Thursday 12/11/14

Yesterday, with great sadness, I sat down to read the “Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program” or, as most people are calling it, the “Senate Torture Report.” I didn’t get far for two reasons. First, the declassified version of the report is 525 pages; not quite as long as the 6,700 page full report (which begs the question, “can anyone effectively read it?’), but still more than I read on a Wednesday. The second reason is that every couple of paragraphs I had to stop and digest chilling new realities.

I have already discussed just war theory. I have written about the types of rules that need to be followed in order to declare a war “just” by Catholic standards. One of those rules is that prisoners must be treated humanely. The report makes is overwhelmingly clear: We did not.

We did not treat our prisoners humanely. Sure, some prisoners may have been treated like any other prisoner of war, but the ones in the report certainly were not. You don’t judge the wealth of a society by how much money the richest man has, but the poorest. You don’t judge the quality of a restaurant by how good their best dish is, but by their worst. You don’t judge a nation on how it treats its prisoners of war by the one treated most humanely, but by the one treated the least.

Without getting too graphic, I want to make something clear: while there has been some debate about whether or not waterboarding is torture, the actions listed in the report are absolutely torture. Waterboarding is just the tip of the iceberg.

As sad as the report is, the content is still not the most upsetting part. The appropriate response to this type of report is to examine it, judge fairly whether or not the actions were right or wrong, and then, if necessary, seek justice for those who acted wrongly. That is not what is happening. People are having all manners of ridiculous responses to the report. Some of them are so ridiculous as not to warrant much of a response, but some of them have been covered in a veneer of righteousness. This candy coating makes these equally outrageous ideas go down easy. I want to talk about what is under that coating.


Newsflash: ‘report reveals NO terrorists were forced to choose between burning alive or jumping to their death’

This beauty comes to us from the website bizpacreview.com. Oddly enough, it is not a story about the Senate Report, but about a tweet by the same name and all the supportive retweets it received. The sentiment expressed in this tweet/story can seem very appealing, but it is not helpful. It is not helpful because it ignores our own culpability. As Catholics, we believe that all people have intrinsic value. We believe that all people should be treated with basic human dignity, regardless of whether they show us basic human decency. Jesus was sinless and allowed himself to be crucified. When I say sinless, I don’t mean he didn’t do anything to the Romans, I mean he didn’t sin at all, ever. And yet, he told us to turn the other cheek. He didn’t tell His followers to “avenge” him, and he would not have allowed torture. Instead, when his own disciples resorted to violence in the garden, he told them “Enough!” and healed the wounded “enemy combatant” who had come to bring him to his death.

Even if we remove our Catholic understanding, this “newsflash” does not pass the sniff test. The underlying message here is “we’re still not as bad as the terrorists!” Is that really something worth celebrating? Is that how we are going to judge our actions as a nation? It seems to me that as a nation we can set the bar a little higher than “At least we’re not Al Qaeda.”


In war you do what you have to do. Torture saves lives.

Here is another appealing one. Would you torture one terrorist to save one hundred Americans? Many people would. The problem is, it does not work like that. The report indicates that “enhanced interrogation” techniques are ineffective. In fact, it cites that just about the only time they got any information at all was when they confronted prisoners with intelligence they had already gathered through other means. In other words, under torture, they got terrorists to admit that what they already knew was true.

The report also notes that guards were ordered to keep torturing prisoners long after they believed that any useful information had been mined. Sometimes they were beaten without even being asked a question. If you don’t ask a question, you don’t get to call it “enhanced interrogation” and you don’t get to claim that it is saving a life. Experts have been saying it for years: torture is not an effective means of gaining intelligence in the modern military landscape.


Releasing this report was a bad idea. It could get people hurt, and for what? It’s just political positioning.

This is another attempt to sweep the issue under the rug. It tries to ignore the fact that heinous acts were committed in all of our names. As citizens in a democracy, we are responsible, at least in some small way, for the actions of our government. We do not get to celebrate our nation’s victories if we do not suffer through its defeats.


Terrorists don’t treat us well when we’re their prisoners, why should we treat them well when they’re ours?

This is a variation of the “newsflash” from before. It is problematic for many of the same reasons, but also one more: it is not entirely true. With the exception of Isis (which is irrelevant since none of its members were involved in the incidents in the report) most hostages reveal that they were not tortured. Executions were not uncommon, but the actual captivity rarely included torture. As one hostage of the Taliban put it, “They vowed to follow the tenets of Islam that mandate the good treatment of prisoners. In my case, they unquestionably did. They gave me bottled water, let me walk in a small yard each day and never beat me.”


So how do we react?

All of these responses are attempts to make the problem not be a problem. They are designed to make us feel better about something which (rightfully) makes us feel sick to our stomachs. A widespread and systematic network of torture was carried out in your name, and in my name, and in our grandparents and future children’s names. That uneasy feeling is your little piece of our nation’s collective shame and guilt over repeated human rights violations. The only good response is prayer.