I had a series of thoughts this morning that led me to a question. Follow me as I walk through them.
Yesterday I heard about the new movie "Redacted". I looked it up on IMDB and its own website. The movie is about "...the real-life rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers..." (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0937237/synopsis). I looked at some of the trailers. It seems to me that the movie is intended to and will succeed in having the effect of giving aid and comfort to enemies of the United States. What were they thinking? Certainly Mark Cuban has the right to make the movie. Certainly I have the right to not go see it. ("If the people don't want to come to the ballpark, how you gonna stop 'em" - philosopher Yogi Berra).
But this was just the first step on my mental journey.
Certainly the crime (which is mentioned in the movie) committed by the soldiers was heinous. I am assuming that it really happened. If history is any guide, rape often accompanies war. So if it didn't happen in Iraq, it did somewhere else. It is an unjustifiable act whenever & wherever.
We are also told that our intelligence gatherers in Iraq are torturing POWs in order to obtain information to more successfully prosecute the war. Now I am all about successfully prosecuting the war. But ends do not justify means. It is sin to committ unjustifiable acts just because they aid in successful prosecution of the war.
Torture is defined as: the act of inflicting excruciating pain ... as a means of getting a confession or information ... . (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/torture) I "redacted" the definition a little to fit the intelligence gathering function of torture.
Tom Landry once said that a football coach was supposed to make men do what they really didn't want to do in order to help them achieve what they really wanted to achieve. (or something like that) No doubt some of the pain was excruciating. But it isn't torture.
When my children were young, I frequently spanked them. Sometimes part of the goal of the spanking was to get a confession (leading to repentance). They tried hard to make me believe that the pain was excruciating, & it is OK with me if it pained them. But that wasn't torture either.
The difference between what Tom Landry and I did, and torture is (I think) our intent. We intended it for the good of the recipient, and the torturer intends it to harm the recipient (or at least as a means to harm the recipient's army).
OK, one more stop on this path and I will have arrived at the conundrum.
Killing a human is wrong - usually. There are 3 times when it is OK to kill a human (I think): (1) After due process of law - capitol punishment, (2) Self defense, (3) War.
Now in war, we don't think it is necessary to give the other guy an even break. If we have overpowering force, or surprise, or any advantage then we use it and it is fine to do so. If the enemy combatant is a POW, we have overpowering force at our disposal in dealing with him. It is possible to torture him without killing him. & we would have been justified in killing him in combat. So are we justified in torturing him?
This leads me to a place where I am very uncomfortable. I seem to have created a justification for a means of prosecuting war (torture) that I naturally abhor.
Here are the points that I think are important in this issue:
(1) In war, we intend to do the enemy harm. This is OK.
(2) One of the things that makes the infliction of pain = torture is our intent.
SO - the implication is that the infliction of pain with the intent of prosecuting the war is OK.
Again, I am uncomfortable with the result of my logic. Help me out here.
About Me
- Doing Better Than I Deserve
- Sometimes I think better if I write things down. I always think better if other people react to the things I write. I will be surprised if many people visit this WebLog twice, but I encourage everyone to read, react, and comment.
5 comments:
For me, the arguments about torture center around three issues (not necessarily in any order):
1) Are we, by torturing someone, breaking our national word. As far as I know, the slightly silly rule here is that America officially never tortures anyone--but has no compunction against shipping people to allied natures for torture in extreme cases.
2) Is it right to ask American soldiers to commit certain acts of torture--considering here how psychologically and spiritually destructive it can be when the ends and means can't be separated. I think this is what you're getting at with intent or motive.
3) Is torture effective, especially in terms of long-term political goals? I'm not an expert on the issue, but I have read a couple of psychological studies supporting the commonsense thought that extreme torture tends to make someone say whatever the torturer wants him to, not necessarily the truth.
I think (3) needs to be the first consideration, because there's no point in thinking about the moral dimensions of torture if it's an unnecessary and self-defeatingly awkward tool anyway.
In slightly related news...
I've been slowly developing a sneaky suspicion that there is such a thing as a relatively "clean" and "dirty" war--and that one of America's problems in both Iraq and (previously) Vietnam is that we've lacked discipline among our troops.
Fighting two wars at once in an unpatriotic age when so few Americans are willing to volunteer to fight has lead to a hastening of the training process in the rush to send troops to the front line. In such a condition, one would imagine the ratio of successful purpose to savagery could increase.
*by increase, I mean "decrease."
I think that (1) and (2) are less important than the overall morality of the thing. That is, if torture in wartime is sin, then the rest is moot. (3) is a question of competence -- not part of the issue that I am considering.
Maybe I can re-state the question as: "I have always thought that torture was sinful in every circumstance. But my chain of logic (see above) makes me wonder if I have just believed that because it was conventional wisdom. Is it possible that torture of POWs in wartime for intelligence purposes is morally acceptable (not sin)? I.E., is dealing w/ POWs more like combat? or more like dealing w/ civilian prisoners?
Ahh. I see where you're coming from.
I just don't see any Scriptural grounds for saying that torture is an *absolute* sin; certainly I don't see Christ or Paul coming out and speaking against the Roman's treatments of prisoners or anything like that. Certainly in OT times, killing of prisoners was endorsed by God.
However, I do think Biblical principals apply to a lot of things that a state does. I think a very strong case could be made from both OT and NT scriptures that it is wrong for a king (and by extension a nation) to break his word even though it isn't wrong for him to kill people under the authority God gives him.
I also think #2 is a worthwhile consideration, though, in light of the divine mandate for the government to punish evil and praise good (1 Peter 2:14). Torture certainly is evil when done by an individual on his own authority; it seems that for a certain temperment, at least, a government-mandated torture might serve to reward evil (attitudes of vengeance and hatred) and punish good (a desire to love one's enemy.
Of course, a government can't entirely praise those who turn the other cheek without encouraging evil. But I think it brings to the forefront the idea that war is always a necessary evil, and the idea that governments should try to make it as un-evil as possible while maintaining order and peace.
But again, I guess I'm coming at this as someone who has simply never seen scriptures as unequivocally condemning torture.
Re. Beowulf:
Probably a good call--esp. since the first half is rather crude. (Purposefully so, in order to contrast with the relative civilization of the second half, but still.)
But how can someone not like dragon fights? (Unless they don't watch it in 3D, in which case lengthy shots of arrows flying at the screen might just be boring.)
Post a Comment