An American Lion

I cannot read this without laughing, even though the subject is no laughing matter:

There’s nothing unusual about partisans of the Bush administration defending waterboarding as a useful form of “enhanced interrogation.” Others will go even further, calling the technique “torture,” but saying it may be a necessary evil. What is a bit unusual is the case being made by Marc A. Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

In “Courting Disaster: How the C.I.A. Kept America Safe and How Barack ObamaIs Inviting the Next Attack,” Mr. Thiessen, a practicing Roman Catholic, says that waterboarding suspected terrorists was not only useful and desirable, but permitted by the teachings of the Catholic Church.

This does not square, to put it mildly, with the common understanding of Catholic teaching. In the past month, Catholic bloggers and writers from across the political spectrum have united to attack his views, and to defend their own: that waterboarding is torture, and that Roman Catholics are not supposed to do it.

Mr. Thiessen makes two basic arguments. First, he says that waterboarding, the simulated drowning technique used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, and others, is not torture. “I didn’t get into the Catholic theological stuff of it until I sat down to write the book,” Mr. Thiessen said in a phone interview. So when Mr. Bush asked him, in 2006, to write a speechexplaining the C.I.A.’s interrogation program, Mr. Thiessen asked himself other kinds of questions.

“There’s a standard of torture in civil law,” he said, “which is severe mental pain and suffering. I also have a common-sense definition, which is, ‘If you’re willing to try it, it’s not torture.’ ”

Thousands of American soldiers have been willing to undergo waterboarding as part of their resistance training, Mr. Thiessen notes; therefore, it stands to reason that it is not torture.

Well, that may be true, but there is a difference between a controlled training environment where someone can simply raise their hand and have the practice stopped as opposed to having the practice continue at the whim of the person in control. Our troops are subjected to it in order to show them what others may do; they are not subjected to it because that’s what we do.

When you have some control over your fate, it’s not torture, now is it? When you have no control over what is being done to you, then it is torture. A child can grasp the difference. Mr. Thiessen cannot.

Second, he invokes Catholic teaching to defend what he calls “coercive interrogation.”

The catechism states, “the defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to do harm,” and Catholic tradition accepts that this might involve killing. And, Mr. Thiessen writes: “If this principle applies to taking human life, it must certainly apply to coercive interrogation as well. A captured terrorist is an unjust aggressor who retains the power to kill many thousands by withholding information about planned attacks.”

To justify killing in self-defense, Catholics point to Thomas Aquinas’s principle of double-effect: the intended effect is to save your own life; killing is the unintended effect. By the same logic, Mr. Thiessen argues, “the intent of the interrogator is not to cause harm to the detainee; rather, it is to render the aggressor unable to cause harm to society.”

Mr. Thiessen must wonder why we don’t willingly live in the Middle Ages anymore; things were easier then. The infallibility of a Church that could destroy anyone it wished must have been so much more pleasant to swallow. This is the perversion of religion, writ large. Religion is not about torturing or destroying people; religion has gone wrong when it delves into such things.

As a conservative and now an Independent who remembers the Cold War, and voted for Reagan, I can tell you that these intellectually dishonest leaps of fancy are hilarious. This is what happens when the Bushies try to run things, I’m afraid to say. I’m ashamed to also add that I voted for them; had I known, no, I would never have voted for them or raised money for them. There is nothing conservative about them. A republic cannot torture without becoming a dictatorship. This nation stands for everything that opposes the torture of people; that’s why so many Soviet dissidents looked to the United States for some sort of help.