Reality Trumps Ideology

…especially on Talk Radio. One yakker for the Rubber Hose Right decided to go get himself waterboarded to prove it’s not really torture. Note that highly politically invested locution. He did not want to find out whether it was torture or not. He “wanted to prove it wasn’t torture“. That’s because, contra so many people on the amazing shrinking Rubber Hose Right, there are indeed people who are heavily invested, not in facts, but in marshalling evidence for a fore-ordained conclusion driven by their political allegiances.

Problem is: the facts are against the torture apologists in many, many ways, beginning with the ridiculous claim that waterboarding is not torture. Our yakker quickly bailed when confronted with the claims of reality over the demands of ideology and announced that it’s “absolutely torture.”

Duh.

Now we just need to get people to acknowledge that the Church really means it when it says that torture is intrinsically and gravely immoral.

“Whatever. Sometime, in war, you have to do evil that good may come of it. After all, you can’t deny that torture works!”

This is pretty much all the torture apologist has left once he finally admits the bleedin’ obvious fact that he is a torture apologist. Of course, his thesis runs into two problems. The first is that the prohibition against consequentialism is not suspended in wartime. This favorite delusion of the realpolitik Machiavellians is a legendary trope among those who are, at bottom, pagan at heart and who regard Catholic moral teaching as a pleasant ideal but hopelessly inadequate to the demands of the Real World, rather than as a revelation of what Reality, in fact, consists of.

Because of this fundamental disagreement about whether the Catholic revelation in fact corresponds to reality, it should not surprise us that torture apologists are, in fact, out of touch with reality in their practical assessments about whether torture “works”. Case in point, this bit of testimony from Colin Powell, which was so important in the US casus belli against Iraq:

I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda.

Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story. I will relate it to you now as he, himself, described it.

This senior al Qaeda terrorist was responsible for one of al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan.

His information comes firsthand from his personal involvement at senior levels of al Qaeda. He says bin Laden and his top deputy in Afghanistan, deceased al Qaeda leader Mohammed Atef, did not believe that al Qaeda labs in Afghanistan were capable enough to manufacture these chemical or biological agents. They needed to go somewhere else. They had to look outside of Afghanistan for help. Where did they go? Where did they look? They went to Iraq.

The support that (inaudible) describes included Iraq offering chemical or biological weapons training for two al Qaeda associates beginning in December 2000. He says that a militant known as Abu Abdula Al-Iraqi (ph) had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases. Abdula Al-Iraqi (ph) characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful.

Ooh! Scary! A connection between Al Quaeda and Iraq! We have to go to war!

The only problem is, the “the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda” turns out to have been obtained under torture and was fiction produced in order to stop the torture. Who could possibly have foreseen it?

So, yeah, torture “works” if, by that, you mean, you can get your victim to say whatever you want them to in order to drum up evidence for a war you are bound and determined to start. However, as a guide to reality, I will still take the Catholic tradition over the pagan realpolitik that darkens the minds of Machiavellians.

“I’ll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.” – Jesse Ventura