Catholibertarian

Posted in Bible, Catholic Church, Catholic Church Doctrine, Foreign Policy, God, history, Morality, scripture, Theology | Tagged Bin Laden, Catholic Church, enhanced interrogation techniques, history, Panetta, physical and moral violence, Rev. Brian Harrison O.S., Secretary of Defense, torture, waterboarding, Zero Dark Thirty | 8 Comments

8 Responses

1. on February 5, 2013 at 3:01 am | Reply marcy

   I’d have to say that in my humble opinion anyone who supports torture has a screwed up sense of morality. Whether you call that torture enhanced interrogation or whatever else it remains true.

   Torture assumes that a people that assumes that every human being deserves to be treated with a basic level of dignity cannot actually survive. That really, we have to treat some people cruelly in order for the rest of us to lead our merry lives. That we have to threaten and bully and beat some people in order to get what we want out of them.

   And the article you link to only gives Biblical quotes on punishment. Not torture. So it is highly misleading to portend, as that author and seemingly you, that scripture is at all murky on it. Scripture only ever condones punishment for sin and even those have been somewhat repudiated by Christ. And again the Church condemned the only sort of torture it had encountered in its earliest stages. The whole article is weaselly and snakes its way to its point. It ignores any recent Papal clarifications of what the Church has said in ages past. It wants to find a way to allow for torture in Catholic theology, and it finds one.

   The Church with scarcely any exceptions finds torture morally wrong. From the Most Holy Father to your own local Parish Priest. And they are right. Torture and Catholicism are untenable even more than Libertarianism and Torture.

   
   
   • on February 5, 2013 at 4:14 am | Reply Teresa Rice

     One brief point – One needs to look past what has only been declared since Vatican II. People need to look at Tradition. Yes, the Church has a history of accepting torture and a number of saints even employed it for purposes of saving their souls. There is a Big difference between someone tearing out someone’s fingernails or putting flesh on fire for masochistic or sadistic purposes than a person who has the responsibility to keep us safe from someone who intends harm against many using water over the face or having a person stand for long periods of time. And waterboarding was only used on 3 people. Its not like these techniques are used indiscriminately against vast numbers of dangerous persons. These people are willing to blow themselves up in the name of Allah so doing less invasive, temporary uncomfortable techniques I have no problem with. Torture has not been defined and there is no consensus as to what constitutes torture so for you to assume any or all techniques that were used by our government to stop attacks were torture is premature. And don’t take some Leftist organization’s word for what constitutes torture. That’s mere speculation and political propaganda.

     
     
   • on February 5, 2013 at 6:12 pm | Reply Kevin Rice

     One of the points of the article was that it is not clear that certain techniques amount to torture. It follows from that point that it is not at all warranted to assume that the reluctant tolerance of those techniques amounts to supporting torture. I can’t say I am impressed by the question-begging fallacy being employed above, e.g. – “whether you call it torture or not it ‘remains true’ that it is torture.” Only if it was true to begin with can it “remain true”. So even if any support of torture whatsoever is morally disordered, it does not follow that tolerance of EITs manifests a “screwed up sense of morality”. Not unless you are assuming something that requires proof – that EITs actually are torture in the moral sense of the axiom. That is a petitio principii. Perhaps more careful reading will permit you to avoid such fallacious thinking.

     This critique is provided gratis, courteousy of Catholibertarian.

     
     
2. on February 5, 2013 at 9:32 pm | Reply marcy

   Torture:
   1

   a : anguish of body or mind : agony

   b : something that causes agony or pain

   2

   : the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure

   From the ever biased Merriam Webster dictionary.

   Here is one from the Geneva Convention, and most importantly an article on which we did not express reservations:

   1.For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

   I’ll address Mr. Rice first.

   a) My statement was meant, and I think this obvious, to be read much as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. That is, I am alleging that EIT is simply doublespeak for torture. To begin with, and this is hardly a fallacious argument, if you really doubt the nature of these techniques, I encourage you to try them at home and report your findings.

   b) McCain and others who have been tortured have roundly denounced these practices as being torture. They would know better than you or I. True, we may not be pulling out fingernails, but we are purposely inducing stress,

   c) By the CIA’s own admission these techniques are designed to inflict physical discomfort.

   d) The US Supreme Court has determined that the conditions of the Geneva Convention apply to the CIA.

