What are we doing? What have we done?

I have not blogged about the torture bill till now, in part because I found its constitutent elements to be somewhat confusing, and I didn't quite know what to say. This morning, I see that it has now passed the Senate, and is headed to the president's desk to be signed into law. I realized this morning that something snapped in me last evening on my drive home, listening to the president on the radio defending this thing, saying (once again) that we -- meaning the government -- can't say that it's doing everything it can to keep the American people safe unless it has "the proper tools" to do the job.

"The proper tools." I am sick of this euphemism, as if torture and all the rest of it were just part of a handyman's fix-it box. These words allow us to conceal from ourselves just what it is we do, and what is done in our name.

I have serious concerns about what this legislation does to our Constitution. This New York Times editorial lists them as succinctly and as powerfully as I've seen anywhere. Given that the government will now have the power to hold and waterboard and otherwise torture indefinitely men who might be innocent, the idea that these men will have no right of habeas corpus is deeply worrying. But if you say something like that, you get accused of being soft on terrorism. Take, for example, what House Speaker Denny Hastert said last night when House Democrats voted against warrantless wiretaps: "For the second time in just two days, House Democrats have voted to protect the rights of terrorists."

It's perfectly fair to criticize the Democrats for their position on this issue. What bothers me a very great deal is the corrupt and corrupting language the Right uses to criticize them. Oppose this bill, and you are for the terrorists. One is reminded of Orwell's observation:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

Proper tools. Protect the rights of terrorists. You see? Or do you see ? This, via Andrew Sullivan, is what is now permitted. This is a waterboarding device, or as our Christian president would say, "a proper tool." How can Christians in good conscience support this? We allow ourselves to accept this kind of thing because we allow its proponents to obscure the difference between harsh interrogation -- I don't think anybody with a lick of sense expects terror suspects to be treated as gently as a guest on "Larry King Live" -- and torture. Others have written far more eloquently and intelligently than I can ever hope to about the legal and moral ramifications of all this. What weighs on my mind this morning is what accustoming ourselves to this sort of regime is doing to our individual and collective consciences.

Here's what I mean. I hate terrorists, and I believe I have enough hatred for them in my heart to bless a policy that would throw them in a pit and, in Orwell's phrase, see to it that they have a jackboot on their faces forever. In fact, my hatred of these Islamist monsters is so raw, and so close to the surface -- it surfaced again this past 9/11 -- that I really can't allow myself to dwell on it for too long. And yet, being aware of what terrible things I am capable of doing, or having done, to these creatures -- I should say, these human beings -- makes me all the more afraid of what our government is up to. Of what the rest of us have effectively signed off on. I know how much evil I'm willing to see done to other men to appease my own fear and loathing of them. I know what's in my heart. It will always be in my heart -- and in yours too -- until the day I die. But it should not be sanctioned in the law.

I don't think I can do nearly as well writing about the immorality of this as Mark Shea (see this, for a great example) and Andrew Sullivan -- now there's a pair you rarely see on the same side of any issue -- have done, so I don't dare try. But I think Mark really speaks prophetically here:

Much has been said of the Rule of Integrity ["To do evil in order to accomplish good is really to do evil."] here, because it is the single most fiercely opposed Rule on the Right at present. It is called all sorts of names. But it remains true: you cannot do evil that good will come of it. If you try it, you will encounter the same Judgment as Judas Iscariot, who found that all the evil was his, and all the good that came of it was God's.

But in addition, there is also the Eschatological Rule ["The victory is assured; my job is to run out the clock in style."], which not a few frightened post-9/11 people seem to have completely forgotten. It is this: "What shall it profit you to win the war and lose your soul?" That, in the end, is what the torture debated comes down to.

The Rule of Realism [" "Remember that Satan is eager to corrupt my efforts to build up the Kingdom, and he's smart enough to figure out a way to do it." -- which is another way of enunciating the principle of Original Sin] is the principal defense we have against the pride that cocoons all fallen men from reality as they reflect on their goodness and compare themselves with the badness of their foes.

And the Petrine Rule ["Nobody ever built up the Church by tearing down the pope."] is about the handiest touchstone for day to day sanity. Recently, I ran across somebody on another board who was baffled over my puzzling inconsistency. He had some kind things to say about my theological scribbles (for which I thank him) and then shook his head, "That's why it breaks my heart to see those "torture" posts. If he's wrong about that, than what happens to his "credibility" on other matters?". It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that my remarks on torture are just as rooted in the Church's teaching as my remarks on everything else. Al l I'm doing is repeating the teaching of the Church, accessible in any Catechism, as well is in conciliar and papal teaching, that torture is intrinsically immoral, gravely sinful, and so forth.

There are only two ways out of this. One of them is to just say the Church is wrong and torture is *not* gravely sinful, etc. This is usually achieved by saying that the Church is hopelessly unrealistic in not recognizing that "24" is exactly like real life, where "ticking bomb" scenarios are a daily fact of life. Another strategy is to say that human beings who are guilty, or suspected, or foreign, or named "Maher Arar" don't have basic human rights and so we can see to it they are tortured if we think it will keep us safe. All of these have the disadvantage, for the putative Catholic, of ascribing fundamental error to the Church's moral teaching by saying that something the Church declares intrinsically immoral is not really intrinsically immoral.

The other strategy is to endlessly quibble about what techniques constitutes "torture". The problem here is that, in my case, I have resolutely refused to play that game. My argument has been, whatever trained interrogators (which I am not) have hitherto deemed "torture" is not in sudden need of redefinition since 9/11. Attempts to redefine torture are simply attempts to call what is intrinsically immoral by a new euphemism so as to get away with it.

As my longtime readers know, I have worn myself out and even wrecked my own Catholic faith by endlessly railing against the Catholic bishops for their own aiding and abetting of the great moral evil, of the kind that corrupted the entire church, of child sex abuse by some of the clergy. I don't believe, and never have believed, that the great majority of these bishops are any more or any less evil than me, than you, than anybody else. What they did is allow themselves to believe in their own goodness, and in the rightness of their mission, and in doing things that no Christian or even decent human being should do because they accepted, consciously or not, that The Good of The Church demanded it. And even to this day, I believe, they have not faced the full truth of what they sanctioned. Nor, in my view, has the broader church. We prefer to speak in euphemism. It's human nature. It's Original Sin.

The point of bringing that up is not to start another argument about the Church and sex abuse. It is rather to say that I'm coming to understand this torture business in the same way. That a lot of good men and women who have the right intentions are signing off on things that we have no business signing off on, because We Mean Well, and anyway, there We Have Enemies, so let's keep the focus on them, and not on our own hearts and our own motives, and our own culpability before God. That's the road to Hell.