January 2009

During his election campaign, US President Barack Obama vowed to close Guantanamo Bay and ban torture by the American military as early as his first week in office to show a break from the Bush administration’s approach to the war on terror. This is a move supported by Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain. In an interview on 12 January with US ABC’s This Week, Obama stated: “But I don’t want to be ambiguous about this. We are going to close Guantanamo and we are going to make sure that the procedures we set up are ones that abide by our Constitution.” Since its establishment in 2002, the prison has critically tarnished US foreign policy.

In his first day in office, the Commander-in-Chief plans to sign an executive order to close the Guantanamo Detention Center in Cuba within a year of it being signed. The draft executive order, which the media has obtained, also calls for a series of reviews on the status of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as well as the military commissions set up to try them. President Obama has also called for the suspension of military trials of terror suspects being held there.

In the February 2006 issue of Christianity Today, David Gushee addressed “5 Reasons Torture is Always Wrong”. He stated:

“Simply put, should our government have the option – even if used only rarely and in extreme circumstances – of torturing prisoners? I believe Christians should say ‘NO’, on the following five grounds.

1. Torture violates the dignity of a human being

Every inch of the human body and every aspect of the human spirit comes from God and bears witness to his handiwork. We are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-28). Human dignity, value and worth come as a permanent and ineradicable endowment of the Creator to every person.

Christians, at least, should be trained to see in every person the imprint of God’s grandeur. This should create in us a sense of reverence. Here, we say – and we say it even of detainees in the war on terror – is a human being sacred in God’s sight, made in God’s image, someone for whom Christ died. No one is ever “subhuman” or “human debris”, as Rush Limbaugh has described some of our adversaries in Iraq.

Because they are human, people have rights to many things, including the right not to be tortured. Christians sometimes question the legitimacy of “rights talk,” correctly so. Just because someone claims a right does not mean that it really is a right. But among the most widely recognized rights in both legal and moral theory is the right to bodily integrity; that is, the right not to have intentional physical and psychological harm inflicted upon oneself by others. The ban on torture is one expression of this right.

2. Torture mistreats the vulnerable and violates the demands of justice

In the Scriptures, God’s understanding of justice tilts towards the vulnerable. “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt. Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry” (Ex. 22:21-23). Primary forms of injustice include violent abuse and domination of the powerless.

One reason our legal system has so many layers of protection for the accused and imprisoned is their powerlessness. This is important in any legal system that has the power to deprive people of their liberty and even their lives. The 83,000 people who have been detained by our government and military in the last four years are, as prisoners, vulnerable to injustice. Those who have been tortured are victims of injustice.

Every inch of the human body and every aspect of the human spirit comes from God and bears witness to his handiwork. We are

3. Authorizing torture trusts government too much.

Human beings are sinful through and through (Rom.3:10-18). We are not to be trusted, and we are especially dangerous when in possession of unchecked power. This applies to all of us.

Given human sinfulness, not only must people be told not to torture, we must also strengthen the structures of due process, accountability, and transparency that buttress those standards and make them less likely to be violated.

This is what is so dangerous about the discovery of secret CIA prisons in Europe and “ghost detainees” who are located no one knows where. As Manfred Nowak, U.N. special rapporteur on torture, said at the time the CIA’s secret prisons were revealed, “Every secret place of detention is a higher risk for ill treatment, that’s the danger of secrecy.” It is not enough for US government officials to say they can be trusted to act “in keeping with our values” – not without due process, accountability and transparency. No government is so virtuous as to overcome the laws of human nature, or to be beyond the need for democratic checks and balances.

4. Torture dehumanizes the torturer.

Mark Bowden, a military scholar and author of Black Hawk Down, believes that sometimes torture is the right choice. Even so, he worries, “How does one allow it, yet still control it? Sadism is deeply rooted in the human psyche. Every army has its share of soldiers who delight in kicking and beating bound captives. Men in authority tend to abuse it—not all men, but many. As a mass, they should be assumed to lean toward abuse.”

Loosening longstanding restrictions on physical and mental cruelty risks the dehumanization not just of the tortured, but also of the torturers. What may be intended as carefully calibrated interrogation techniques could easily tempt implementers toward sadism—the infliction of pain for the sheer fun of it, especially in the heat of military conflict, in a climate of fear and loathing of the enemy, and in the context of an endless war on terror. How many of us could be trusted to draw the line consistently between the permitted “grabbing, poking, and pushing” and the banned “punching, slapping, and kicking”? How much self-control can we reasonably expect people to exercise? Once the line has been crossed to torture, as Michael Ignatieff claims, it “inflicts irremediable harm on both the torturer and the prisoner.”

Frederick Douglass commented famously on how holding a slave slowly ruined the character of the woman who owned him. Martin Luther King Jr. frequently said that the greatest victims of segregation were the white people whose souls were deformed by their own hatred. And Alexander Solzhenitsyn, reflecting on the Soviet gulag, said, “Our torturers have been punished most horribly of all: They are turning into swine; they are departing downward from humanity.”

5. Torture erodes the character of the nation that tortures

A nation is a collective moral entity with a character, an identity that carries across time. Causes come and go, threats come and go, but the enduring question for any social entity is who we are as a people. This is true of a family, a church, a school, a civic club, or a town. It is certainly true of a nation.

Senator John McCain, who has led the Republican charge against torture, said “This isn’t about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies.”

In an interview with Newsweek, he stated: “What I…mourn is that we lose when…we allow, confuse, or encourage our soldiers to forget the best sense of ourselves, that which is our greatest strength – that we are different and better than our enemies, that we fight for an idea, not a tribe, not a land, not a land, not a king…but for an idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.”

No exceptions

It is past time for evangelical Christians to remind our government and our society of perennial moral values, which also happen to be international and domestic laws. As Christians, we care about moral values, and we vote on the basis of such values. We care deeply about human rights violations around the world. Now it is time to raise our voice and say an unequivocal NO to torture, a practice that has no place in our society and violates our most cherished moral convictions.”