Amid Holiday Cheer: Ethical Questions About Torture

20 December 2004 |permalink | email article

‘Tis the season to be jolly. TIME crowns George Bush as Person of the Year 2004. Giddy Republicans gulp egg nog. Dazed Democrats sense deep public concern about W’s domestic social agenda. Evangelical Christians, dismissing the Rev. Jim Wallis’s epic phrase that “God is not a Republican…or a Democrat,” move their moral values agenda to statewide ballots. But, as the New York Times’s Peter Steinfels reflected in his keeper “Beliefs” column just before Hanukkah, ethical questions involving torture are lost in the debate over the war in Iraq. “Is this a topic to bring up on the eve of a season of sparkly candles, childlike exuberance and family gift-giving?” My answer is yes. That question, Steinfels wrote, cannot be reduced to differences over the war. The Guantanamo prisoners “were captured in a military action that had the overwhelming support of the citzenry.”

There is a common belief among contemporary ethicists that torture is among acts that qualify as “intrisically” evil.” Even Pope John Paul II, focusing on abortion and euthanasia in his 1993 encyclical “The Splendor of Truth,” included “evil actions” such as genocide, slavery and torture. Steinfels recalled that last April photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison shocked the world and put treatment of prisoners in the headlines for weeks, Congressional hearings faded, a few personnel were tried an both Bush nor John Kerry ducked the issue.

Steinfels cited the specter raised in Mark Danner’s book, “Torture and Truth,” that in the end the photos may have deflected the central question of what role terror may have played, or yet be playing, in American policy for waging a war on terror into a question of individual indiscipline and sadism. James R. Schlesinger, Nixon and Ford’s secretary of defense, called the Abu Ghraib atrocities “Animal House on the night shift.” Then there was conservative god Rush Limbaugh who, in his May 4, 2004 broadcast script, defended torture in Iraq: “Folks, these torture pictures with the women torturers…You know, if you really look at these pictures, I mean I don’t know if it’s just me but it looks like anything you’d see Madonna or Britney Spears do on stage.”

Gathering intelligence is critical to the war on terror, Steinfels noted. But “voices…began to ask about the legitmacy of torture, sometimes treading a fine line where it is hard to tell whether the aim is to uphold a moral precept or undermine it.”

Senate hearings on the confirmations of Alberto Gonzales and Condoleezza Rice for attorney general and secretary of state must address the torture issue. Each played a key role in framing the administration’s policies in the treatment of prisoners of war. This week a Los Angeles Times editorial asked the critical question: “When will the president respond to the cascading allegations of prisoner abuse by the military?”

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