Retractions and Clarifications

Earlier this week I was arguing with somebody about Brownback’s vote to confirm Sebelius and called it a “betrayal”. My reader persuaded me that this language was too harsh. However, it occurs to me that I did not note this on my blog, merely in the combox. So, for the record, here is my reply in which I acknowledge that this language was too harsh:

Okay, then “betrayal” was too strong. Brownback’s not my senator and I don’t know the guy too well. For me, he blends into the background of hundreds of other GOP guys who have yakked about abortion and exploited the prolife vote for almost 30 years. I’ll take your word for it that he’s better or different than the rest of them. But from where I was sitting, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference between an individual zebra who is white with black stripes and the herd that is black with white stripes. I’ve seen so many GOP types make so many promises and tell so many lies over the years that I assume, rightly or wrongly, that when yet another GOP guy tells me he’s prolife and then votes for some obviously repugnant figure like Sebelius, that I’m seeing… yet another GOP guy.

But I’ll take your word for it that Brownback is way different.

Second, I want to take the opportunity of an exchange I had with a reader who has said sensible things in my comboxes for years to clarify another misconception I run into a lot:
Reader Peggy opens a comment as follows:

I don’t suspect that this is worth my while to note here, but here goes. [I’m not interested in being labeled an apologist for torture.] I do agree torture is immoral and unacceptable. Good, we’ve stopped that policy….

She then goes on to discuss things like the merits of prosecuting the guys who wrote the torture memos, etc.

So I write her back and say, “I don’t think you are a torture apologist. I don’t really quite see why you would think I would.”

She replies,

Thank you Mark. Your positions and commentary to many others who discuss the issue and debate legal aspects and such lead me to believe that you are categorizing all who want to debate as torture apologists.

That troubles me, because it’s not so. There are, to be sure certain aspects of the torture “debate” that I don’t believe to be debatable at all to anybody of common sense. When victims turn up dead on multiple occasions in multiple places from things like hypothermia, beatings, and “stress posiitons”, it is absurd to pretend that they were not tortured. I therefore think that people who still, at this late date, maintain that we did not torture, that it is impossible to even know what torture is, that it’s not torture and besides it works, etc are torture apologists. Similarly, I think that people who build mountains of theological justification for ignoring Veritatis Splendor in favor of Bush torture policies on the tiny molehill of theological justification provided by Fr. Harrison’s incredibly remote speculations are torture apologists.

But people who have various views about what should be done about the crimes committed under Bush policy can disagree in good faith. I personally think that those who authorized the torture should be prosecuted. But I can also see the arguments of those who think that would do more harm than good, sucking up the time and resources of a nation at war with both foreign enemies and economic disaster. So: whether we have tortured seems to me to be obvious and those who deny it seem to me to be trying to deny the bleedin’ obvious. Similarly, whether that torture violated the bleedin’ obvious teaching of the Church is also, I think, only an “open question” to the wilfully blind. Whatever Fr. Harrison said about the extremely remote ticking time bomb and how it might, just might, render torture and open question in the remote eventuality–it has no bearing on justifying the torture of the people we have tortured and even killed. Indeed, the emerging evidence suggests that the torture “high value” target was conducted in no small part, because the Administration wanted a casus belli and so tortured victims (who had actually been giving valuable intelligence by normal humane interrogation) in order to find the Saddam-Al Quaeda connection they simply knew had to be there–even though it wasn’t. A classic example of the stupidity of torture as an interrogation method.

However, that said, when we move away from the question of whetherr beating a man to death is torture (like we did to Dilawar at Bagram) and the question of whether we can square that with Catholic teaching (answer: no), we then arrive at the question of what we should do in response to the fact we have tortured. And that seems to me to be less clear and open to prudential judgment. Good faith and bad faith arguments can be made for and against prosecution.

A good faith argument for prosecution says “Justice should be done on war criminals.”

A bad faith argument (a la Nancy Pelosi) say, “I’m shocked–SHOCKED–to discover we have been torturing people! Those awful Republicans!” while the Congressional aide is handing her the reports on the torture she authorized.

A good faith argument (like Peggy’s) can be made that it’s problematic to prosecute lawyers. Or, similarly, a good faith argument can be made that, nice as it would be to get perfect justice for war criminals, the country needs to move on given our present economic and global situation and focus on more pressing matters. I can respect that.

A bad faith argument can also be made by GOP hacks who just want to avoid prosecutions.

I would not assume that somebody who has shown no inclination to make every excuse in the book for torture is arguing in bad faith against prosecution.

Just FYI.