   e) Our harmless interrogation techniques have resulted in broken bones and severe lacerations: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/04/gitmo-docs-torture/

   f) Bush Administration officials concluded multiple times that EITs were “the techniques least likely to be sustained” by the courts and violate the Constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”
   http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20120403/

   g) Whatever you want to call our practices at Gitmo and beyond, the terrorists sure find them useful recruiting tools: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/torture-it-probably-killed-more-americans-than-911-1674396.html

   h) The US prosecuted Japanese officers for waterboarding our men during WWII.

   i) Our “enhanced” techniques have killed people.
   http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/02/05/20-facts-about-extraordinary-rendition-torture-and-secret-detention/

   So lets not quibble. EITs are torturous. And the burden of proof is not really on me. It is on you to prove that they are not torture. It is a human life in question. It is a soul. Let us never err on the side of cowardice.

   The strongest argument given by either of you or the author of the article quoted is that what we’re doing isn’t as bad as pulling fingernails! There has been no attempt to prove that EITs are not torture. Only the insistence that because you are not calling it torture, I must prove that you aren’t just trying to fool everyone. I imagine that in Orwell’s world Oceania would request much the same.

   Teresa:

   The question of torture in a political context has never been one of an individual’s sadistic impulses. But rather the legitimacy of a state coercing information from an individual through the use of physical force and or mental stress.

   Nor have you any proof that these techniques are temporary. We have waterboarded a single individual as many as 83 times. That is hardly temporary. What is more, the nature of these techniques is designed to get people to release what are their deepest darkest secrets. Which, we may have very many good reasons for wanting to know. But the fact is that if the physical discomfort is severe enough to cause you to tell things that you hold deepest to your heart you cannot suppose that there is no psychological damage. These people are Muslims. They, even though we think them and their religion wrong, hold these beliefs near and dear. Understand that what we are inducing them to do if we get information from them is to induce them to betray both their religion and their idea of country. Don’t pretend for a moment that they are not scarred by this. You would be. I would be.

   Also, the fact is that outside of the CIA, everyone says EITs are ineffective. Our allies have refused to give us information or grant us access to detainees because of concerns. The FBI has repeatedly denounced these practices and has claimed that when they have given formerly cooperative detainees over to the CIA, and the CIA has then used their EITs they have become entirely uncooperative.

   And while the CIA has claimed torture helped them find Bin Laden, Sens. McCain, Feinstein and others have all pointed out that the first leads to the chauffer that lead us to Osama were not from CIA detainees at all.

   And Teresa. There is a consensus as to what torture is. There have been multiple treaties, some of which we have signed, answering that very question. It is only a fiction of the neoconservatives that there is any doubt. Show my a lack of consensus in the international community and I will gladly put the question aside.

   I have been meaning to ask this question, which you needn’t answer here as it is tangential, but how exactly do you two define libertarian? And what exact tenants do you hold that make you think you are libertarian? Because I don’t know a single other libertarian that would make the claims you two do.

   
   
   • on February 7, 2013 at 12:24 pm | Reply Teresa Rice

     You may want to read this because it addresses some of what you stated: http://catholibertarian.com/2012/01/03/the-tortured-definition-of-torture/

     I agree that much of what McCain endured was probably torture. Like the fact that he has a really hard time moving his arms. But what caused that? Were any of the same techniques used by our government used on McCain when he was captured? If not, then he has the authority to talk about the torture that he endured but not on the methods which are in question as to whether they constitute torture.

     Your challenge that one or both of us, who happen to be innocent people not charged or accused of terrorist activities, is beyond the pale, absurd, and illogical at best. Of course there uncomfortable. Punishment of any sort usually is. That’s why its called punishment.

     Just because a dictionary or more than one dictionary adopts liberal jargin doesn’t make the definition true. But even the definitions you cited are ambiguous. Does a job torture because it causes stress? Pain is subjective so the definitions don’t even make sense.

     This is from RedState: Their first wrong-headed premise, and the most important one here, is that Republicans are “pro-torture.” This assumes that waterboarding is torture and also assumes that we on the right consider it as such. This, however, is completely wrong. No one on the right is a supporter of torture, nor do any of us agree that sleep depravation, waterboarding, or the other items that comprise “enhanced interrogation” is torture. So, their very first premise, the one that undergirds their entire argument, is faulty. We just aren’t “pro-torture.”

