Torture in the name of ...
Torture in the name of ...
What if Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian recently sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in a planned attack on the Los Angeles airport, was suspected of having information on the next big al-Qaeda plot? Would our government be justified in torturing him to extract this knowledge? How about sending him to an undisclosed foreign country to do the dirty work?
Surely, Jack Bauer, hero of 24, a popular series on Fox, would say, "Go for it." Bauer's torture menu for 24's bad guys has included denying them medical treatment, threatening family members and executing them outright.
That's just TV, right?
Yet even in real life, nearly two-thirds of the American public believes that torturing suspected terrorists to gain important information is justified in some circumstances, according to Pew Research. Moreover, more than half would agree to send them to a foreign country where U.S. restrictions do not apply, an ABC/Washington Post poll shows. So Americans a>EUR" most of whom have some religious background or at least a belief in God a>EUR" apparently find torture to be a necessary evil.
But what do religions say about torture? Never, according to the official pronouncements of many diverse faiths. But such decrees reflect changes of conscience from earlier religious traditions. At one time or another, most major religions, under the right circumstances, were open to the use of torture. Their reasons sounded much like the arguments being made today in the USA: Saving souls (spreading democracy) and defeating evil by fighting just wars.
Catholicism accepted and even utilized torture for centuries before taking a more enlightened path. In his book, Torture: Religious Ethics and National Security, Jesuit priest John Perry explains how noble religious values such as Christian charity were used to rationalize not only the Inquisition many hundreds of years ago, but also abuses just decades ago during the military regimes of Argentina and Chile.
'Eliminating weeds'
Perry recounts, for example, the story of Adolfo Scilingo, a former captain in the Argentine navy who threw suspected leftists out of airplanes to their deaths. Scilingo's conscience was assuaged by Catholic military chaplains who assured him that even the Bible "provided for eliminating weeds from the wheat field." Many Argentine bishops remained mute to the torture policy because they regarded the atheism of Communist leftists as a threat to Christian values.
In Judaism, ancient Maccabean kings used the sword to convert their neighbors. But already by Roman times, Judaism had decided that one could torture and kill pre-emptively only when a threat was direct, imminent and certain. Melissa Weintraub, writing for Rabbis for Human Rights, says that "Judaism would never permit routine torture." Yet "never" hasn't held up well in Judaism or in the world's other great religions.
Case in point: Shraga Simmons, a commentator on an "ask the rabbi" website, sees things quite differently. "It is probably a duty to apply reasonable physical pressure (to a terrorist with knowledge of a nuclear bomb in a large city) in order to save lives," Simmons says.
The times have a funny way of changing religious views on torture, just as the times might influence a government's view of such measures. In Israel, for example, remnants of unjustified torture persisted. Israeli watchdog group B'tselem says torture inIsrael was not unusual before 1999, when Israel's Supreme Court outlawed it under most circumstances. Before the court ruling, the group said, 85% of Palestinian prisoners were physically abused. From 1999 to 2002, the last years for which statistics exist, Israel approved only 90 cases in which interrogators could use "exceptional means of interrogation" because of "ticking bombs" scenarios, the newspaper Haaretz reported.
The lure of violence
Even in the most pacifistic religion, Buddhism, some religious leaders say violence is permitted if it is the lesser of two evils, write Joyce Dubensky and Rachel Lavery in The Torture Debate in America. In the 1970s, for example, Buddhist monk Kittivuddho Bhikkhu in Thailand supported torture and violence against the threat of invasion and communism. He argued that killing 5,000 people to protect42 million others was no sin.
In Islam, too, religious theory demanded a change in practice. Scholars such as Taha Jabir al-Alwani of the International Institute of Islamic Thought contend that because the Quran insists on truth and justice, "a confession obtained under duress cannot be considered truth, and punishment awarded because of it cannot be considered justice." When torture nevertheless happens under some Islamic governments, he says, the leaders will be held religiously accountable.
With some of the brutalities committed around the world today in the name of Islam, it's clear that even the most noble of faiths can be distorted to justify abhorrent actions, including torture.
So why haven't religions "professing the worth of each person as created in God's image" opposed torture as a practice clearly outside the bounds of a good faith? Why have they had to overcome their "dark side" to arrive at the obvious moral answer? Because, in the words of Rabbi David Hartman, director of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, "The Bible doesn't teach you tolerance. ... You go there for passion, for zealousness, for extremes. Biblical people are extremists."
Religious passion is indeed double-edged. It instills fervor for one's own beliefs while passionately excluding those who do not share those beliefs. Once another person becomes the "infidel," it is but a short step to treat him differently from the believer. And when a clashing of religions leads to war "as is often the case in world history" the worst of mankind uses faith as a sword in those battles. Torture in the name of God isn't a great step from that reality.
The conversion that many religions have undergone in upgrading their moral stance on torture can be instructive to governments such as our own. Torture degrades the victim, but it also degrades the society condoning it. Rationales such as the greater good or self-defense are slippery slopes. The definition of self-defense becomes looser and looser, and the greater good more arbitrary.
A quick walk through history shows that even the greatest religions have wallowed in dark periods in which human abuses were perpetrated in the name of God. Enlightenment often followed.
The world's greatest governments would do well to look at the lessons of history, and faith, in determining whether to venture over to the dark side or to use restraint. No religion can reflect proudly on having taken such an immoral route as torture. Surely the same holds true for governments and nations tempted to do the same.