This was wrong, and we can’t make that moral truth go awayLet’s start by admitting one of the strongest points made by those upset about the damage done to America’s foreign interests by the release of a 528-page “executive summary” of a 6,700-page report that remains classified. Let’s start by granting them the claim that this is clearly a partisan document, released in the waning days of the Democratic majority in the Senate and endorsed only by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
And why not give them that claim? It seems pretty clear that the summary was created with partisan intent, and it is certainly being used for partisan purpose: a weapon designed for the battles of domestic politics rather than a serious consideration of the role of American violence in the world. Thus, for example, both the NBC reporter Richard Engel and the former Democratic senator Bob Kerrey have denounced the result as a predetermined score-settling with the CIA and a betrayal of the bipartisan role of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
If the summary had been delayed for only a few months, held back till the Republicans took over the Senate, it would surely have named a few people beyond only those associated with former President Bush. It would surely not have passed over in silence the fact—insisted on by both former CIA acting director John McLaughlin and CIA veteran Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., along with the former CIA interrogator and current defender of torture who writes under the name “Jason Beale”—that the same Democratic leadership now professing shock and outrage was informed multiple times about what was happening (and consented to it, with at least their silence).
Of course, to grant that point, we have to use phrases such as “current torture defender,” which ought to stick in the throat like a fish bone, choking us into dry, painful hacks as we try to pronounce them. But that should not stop us from recognizing as untrustworthy hypocrites many of those who released this summary—along with many of those now publicizing it, still infected by what conservatives during the previous administration mocked as “Bush-derangement syndrome.”
While we’re at it, let’s also allow the hard-edged foreign-policy types another of their points. Let’s admit that torture may actually work at getting accurate and useful information. Although the Senate committee’s summary denies that anything pertinent was obtained through “enhanced interrogation,” the subsequent statement by President Obama was more circumspect. Even while it pledged that the United States will no longer use these interrogation techniques, the president’s statement seemed carefully phrased to avoid denying that (as Stephen Hayes notes at the Weekly Standard) information about couriers, obtained via torture, helped in his administration’s much-boasted tracking down of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
Finally, let’s agree with one more point: There isn’t a competent governing class in the history of the world that would have allowed something like this summary to see the light of day. Yes, we might say, the Senate should have quietly compiled this horrifying report about what the government’s proxies in the CIA have been doing. And yes, the Senate should have followed the report with efficient measures to shut down all such programs. But the reason for making the report and then using it, quietly and efficiently, is precisely the damage that torture would do to American interests if the news ever got out. So what kind of idiocy then makes public a summary of the report, thereby doing exactly the damage such a report should have been created to avoid? The release of the CIA torture summary is proof, if we needed it, that we have finally lost even the last vestige of the old Cold War-style political accord, where no matter how strong their disagreement on domestic policy, Republicans and Democrats would at least pretend they were doing foreign affairs in a bipartisan manner.
To read the 167-page minority report from the Intelligence Committee is to think that the Republican senators have the better case on all three of these points: The majority summary from the Democrats genuinely is partisan, torture actually can work, and none of this should have been made public in this way. And once all three of those points are granted, nothing remains.
Nothing, that is, except the raw fact of torture—the ugly truth that the United States licensed anal penetration, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and all the rest; the vile reality that men have been cruelly tormented in my name and yours.
Yes, I know the hard realism that led George Orwell to sneer, “Those who abjure violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.” And, no, I do not demand a complete Christian pacifism, whereby we stand like sheep among the wolves, waiting to be devoured. Rightly understood, Catholic just-war theory is not merely a bar against violence in bad cases; it’s also an encouragement for violence in good cases—a cry for righteous anger expressed in force, when needed. For that matter, I suspect (without knowing for certain) that the general trend of the United States has been toward less torture over the years: less in the War or Terror than during the Second World War, Korea, or Vietnam.