     Secondly, we on the right are not mad that Pelosi kept quiet before. We would be just fine with her ignoring the whole debate now — and that would include not pressing the absurd idea of prosecutions of Bush officials today. She is a hypocrite on the issue not because she is lying about what she knew and when she knew it but that she is attempting to use the “torture” issue only now when she thinks it might pay her political dividends. If she was so upset over “torture” as she now claims to be, why did she remain quiet all this time until now? Of course we all know that the answer is that it is only now when her party is in control of Congress and the White House. It is now that she feels she can safely use the debate as a political football.

     But the very fact that she is only bringing it all up now proves that the idea of “torture” really doesn’t bother her at all and never did. It can’t have ever truly bothered her because if it so horrified her, why was she quiet for so many years? And her claim that she didn’t know is simply a lie. There isn’t a soul in any position to really know that is backing her play. Porter Goss, Leon Pannetta, Pelosi’s own staff, and her own past actions prove she knew everything there was to know.

     So…

     We aren’t mad that a “torture” program is exposed because none of us agree there ever was any torture carried out
     We aren’t mad that Pelosi was quiet for half the decade
     We aren’t even mad that she’s a hypocrite. After all, we all assume one must be a hypocrite to be a Democrat in the first place. That is a given!
     Here is what we see with the issue:

     Pelosi never cared about “torture” in the first place because she went half a decade without protesting it even as she knew all about it
     She knows that the U.S. wasn’t torturing anyone but now pretends we were merely for the sake of politics
     She is only now raising the issue because she thinks she can make political hay out of it proving she has no real principles
     She is playing politics with our national security
     The left is stupidly covering for someone that they would call a “war criminal” if only they’d have had an “R” next to their name

     http://www.redstate.com/warner_todd_huston/2009/05/17/disingenuous-lefts-confusion-over-pelosis-lies-and-the-right%E2%80%99s-reaction/

     The Left only jumped on the issue of “torture” for political propaganda and for political/personal gain.

     
     
   • on February 7, 2013 at 12:32 pm | Reply Teresa Rice

     NONE of the DOJ lawyers argued that EIT’s were illegal or torture.

     http://chat.anncoulter.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=85829&p=1847921

     “But a closer examination shows a more subtle picture. None of the Justice Department lawyers who reviewed the interrogation question argued that the methods were clearly illegal.

     For example:

     ¶Mr. Goldsmith, now a Harvard law professor, unnerved the C.I.A. in June 2004 by withdrawing a 2002 memorandum written by Mr. Yoo that said only pain equal to that produced by organ failure or death qualified as torture.

     In addition, in a previously undisclosed letter to the agency, Mr. Goldsmith put a temporary halt to waterboarding. But he left intact a secret companion memorandum from 2002 that actually authorized the harsh methods, leaving the C.I.A. free to use all its methods except waterboarding, including wall-slamming, face-slapping, stress positions and more.

     ¶Mr. Levin, now in private practice, won public praise with a 2004 memorandum that opened by declaring “torture is abhorrent.” But he also wrote a letter to the C.I.A that specifically approved waterboarding in August 2004, and he drafted much of Mr. Bradbury’s lengthy May 2005 opinion authorizing the 13 methods.

     [Manofaiki: Awful funny of him not to mention that during the the past 3 years he was 'winning public praise', eh wot?]

     ¶Mr. Comey, who had forced a 2004 showdown with White House officials over the National Security Agency’s surveillance program [manofaiki - you remember that program, right? The one that was found legal also?], concurred in that Bradbury opinion. His objections focused on a second legal opinion that authorized combinations of the methods. He expressed “grave reservations” and asked for a week to revise the memorandum, warning Mr. Gonzales that “it would come back to haunt him and the department,” Mr. Comey said in a 2005 e-mail to Mr. Rosenberg.

     Justice Department lawyers involved in the opinions felt torn between what was legal and what was advisable, Mr. Levin said. “Obviously you can only do that which is legal,” he said in a recent interview. “But that does not mean you should automatically do something simply because it is legal.”

     The e-mail messages and documents provide new details about a critical year in the interrogation saga, beginning in mid-2004. The C.I.A. inspector general had questioned the legality and effectiveness of the harsh methods, prompting a review of the program. Under intense White House pressure, the Justice Department lawyers in May 2005 approved a series of opinions that reauthorized the harshest practices.

