Hi Bluefish,
First, I want to sincerely thank you for your posts. While I may still disagree with you on several points, I do want to thank you for taking the time and care to present well thought out arguments for your position and entering into debate in the right spirit. We live in an age where that kind of discourse is becoming rare to say the least and one gets depressingly used to dealing only with people's "Internet Alter-Ego."
I hope you don't mind if I simply respond to the points you made rather than quoting you. I believe that it is critical that we understand the huge difference between
torture and
punishment as they are two separate and largely unrelated categories. Punishment per se, is not a moral evil. Properly understood its end is retribution and it often has the desirable side-effects of deterrence and restoration. We punish someone whom we know to have broken a law. So in the case of war crimes, when we capture someone who has committed what the international community has agreed is a war crime, we try them and if found guilty, punish them either with imprisonment for a fixed period or death. An example of this kind of proceeding occured at Nuremburg following WW2. The sentence is viewed as the "just reward" for their actions, by their proven actions they brought this upon themselves. Hopefully, others will be deterred from similar actions when they see what can happen. Since inflicting pain is not the objective in Capital as opposed to
corporal punishment, generally prisoners are executed swiftly.
Torture on the other hand is
not a punishment, nor does it follow a trial. In torture we use pain, discomfort, and terror upon someone totally within our power in an attempt to extract information which we consider to be useful but which they have not willingly offered up. Usually torture precedes or occurs in the absence of any sort of trial. The end of torture is information, not retribution. It presumes that any potential information we extract is more important than any other consideration.
If I can use an example. If a parent spanks their child because they took something that was forbidden to them and broke it, that is punishment. If, on the other hand, a parent begins the process of using spanking on their children in order to get them to cough up the details of whatever future mischief they
might be planning, that is torture. In torture, we care very little for the person, what we care about is the
potential information and its usefulness to us.
The reason I mention that is that because torture is not a "lesser harm" than execution. When we put a war criminal to death after trial, it is because he has merited his death sentence - that is the just punishment for his crimes. We do not, nor should we execute or torture untried prisoners randomly, as was done by the Japanese, on a whim and without any trial. Sure you might get useful information, but we could also get useful information about future crimes and ongoing conspiracies by systematically torturing our current prison population.
My second point, regarding our current war, the very fact that the enemy refuses to play by the rules argues for the most aggressive application of those rules in order to force them to do so. At no point should we "accept" evil behavior. Currently, you are right to point out that Jihad is a mostly stateless endeavor (This is as opposed to say the 8th century when Jihad was waged by the armies of the Caliph, or the following centuries when it was waged predominantly by the armies of the Turks). However, we should do all that we can to discourage the current behavior rather than viewing it as normal. For instance, in Iraq, the West fought the armies of Saddam, when they were defeated however, we should have made it clear that anyone conducting an insurgency via systematic war crimes would be tried and executed because of the danger insurgents create for the civilian population. In the same way, the USA in Vietnam should have indicated from the beginning that they had no problem fighting uniformed NVA regulars, but that Vietcong who refused to wear any distinguishing marks and who broke the rules of Land Warfare would be tried and shot. Had we done this from the beginning, we
might have avoided things like the
My Lai massacre that results from the inevitable stress of having regular troops constantly under fire from an enemy that comits attrocities from the midst of the civilian population and strives to be as indistinguishable from them as possible. The insurgents, not the regulars, are the ones culpable for civilian deaths in that case and the only way we can stop it is by treating those insurgents not as POWs but as War Criminals.
Finally, yes you are right, there hasn't been enough theologically conservative biblical exegetical work done on the subject of torture, that is largely because for hundreds of years no one in the nations where post-Reformation biblical exegesis has flourished was advancing its necessity. It's rather like abortion in that respect. We came to that debate largely exegetically unequipped simply because abortion hadn't had any serious public advocates until the advent of the eugenicists of the 20th century.
A few individuals are now working towards it, but by and large the attitude amongst conservative biblical scholars is one of "is this really necessary?" As a result the theological liberals are running away with the show. Anyway Bluefish, give me your thoughts about this initial attempt done by one of the men of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals -
EXEGESIS ON TORTURE
