Eliminating All Empathy: Personalism and the "War On Terror"

Yesterday, the World Day against torture was celebrated. May the common commitment of the institutions and citizens totally ban this intolerable violation of human rights which is radically opposed to human dignity.

Pope John Paul II¹

As I understand it, technically, unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld²

Within months of the September 11 attacks on the United States, public officials, academics, journalists, and lawyers began debating the ethics of torture. Confronting an unconventional and intransigent enemy, the United States and its allies required quick intelligence in order to prevent further terrorist attacks. In such circumstances, some believed that torture would be morally justifiable. Often, they invoked political philosopher Michael Walzer's well-known "ticking bomb" scenario. In it, a colonial official in a civil war captures a rebel who knows the location of bombs in a city. To stop a bombing, should he torture the rebel? Walzer maintains that he should, but argues that he would incur moral guilt for committing torture. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, many have agreed with Walzer's account of the ethics of torture.³

These ethical debates are no mere ivory-tower exercises. They have occurred when the United States waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and battled al Qaeda terrorists worldwide. In the first few years after the September 11 attacks, the United States imprisoned more than 70,000 people around the world, most notoriously in Saddham Hussein's former prison, Abu Ghraib.⁴ In 2004, the world was shocked to see photographs of Iraqi prisoners standing naked in human pyramids, fleeing attack dogs, and connected to electrical wires. These horrific images sparked worldwide outrage. The debate about Abu Ghraib, however, was only the most public one about American policy toward detainees in the "war on terror." The United States held hundreds of prisoners at its naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. At this facility, allegations of abuse and torture began emerging, some leveled by FBI agents and military lawyers. For example, in August 2004, an FBI agent reported that

on a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18–24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.⁵

In 2003, the public learned that officials in the U.S. departments of Justice and Defense had redefined torture, legitimizing new forms of abusing detainees. All these developments raised difficult ethical questions about how the United States employs torture.

Disturbingly, in the face of these developments, many Christians have remained silent. Those who often speak out against abortion, euthanasia, or embryonic stem cell research have said little about the prisoner abuse scandals and documents on torture. Many who admire the late John Paul II for defending human dignity have stood mute while the United States has been accused of brutalizing persons. Some have condemned abusive treatment of detainees but have uncritically applied ideas about the person's dignity to international politics. Complex military and civilian institutions devise and carry out interrogation policies. They do so in a political context, interpreted by media and political institutions. Too often, those who condemn torture and abuse naively ignore...