     The lawyers had to interpret a 1994 antitorture law written largely with despotic foreign regimes in mind, but used starting in 2002, in effect, as a set of guidelines for American interrogators. [b] [Oh - so you mean people are supposed to begin recognizing this fact NOW after 4 years of watching the Left hit the Bush Administration over the head with the torture meme?] [/b]The law defined torture as treatment “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” By that standard, a succession of Justice Department lawyers concluded that the C.I.A.’s methods did not constitute torture.

     The only issues that provoked debate were waterboarding, which Mr. Goldsmith questioned, and some combinations of multiple techniques, which Mr. Comey resisted.

     Some outside experts agree that the language of the 1994 law is strikingly narrow. “There’s no doubt whatsoever that a great deal of coercive treatment that most people would call torture is not prohibited by the federal antitorture statute,” said Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution scholar who has studied interrogation policy.

     But many believe that even under that law, the Justice Department should have recognized that waterboarding, at least, was torture. To argue otherwise, said Brian Z. Tamanaha, a St. John’s University law professor who has studied the interrogation memorandums, required “extraordinary contortions in language and legal analysis.”

     Waterboarding, the near-drowning method that Mr. Obama has described as torture, was used on three operatives for Al Qaeda in 2002 and 2003. The C.I.A. never used the technique after it was reauthorized in 2005.

     C.I.A. officials had been nervous about the legality of their proposed methods from the start in 2002. They had asked Michael Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, to grant interrogators immunity in advance from prosecution for torture. Mr. Chertoff refused, but neither did he warn the agency against the methods it was proposing.

     The agency’s worst fears about the potential liability of its officers returned with a vengeance in 2004, after the sharp criticism from the agency’s inspector general and Mr. Goldsmith’s withdrawal of the first torture memorandum. C.I.A. officials demanded a comprehensive legal review.

     But Mr. Goldsmith resigned in July 2004, and his successor as acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Levin, quickly set to work on the review, assisted by his top deputy, Mr. Bradbury.

     On July 22, 2004, the Justice Department offered the C.I.A. interim assurance that it could use all methods except waterboarding, which Mr. Goldsmith had questioned. On Aug. 6, Mr. Levin issued another interim letter reauthorizing waterboarding, as long as rules were followed.

     But in February 2005, when Mr. Levin moved to a job as legal adviser to the National Security Council, the new interrogation opinions had not been approved by all necessary officials. The day before his departure, Mr. Levin stopped by and apologized to Mr. Bradbury for leaving it to him to sign the volatile documents.

     By April 2005, the opinions were in final form, and Mr. Comey, who had set his own resignation for August, concurred in the 46-page opinion affirming the legality of the 13 techniques. But he told Mr. Gonzales that he strongly objected to Mr. Bradbury’s second opinion, allowing multiple techniques to be used in a single interrogation session.

     Mr. Gonzales told him that he was “under great pressure” from Vice President Dick Cheney to complete both memorandums and that President George W. Bush had asked about them, Mr. Comey recounted in one of the 2005 e-mail messages.

     Later, after reading a revised draft of the second opinion, Mr. Comey added that “my concerns were not allayed, only heightened.” He said he wanted more time to fix the memorandum, but Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, Theodore Ullyot, told him the White House would not wait.

     Mr. Comey wanted an analysis centered on actual interrogations in an effort to limit the type and combination of techniques that would be permissible, according to someone familiar with his thinking.

     “I told him the people who were applying pressure now would not be there when the [expletive] hit the fan,” Mr. Comey wrote in another e-mail message. “It would be Alberto Gonzales in the bull’s-eye. I told him it was my job to protect the department and the A.G. and that I could not agree to this because it was wrong. I told him it could be made right in a week, which was a blink of an eye, and that nobody would understand at a hearing three years from now why we didn’t take that week.”

     So basically the facts are not one DOJ Lawyer that looked at these EIT techniques deemed them to be torture and therefore illegal.

     Some of them had ‘strong reservations’ and adopted the position that just because it was legal didn’t mean it was a good idea to use them, and the meme becomes the Bush administration ‘rushed’ the justification of the techniques out the door.

     But lets remember this shall we: all this was CYA manevering in 2005 after the Bush Admin. got ample proof Pelosi and Co. were planning to pretend they didn’t have a clue waterboarding was going on and were about to politicize the EIT’s in an attempt to help themselves in the 2006 mid-terms.”

