Just another pledge class at Animal House, right fellas?

Mark Shea posted an article on the Inside Catholic website about our government’s recent experiance with torturing prisoners of war, and the defense of such by alleged “Catholic” Christians, as though by any, er, TORTURED reading of the four Gospels you could make any kind of logical case for torturing people whose country you illegally invaded.

And for all the trouble he took to write a careful, well-reasoned article about it, he was SAVAGED by a gaggle of pro-torture “Catholics”, whose arguments distilled down to some version of “when there’s a ticking time-bomb that will kill thousands of innocents, taking pliers to a n*tsack or waterboarding someone 180+ times is morally justified, dammit, and Jesus would have wanted it that way, oh, and by the way, it isn’t torture, it’s no worse than a fraternity hazing or a prank”.

I chimed in to refute each of these inanities, for which I will, no doubt be savaged in turn by these moral midgets who claim that an abstract faith in an invisible, omnipotent giant in the sky is somehow superior to an internally consistent moral and ethical system;

Right On, Mark, Stand The Moral High Ground

The defenders of torture (uh, “enhanced interrogation”, sorry) here have demonstrated that they are not only thinking in an un-Christian way about depersonating prisoners for (fill in the blank) reasons, but have displayed either a willful disregard, or profound ignorance of what was until recently a widely-believed cultural norm regarding torture and treatment of prisoners in general.

When the maker of a movie or a TV program in days past depicted Americans captured by, say, Communists, the norm observed with regard to interrogation was that the prisoner was required to provide to his captor only his name, rank, and serial number, the implication being that any further interrogation of the prisoner without his consent was to be regarded as against international law and the laws, customs, and mores of war.

This set of mores was underlined for us by the reports during and after the Vietnam War of the Viet Cong treatment of prisoners of war, which caused widespread, righteous outrage.

It was not only Catholics, Christians, or Democrats that were expected to adhere to these norms, they were widely regarded as applying to civilization universally. How sad, in particular that there are Catholics who now argue in FAVOR of destroying this set of mores.

Morality, particularly Christian morality (since God is the source of moral authority and operates everywhere and always) is supposed to be universally applicable. How can a society or government accord rights against self-incrimination to domestic criminals, no matter how heinous their acts, and deny those same rights arbitrarily?

How can a society demand a presumption of innocence and a fair trial for a domestic suspect, no matter how heinous of infamous his crime, and then arbitrarily deny such presumption of innocence and a fair trial for those accused of being “terrorists”? None of the people tortured were given a trial or anything like one. Their guilt was simply presumed, and punishment carried out.

The concept of “just war” evolves out of a moral right of self-defense. Leaving the lack of such moral sanction for the war in Iraq out of this for a minute, many of the people captured and tortured in this instance were arguably fighting in self-defense against an invasion / occupation. While leaving them morally responsible for their actions, there is no sanction for treating them differently because they were captured “on the battlefield” or any other reason.

With regard to the references to the SERE program – the program was put in place to teach soldiers and sailors how to deal with and survive torture methods known to have been used on American prisoners, a clearly pragmatic response to the application of immoral methods against prisoners of war covered by the Geneva Conventions and other treaties by individuals and regimes that did not care about their moral standing.

Being subjected to the techniques in a practice environment is in no way equivalent to being subjected to them for real – in training, the soldier or sailor knows the date by which the mistreatment will end, and he knows that the mission of his captors is to keep him alive. The prisoner subjected to this treatment knows none of this. Thr difference in the potential to cause physical and psychological terror is magnitudes higher.

There are lots of practical reasons not to torture prisoners of war. The moral reason is that it is un-Christian to do so. Jesus himself demonstrated the immorality of torturing and murdering prisoners with his own torture and death.

How can a person understand the moral implications of Christ’s passion and death as a condenmation of immoral and unjust earthly regimes, and still condone inflicting such against others?