Mennonite Weekly Review

I continue to have difficulty with the fact that the topic of whether U.S. interrogators may torture prisoners is still open for discussion.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

In the 1980s, when I was active in Central American solidarity groups and learned about the CIA’s support of regimes that tortured dissidents, the Reagan administration denied torture was happening. This was an indirect way of saying torture was unacceptable.

More recently, John McCain, the only 2008 presidential candidate who had experienced torture, was called courageous for speaking out against it. If opposing torture takes courage, torture must be widely accepted.

At the end of May, a House committee approved legislation that required the Pentagon’s Inspector General to investigate whether the attorneys for Guantanamo detainees violated the law by gathering information about CIA officers suspected of using torture. This, as Amnesty International points out, indirectly means, “Torture is good; investigating torture is bad.”

Since June is Torture Awareness month, I will reprise here the five reasons torture is always wrong that Christian ethicist David P. Gushee wrote in a February 2006 article for Christianity Today.

1. Torture violates the dignity of the human being. Because we were created in the image of God, and because Christ died for us, we are precious. “No one is ever ‘subhuman’ or ‘human debris,’ as Rush Limbaugh has described some of our adversaries in Iraq,” Gushee wrote.

2. Torture mistreats the vulnerable and violates the demands of justice. “In the Scriptures, God’s understanding of justice tilts toward the vulnerable,” Gushee wrote, citing Ex. 22:21-23. The tens of thousands of people imprisoned by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2002 and 2006 were vulnerable, and those tortured were therefore the victims of injustice.

3. Authorizing torture trusts government too much. “Human beings are sinful through and through (Rom. 3:10-18). We are not to be trusted, and we are especially dangerous when in possession of unchecked power,” Gushee wrote. Given human sinfulness, Christians must support due process, accountability and transparency in the U.S. dealings with detainees.

In response to the pro-torture lobby, which always trots out the “we have to torture this guy so he’ll tell us where the bomb is,” Gushee wrote, “I think any potential resort to torture in rare, ticking-bomb cases would be better handled within the context of an outright ban… . Dietrich Bonhoeffer participated in an assassination plot against Hitler … but he did not argue for re­writing moral prohibitions against political assassinations.” I will add that almost none of the world’s victims of torture fit the “ticking bomb” description.

4. Torture dehumanizes the torturer. “Frederick Doug­lass commented famously on how holding a slave slowly ruined the character of the woman who owned him,” Gushee wrote. “Martin Luther King Jr. frequently said that the greatest victims of segregation were the white people whose souls were deformed by their own hatred. And Alexander Solzhenitsyn, reflecting on the Soviet gulag, said, “Our torturers have been punished most horribly of all: They are turning into swine.”

5. Torture erodes the character of the nation that tortures. Gushee quoted John McCain, who said, “This isn’t about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies.”

Sadly, in 2010, the rest of the world thinks who we are is a nation that tortures detainees.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.