     Definition of torture: The action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something.

     If you go by this definition of torture — the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure — what constitutes intense pain for one may not for another. Plus, the EIT’s don’t burn, crush, or afford sadistic pleasure and very rarely do they wound any person under interrogation. And if they did it was because the interrogation was not administered properly or the terrorist could have done something to inflict pain or wound upon themselves. These are the same people who are okay with being suicide bombers.

     
     
   • on February 7, 2013 at 2:29 pm | Reply Kevin Rice

     It is good that you are now offering definitions. Merriam Webster has currency here (I like it). It’s not the Oxford, but at least it is THE (original) Webster’s Dictionary. Now you are beginning to offer a non-circular argument. That’s good!

     Now to respond to your points, carefully delineated by letter (good job, btw – now you’re speaking my language):

     a. A rose is a rose, but do you have a rose there or a hothouse tulip? An Allegation (we call that a premise) presented as a conclusive argument is very precisely the fallacy I called out: petitio principii. Interesting “Do Indeed Try This Stuff At Home” suggestion. Why don’t you try looking up petitio principii? There is no risk of pain or injury, you won’t wind up in the next Jackass movie, but I assure you it is worth doing.

     b. With due respect to Senator McCain, if he underwent the same procedures and techniques with the same measured precautions and nothing more, his authority on these particular EITs would have more weight. He did not. His captors showed far less restraint than that which was shown to the Gitmo detainees. The scholastics often said that the argument from authority is the weakest of arguments (to give it its due, a weak argument is still an argument, not a fallacy). I give his opinion due consideration, but, sorry, I do not surrender my whole intellect to it and cease to question. I need more.

     And you provide it. C through f and i all look like very good arguments that the EITs fit the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition you offered. Thus if they do not fit the legal definition, a good case is being made that the legal definition might need to be re-examined. H is misleading (the Japanese procedures were far more brutal than ours, and less ambiguous in terms of whether they fit the moral category of torture).

     As for quibbling, Marcy, when you accuse one of us of a deficient moral sense,. you had better be sure that all your i’s are dotted and your t’s crossed. I am a big old quibbler and this is my big quibble box that you are in…capiche?

     You may be right about which argument was the strongest presented so far that the EITs are not torture. But the article was never intended to take up that burden. It was not intended to offer an argument that they are not torture, only to publically state a return to an old position in the interest of full disclosure. The position was always held as the default assumption – i.e., it was held as something that could be believed until proven wrong, not something that required proof in order to be held at all. In the absence of definitive proof one way or another, people take default positions on issues that require you to take one rather than remain neutral. Your default assumption is that they ARE torture. Teresa’s is that they are NOT. As for me, I take a different stance. I hold that they are torture in a weak, morally trivial sense, i.e., they do not fit the category of torture that would certainly amount to an intrinsic evil. But even if I am right, that is not very high praise, is it? It’s not like I am an enthusiastic *supporter* of something just by saying “at least it’s not an INTRINSIC evil”.. After all, some relational (non-intrinsic) evils can be
     quite monstrous indeed.

     One last quibble (I said that I am a big old quibbler) – this one was aimed at Teresa, I know, but technically, doing something 83 times does not render it eternal. All torture in this life is temporary, if nothing else ends it then death will. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Your point was still worth making – if something intensely unpleasant goes on for that long and that many times, calling it temporary and relying on the technical, bare literal sense for that to be true can seem quite cynical. OTOH, you have to admit, when it was over, it was over. Whatever effects may have lingered, I have not heard any liberal media talking heads whining about Khalid Sheik Muhammed’s PTSD symptoms. Maybe he is a very strong, defiant man and the waterboarding did not leave many lasting psychological scars. Finally, his resistance was what made it last as long as it did, and he could have simply stopped resisting.

     
     
3. on February 7, 2013 at 2:47 pm | Reply Teresa Rice

   @marcy

   I want to clarify my position.

   1) I don’t think that these interrogation methods are good. Evil? That I’m not sure but I agree with Kevin when he says that they don’t qualify as intrinsically evil.
   2) I’ve said this in many other places (pretty sure that I didn’t say it in this in this post) that it is probable that under the Bush administration these techniques were used too frequently. I believe some, if not all, of these techniques used should be Rare.
   3) I may be somewhat of a cheerleader for them as far as these techniques having had saved lives but not for their actual usage.