Today’s Desperate Lies from Torture Defenders

Today’s Desperate Lies from Torture Defenders December 18, 2014

In the ongoing effort of “prolife” Torture Defenders to ignore the fact that, among other things, we anally raped, froze to death, beat, stood on the broken legs of, and threatened to murder the wives and children of prisoners, said defenders insist on perseverating over the now dead as a doornail question: “Waterboarding: Is it Really Torture?”  It’s like obsessing over disproving an old charge that Himmler was cruel to animals after the camps have been opened.  The pretense that defining torture is impossible (so let’s maintain the status quo) is all Catholic Torture Defenders have had in their rhetorical arsenal for 10 years.  Now that’s gone (since the CIA itself called what they did torture).  But, in their desperation, Catholic torture defenders stick with the only thing they know and go on making excuses for waterboarding as though it makes any difference now.

Two of the most beloved lies told to that end are as follows:

  1. We waterboard our own troops in SERE training, so that proves it’s not torture.
  2. If it does not result in death and leaves no permanent physical injury, it’s not torture and therefore not gravely and intrinsically evil.

These lies are curiously related.  To the first, the reply is easily made: SERE training is done in order to build our troops up and strengthen them. Waterboarding prisoners is done in order to tear them down and destroy them. You might as well say that a man making love to his wife is the same thing as rape since the physical actions are the same.

Not coincidentally, the second lie turns out to be an excellent defense of rape.

That it should come to *this* for “prolife” Catholics.

Torture Defenders: Why die on this hill? Repent. Believe the good news. Confess your sin and Jesus will certainly forgive it.


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