Sunday, June 18, 2006
Editorial: Keep America's faith; ban torture
The president should abandon the administration's tortured language about torture and declare the United States will not allow it.
From the RoundTable blog
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President Bush is a man of simple and, we believe, sincere faith. He speaks unequivocally about what he thinks is right and what he thinks is wrong. Like many Americans, he loathes ambiguity.
Yet the president insists on ambiguity on a critical moral issue of these times, the torture of suspected enemies in the so-called war on terror.
Now, a broad coalition of religious leaders is rightly calling on the United States to "abolish torture now -- without exceptions." Bush should answer the call as a matter of personal faith, fidelity to the nation's fundamental beliefs and practical global politics.
An America so caught up in fear that it becomes willing to betray its founding principles will not retain for long its power to inspire, cajole and prod other nations toward the freedom this country claims as its objective in the oil-rich Middle East and undemocratic nations elsewhere around the globe.
Indeed, the Bush administration's post-9/11 tough-guy talk and actions already have undermined the United States in the battle for hearts and minds as Abu Ghraib, Guantan-amo and "extraordinary rendition" have become bywords for American hypocrisy that can only aid the recruitment efforts of the very Islamist extremists the "war on terror" aims to defeat.
The Bush administration has answered all allegations about the use of torture with the pat assurance that the U.S. government does not torture people and adheres to international conventions against torture. A White House spokeswoman responded in similar fashion last week, at the start of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
But U.S. denials leave too much room for interpretation -- about what degree of degradation and mistreatment constitutes torture; who is protected by international conventions; what leeway the United States has to transfer suspects to supposedly less-enlightened governments not likely ever to be called to account by the people they rule.
Disturbingly, the president pointedly has claimed for himself the power to act outside U.S. law. Even as Bush signed a ban on cruel and degrading treatment of foreign terror suspects, he issued a signing statement asserting a right to ignore the ban in "defense of the Constitution."
But torture used ostensibly in defense of the Constitution will destroy that which it seeks to protect.
Religious leaders who want a clear statement of principle hold beliefs that cross a wide spectrum -- Islamic, Jewish and Christian, including the conservative evangelicalism that Bush understands so well.
The message -- "any policies that permit torture are shocking and morally intolerable" -- is so basic to democratic ideals that it should be embraced equally by the president and every American, people of all faiths and of no religious faith at all.
