A conversation with Newt Gingrich:
“DIA: Do you believe any of the Bush administration’s approved interrogation techniques amounted to torture? Asked another way, why is waterboarding torture when it’s done by the Khmer Rouge, but “enhanced interrogation” when it’s done by America?
Mr Gingrich:No. As a British court noted, waterboarding is not torture. Waterboarding has been routinely used to train American pilots in the military to understand what interrogation techniques they might encounter. The reference to the Khmer Rouge is the kind of moral equivalence President Reagan warned against in his “Evil Empire” speech in 1983. The Khmer Rouge killed millions of people, annihilated the Cambodian intellectuals, and was among the worst inhumane movements in the last century. The United States has used specific enhanced interrogation techniques in specific circumstances against very high-level terrorists for the purpose of saving innocent civilian lives, not for taking them.”
He seems to be saying the the object of the act does not matter, only the intention of the acting moral agent. And since the US are the good guys, they don’t intend any ill on people, which makes this kind of torture licit. It sounds suspicously like the depraved logic of Andrew McCarthy of the National Review. As the coiner of the phrase “consequentialism”, Elizabeth Anscombe, put it: “on this theory of what intention is, a marvellous way offered itself of making any action lawful. You only had to ‘direct your intention’ in a suitable way. In practice this means making a little speech to yourself: “What I mean to be doing is…” Sorry, Newt, but if you are want to be Catholic, you need to get your moral theology from official sources, not Ronald Reagan — and it’s you who are engaging in moral relativism, it’s you who are denying that something the Church deems intrinsically evil is not indeed intrinsically evil.
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