending is, from a Catholic point of view, intrinsically evil and something that cannot be done under any circumstances. Pope John Paul II's Enclyclical, Veritatis Splendor, contains the following passage:

"... 'there exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object'. ... 'whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity' ... 'all these and the like are a disgrace, and so long as they infect human civilization they contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honour due to the Creator.'"

The notion of the integrity of the human person, of human dignity, is integral to the Catholic faith. We are all made in the image of God, imago Dei. The central and divine figure in our faith, Jesus of Nazareth, was brutally tortured. He was also robbed of dignity, forced to wear a mocking crown of thorns, sent to carry a crippling cross through the streets of Jerusalem, mocked while in agony, his body exposed naked and twisted in the stress position known as crucifixion - which was often done without nails by Romans so that the death was slow and agonizing in the way stress positions are designed to be. Ask John McCain. That the Catholic church in the Inquisition deployed these techniques reveals the madness and evil that can infect even those institutions purportedly created to oppose all such things.

The entire post is worth your time to read.  Please do so.

I don't talk about my religious beliefs much, other than to say that I was raised Catholic and come from a long line of Catholics.  My religion has always been ACC college basketball, if I have one.  But this is the most moving argument I've read in some time that tackles this topic, and it is why I still believe that President Obama and AG Eric Holder need to prosecute these crimes.

Because that's what they are.  Crimes.  Not just legally, but morally too.