Christians and torture: Two faces have thee

By Paul Prather - Herald-Leader columnist

The most disturbing revelation about our government in quite a while is the disclosure that, after 9/11, the Bush administration embraced what Vice President Dick Cheney euphemistically called ”the dark side.“

That is, the administration secretly adopted an official program of torture against suspected enemy combatants captured in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Abu Ghraib was not an exception, not the result of a few sadistic enlisted soldiers run amok. We now know Abu Ghraib was just one manifestation of a policy in which the abuse of prisoners was ordered, and at times micro-managed, from the highest offices in Washington, D.C.

The approved tactics included not only waterboarding prisoners, which has gotten a lot of publicity, but sexually humiliating them, depriving them of sleep, terrorizing them with dogs and shackling them in excruciating positions.

This should appall every American.

What perplexes me most, though, is that the great majority of U.S. Christians seem to be reacting to this sordid news with a long, corporate yawn.

It has been only 10 years since many of these same Christians—from TV evangelists to radio pundits to local pastors to folks in the pew—were calling for Bill Clinton's impeachment. Hey, they were screaming for his head on a pike.

His offense? He'd dallied with a willing intern in the Oval Office.

”How dare he?“ Christians cried. ”Reprobate! Sinner!“

Now we learn the current administration committed—not a few times, but concertedly, for years—crimes both evil and medieval. And Christians don't care.

I'm still trying to figure that one out.

One reason for Christians' collective silence may be that President Bush, Cheney and their advisers are conservative Republicans, as are a great many Christians, especially the white evangelicals who despised Clinton so vocally and voted for Bush so heavily.

But torture isn't an issue that should pit Democrats against Republicans, or liberals against conservatives. It's a foundational moral issue. It should pit all decent people against barbarians. It's not about right and left. It's about right and wrong.

Indeed, many of the folks most horrified by the administration's policy have been the ones who were supposed to help implement it, from senior military officers (clearly not a bunch of bleeding hearts) to mid-level members of the administration itself (presumably all staunch conservatives).

Whether individual critics line up to the right or left, their reasoning has been identical: Torture is despicable by any measure — it's uncivilized, it's un-American and, in a practical sense, it's tragically counterproductive.

It produces worthless military intelligence, since agonized prisoners will tell interrogators anything they want to hear, true or not. Torture also diminishes America's standing among our allies and provides our enemies with an incomparable recruiting tool.

Worst of all, torture destroys the American ethos. We like to view our country as a beacon of enlightenment and freedom. Torturing people makes us feel like fascists.

So where's the hue and cry against Bush; Cheney; John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer said to have developed the arguments ”legalizing“ torture; and David Addington, the vice president's enforcer on this issue?

The only message I can infer from Christians' silence is this: To them, what Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky was more reprehensible than what American interrogators did to Mamdouh Habib, an Australian captured in Pakistan, who was tormented with electric cattle prods and threatened with rape by dogs.

As Dahlia Lithwick wrote in Newsweek, Habib ”confessed to all sorts of things that weren't true“ until, after three years, he was released—without charges.

Why is it Christians, followers of the Prince of Peace, followers of the one who commanded us to love our enemies, don't find these offenses worthy of impeachment?

Perhaps, in many American Christians' minds, the people we've captured in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan represent Satan—they're Taliban, they're al-Qaida. They're killers who crash airliners into skyscrapers and saw the heads off their prisoners. They look different than we do. They follow a different religion.

But it's important to remember that investigator after investigator has found that the majority of people we've imprisoned and brutalized aren't al-Qaida or Taliban. Many are innocent farmers or merchants snatched up mistakenly in the chaos of war.

Besides, the bottom line is, we Americans are supposed to be better than the Taliban. The Taliban live in the 7th century; we live in the 21st. We're the good guys.

The United States has in the past faced ruthless enemies and perilous threats to our existence. During such times, previous administrations have ignored certain human rights, too.

But no administration has ever sunk so low as to actively promote torture.

If torturing your enemies isn't a sin, there's no such thing as a sin.