Statements by Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey, along with comments by Mitt Romney and his new national security adviser, have brought the issue of torture to the surface in troubling new ways.
It is quite clear that this issue is not dead. Therefore it is also quite clear that morally concerned citizens must continue to fight the use of torture as a tool of American interrogation policy.
In answering questions during Senate Judiciary hearings last Thursday, Mukasey was forced to reveal perhaps more than he would have wanted about where the Bush Administration currently stands on torture. To wit:
— Mukasey said that American officials are currently authorized to use “coercive techniques” that go beyond the limits imposed in 2006 by the Army Field Manual, which, for example, bans beatings, sexual humiliation, and waterboarding;
— When read a detailed definition of waterboarding and asked whether it is constitutional, Mukasey resorted to semantics: “If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional.” But he refused to say whether waterboarding amounted to torture.
— Mukasey asserted that the president has the authority to “defend the country” by authorizing an act that is contrary to a statute passed by Congress. The implication of this position is that Congress and the public cannot know whether acts banned by laws (such as the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act sponsored by Sen. John McCain) are currently being performed by our government.
In short, it goes like this: the president accepts that “torture” is unconstitutional. However, he is free to define torture as narrowly as he wishes — and to do so secretly and apart from congressional statute or public review. If an act is not “defined” by the president as torture, it is not torture; therefore it is constitutional. The president's executive power to defend the country using whatever techniques he does not define as torture is absolute.
As a citizen, I find these executive-branch contortions to be a violation of representative democracy and the rule of law.
As a Christian, I find this narrowing of the definition of torture and placing of authority to act on this narrow definition in the hands of one man to be a blatant violation of the biblical doctrines of human dignity and human sin. This violates human dignity, because, yes, even detainees in the fight against terrorism are made in the image of God and have basic rights that must be respected. And it misunderstands human sin, because Christians know that the human heart is desperately wicked and human actions desperately corruptible. This is precisely why no one can be trusted with unfettered power.
The comments by retired General James Marks, Mitt Romney's new national security adviser, are worse than anything we have discussed so far. In a 2005 interview which he has not repudiated, Marks asserted he would “stick a knife in somebody's thigh in a heartbeat” to get information from a prisoner or save a soldier's life.
Perhaps Marks and others outside the government have the virtue of stripping away the euphemisms and legal niceties so that we must face directly what we are really talking about here.
Romney himself said in a presidential debate that, far from closing our detention center at Guantanamo, we should “double” it. He has also voiced support for the “enhanced interrogation techniques” being used by the CIA. These are secret, and so it is hard to know what precisely Romney is endorsing. One wonders if this includes practices now banned by the Army Field Manual but known to have been employed by United States in the “war on terror” — induced hypothermia, sleep deprivation, stress positions and waterboarding, among others.
Romney's position is not unique among the Republican presidential candidates, who with the laudable exception of John McCain appear to be trying to out-tough each other in the perhaps inevitable trajectory of a primary campaign aiming to attract conservative voters.
Ultimately, it is not the politicians who are to blame. If Mukasey is confirmed in a Democratic-controlled Senate despite his comments about torture and executive power, then the Democrats also share the responsibility. If the essentials of the Bush position on torture continue to be publicly affirmed by the next Republican nominee, then Republican voters also will have made their choice when they select that nominee.
And so it will continue, with our consent, that for four more years, agents of our government will, in the words of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (Dem-R.I.), be “putting somebody in a reclining position, strapping them down, putting cloth over their faces and pouring water over the cloth to simulate the feeling of drowning.”
Or, for a more direct approach, just sticking knives in their thighs.
Or maybe, as citizens, we could just say “no” to torture.
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— David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. www.davidgushee.com