But none of that matters. I did not license—you did not license, none of us licensed—the acts in the report too nauseating to describe here. This was wrong, and we can’t make that moral truth go away even by granting to the CIA’s defenders all their claims. “Is the Intel Worth What Inhumane Practices Make Us?” asks the subtitle of a news article here on Aleteia by Mark Stricherz. Even through his carefully neutral, reportorial tone, the answer comes clear that no, the intelligence we got wasn’t worth it. If evidence exists that Osama bin Laden was found through information obtained by torture, we still lack proof that no other paths led to him—proof that he would not have been found without the tortured information. From the fact that the United States has not suffered a major terrorist attack since 9/11, we cannot leap to the claim that torture is the reason we have not been attacked.
The fact of American torture is a stick with which the United States is beaten by countries, from China to Turkey, which practice much more torture (even while they refrain from documenting it in public reports). For that matter, the cry of torture has been deployed to attack everything leftist radicals oppose—as, for instance, this spring, when Members of the United Nation Committee Against Torture declared that the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion was a torturing of women. But again, none of that matters. None of that touches the sheer fact that we are all soiled by the practices of the CIA, undertaken in the panicked reaction to 9/11 by our politicians, both Republican and Democrat.
A Catholic analysis—whether from Pope Benedict or Pope Francis—deepens the point. It is not a counsel of perfection to say we should not allow this. It is a counsel of prudence in our concrete situation, here and now. The practice of torture deliberately injures the image of God in the bodies of the tortured, with a far more distant Double Effect than the injuries caused by ordinary warfare. The practice of torture endangers the souls of the torturers. It corrupts the culture with a utilitarian doctrine of ends that erodes awareness of moral absolutes, and it weakens the sense of universal law by allowing in foreign places what we prohibit at home.
What’s more, the commentator Max Boot
is absolutely right that the Democratic senators’ report will give our enemies “more fodder for their propaganda mills.” He means that as a reason not to have distributed the report widely, but Boot’s observation reveals a deeper point: We need a measure of moral stature for America to have good effect in its projection of force in the world, and the practice of torture profoundly weakens any last vestige of that stature (and thus is already being trumpeted by those, from the intellectual salons of Europe to the activists in the Arab street, who wish us ill).
In other words, the CIA was wrong not just as a matter of moral absolutes. The agency was also wrong practically and prudentially, for in our current politics, how could anyone imagine this would stay secret? The rest of the world will now describe America not as the City on a Hill and a bright light to the nations, but as the dungeon dug beneath that hill—red with the light of a torturer’s brand, glowing and smoking in an evil fire. And how can we deny it?
But the reason for talking about damage to the American ideal extends beyond the practical effect in international relations. The religious commentator Rod Dreher has urged “Christian conservatives” to use the torture report as an occasion to turn away at last from their “idolatrous attitude” toward America. That’s an intelligible analysis, I suppose, but it feels a little glib—for it misses a deeper point about the damage done by American torture. We dwell, after all, in concrete and particular situations; we have our participation in the life of a nation as a quality of lived experience.
Perhaps, in the most evil of situations, Christians must retreat, declaring their particular setting too corrupt to allow participation in civil life. But how is it idolatry to say that we live better in a nation of which we can be proud? A nation whose ideal calls us to be better people? In addition to all the other evils wrought by torture, there is the damage done to the civil frame in which American Christians actually dwell. The fact of CIA torture will allow certain foreign factions to rage against the nation. But they don’t like us much anyway—and a deeper problem is that the fact of CIA torture means we are not much able to like ourselves.
Not today, anyway. And not for many days to come.
Joseph Bottum is a best-selling writer of Kindle Singles on Amazon and author, most recently, of An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America. His new EP, Grace and Gladness: Two 2014 Christmas Songs, is available for downloading at iTunes and at Amazon. Official music videos of “Some Come to See the Lord” and “Joy Will Keep Us” are free to watch on YouTube.
