Would you do it?

Lutheran, The, Jul 2004 by Hoffmeyer, John

Some quest ion if torture always is wrong

"If you thought that by torturing one person you could get information that would prevent a terrorist attack, which could kill thousands of people, would you do it?" A member of our food co-op asked me that question the other day as we packed grocery bags.

Recent revelations of cruelty practiced by U.S. personnel against Iraqi prisoners have made torture a topic of conversation worldwide. International agreements concerning torture are back in the news.

In 1975 the United Nations defined torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted by or at the instigation of a public official on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or confession, punishing him for an act he has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating him or other people."

The official international consensus is that torture is indeed a very bad thing. But does Christian faith have anything specific to say about it?

At the heart of our faith stands a person who was tortured: Jesus Christ. So Christians have a distinctive relation to torture.

When I worked with the Salvadoran Lutheran Synod in 1992, I visited the chapel at the Jesuit university in San Salvador. Across the back wall of the church, in the Roman Catholic tradition of the "stations of the cross," hung 14 large black-and-white drawings of torture victims.

I understood the point of the drawings: God shared the sufferings of these people. My gut reaction, though, was that such brutal depictions weren't appropriate for a house of worship.

Then I turned toward the front of the church. Behind the altar hung a large cross. Before the cross became a Christian symbol, it already symbolized torture in the Roman Empire. Before Jesus was the subject of countless hymns, paintings and stained-glass windows, he was a torture victim.

Example of inhumanity

Torture has often been held up as a prime example of "man's inhumanity to man," or better, "human beings' inhumanity to other humans."

This new wording not only takes into account the fact that women are among the perpetrators and victims of torture. It also reveals the contradictory character of sin. As sinners, human beings act inhumanly. We go against our God-given human nature. We contradict the image of God in which we are created.

The Council of Chalcedon in 451 declared that Christ was both "truly God" and "truly human." This means that if we want to know what God is like, we look to Jesus Christ. If we want to know what a human being is like, we look to Jesus Christ.

Sin is not so much a problem of being "all too human" as it is a problem of failing to be human. Jesus lived a life of truly human words and deeds. As sinners we act inhumanly toward one another.

Torture isn't only an inhuman action. It's also an assault upon the humanity of those who are tortured. Training people to perpetrate torture requires persuading them that their potential victims are somehow less than fully human. People cease to be human beings and become "enemies of God," "threats to morality," "dangers" to cherished values. They become "dogs," "animals," "beasts." The potential victim is no longer "he" or "she" but "it."

The relationship between torturer and tortured sunders the most fundamental human bonds. It assaults our basic trust in what it means to be human beings together.

When it comes to torture, Jesus' familiar words take on an aching resonance: "Inasmuch as you did it unto one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it unto me" (Matthew 25:40).

Torture isn't just about extracting information that someone doesn't want to give. In fact, torture isn't a very reliable source of information. Torture may bring a person to the point of surrendering valid information that she wanted to withhold. It may also bring a person to the point of saying whatever she thinks will make the torture stop, regardless of whether the information is true or false.

Information & justification

But beyond the usefulness of information extracted under torture lies a more basic question: Since torture is such a fundamental assault upon humanity, what kind of information could ever justify opening the door to it being used again ... and again?

Dianna Ortiz, a nun who is a torture survivor and now serves as director of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (www.tassc.org), says it this way: "Once used, torture spreads like a plague over the land. The surgical approach to torture-we will torture just this one or that one-is an illusion. Instead, it legitimates the spread of this crime against humanity throughout the population."

Amid the fear that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, some U.S. government officials and journalists speculated about the extraordinary circumstances that might make the use of torture permissible. Their speculations proposed the same case as my friend at the food co-op. In doing so they too easily assumed the reliability of information extracted under torture.