Torture in our national soul

Otto von Bismarck, the great 19th century German chancellor, once remarked, “Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.” This is also true of other things the government does in serving the public good: grisly police work, ugly executions, hellish battlefield operations. There are very bad people in this world who won’t listen to reason and who refuse to do what is right or even beneficial to them. They are overseas cutting off heads and throwing acid in the face of schoolgirls and they are perhaps in your neighborhood too.

Is torturing a captured terrorist in the reasonable hope of saving thousands of innocent lives among the unpleasant necessities involved in keeping us safe and free? That is the debate the Senate Intelligence Committee, under the chairmanship of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has forced with the release of its report on post–9/11 CIA interrogation methods. The boundaries of justice may be simply the line between what is reasonable and unreasonable and therefore acceptable and unacceptable for a still somewhat Christian people.

This line sometimes depends on the context of an act. If a nuclear bomb will soon explode in a major American city unless a prisoner coughs up information we are certain he knows, any reasonable person would turn up the heat on him fast. It’s a clear-and-present danger of great magnitude. But in that case, we know the threat and we know what information we need. The location of the bomb is what Donald Rumsfeld called a “known unknown.”

After 9/11, things weren’t that clear. Al-Qaeda was a very present but maddeningly unclear danger. We faced what was reasonable to assume were unknown unknowns. Something unexpected and very big could hit us from a blind spot we didn’t even know was a blind spot. Today’s retrospective critics of yesterday’s clandestine intelligence techniques need to appreciate our real and justified fear of another 9/11 or worse at the time: a dirty bomb in New York City, poisoned water systems, sarin gas in the subway, an exploding train under Manhattan’s East River, a small plane full of explosives crashing into the stands of a packed football stadium. Imagine and shudder.

And those were not silly fears. Since 9/11, the authorities God established for our protection (Romans 13:1–4) have prevented more evil than we can imagine. It amazes me that in the past 13 years no garbage can has exploded in Manhattan. Even the accidentally failed attacks like the Underwear Bomber in 2009 and the Times Square Bomber in 2010 show us the continuing extraordinary threat of mass carnage that could, under narrow circumstances, justify extraordinary measures to prevent it.

Once we accept that the “no-torture-though-the-heavens-fall” position is unreasonable, we are faced with judgment calls on the far margins of civic life in a tragically fallen world. Ultimately those calls belong to the president, our elected commander in chief. And whatever his call, we’ll debate its wisdom, just as we debate police issues, the death penalty, and every war.