Sometimes we have to recognize--

Andrew Sullivan has a breath-taking post up. And yes, it's from a very Catholic perspective, but it's also the kind of thing I follow his blog for:

Then we have the astonishing argument from Thiessen that the torture-victims in the Cheney program he supported were grateful for being tortured, because when they were forced beyond what they could endure - which, of course, is Thiessen's unwitting admission that what he was doing was definitionally torture - they were grateful. They were grateful because their duty to Allah had been fulfilled and they were then free to spill their guts. They had done their religious duty and had been brought to a spiritual epiphany that allowed them to tell us so much.

There is much to say about this but let me on Ash Wednesday simply remember the Catholic church's own shameful history of torture. It was done, according to the Inquisitors, as a way to free the souls of the tortured, to bring them to a religious epiphany in which they abandoned heresy and saved themselves from eternal damnation. It is hard for modern people to understand this, but as a student in college of the years in which my own homeland used torture to procure religious conversion, it is important to remember that the torturers sincerely believed that what they were doing was in the best interests of the tortured. In fact, it was a sacred duty to torture rather than allow the victims to die and live in hell for eternity, a fate even worse than the agonies of stress positions or even burning at the stake. Why? Because the torture they would endure in hell would be eternal, while the torture on earth would not last that long.

This is not an exact parallel to the way in which Thiessen defends torture. But the meme that it somehow relieved the victims, that it liberated them, that it helped them to embrace giving information without conflict with their religious faith is horribly, frighteningly close to this ancient evil. For a Catholic to use this argument on a Catholic television program and to invoke the Magisterium of the Church in its defense is simply breath-taking in its moral obtuseness.

To me, the question boils down to whether one identifies with Christ or the centurions. Not as a Christian, or a believer in any God, but just as a human being. A long time ago, I read that some mystics would actually imagine themselves in Christ's place and try to experience, for themselves, in their own minds, what kind of suffering was endured. When I read that, I couldn't help but imagine. And that feeling was outside of time, desolate even before a crowd, and an eternity of pain. More than any crime or reason deserves.

But do we even have to recognize that we are scourging and crucifying people in the way that the teacher Jesus was persecuted according to the Bible, or can we just recognize what this government did to ordinary people? When I think about how mundanely this activity has been sanitized, with words like "enhanced interrogation", and with our former vice-president even having confessed publicly, and matter-of-factly, that he was a supporter of water boarding, I think the idea that the people that this was done to were human is lost. And he goes on chat shows, and his daughter does, and John Yoo writes editorials for The Inquirer. And Theissen gets a WaPo column.

But they have, to use the Christian metaphor, identified with those who drove the nails in. They have offered excuses, but never considered what the impact is on the world that watches, on the families of detainees, on just normal people with a regular conscience who recognize that there just never is a reason for dehumanizing others. And that part is actually kind of obscene--

You can't say of any of them that they "know not what" they are doing. There are laws against torture and they are as plain as day. They know and are covering it up like a cat kicking sand over its own crap. But they still don't seem to "know" in the full sense of grasping that human beings suffered "hell" at the hands of people working on the behalf of the US. And that lack of awareness puzzles me, and disgusts me. How do they look at torture, and just not see the moral wrong?