A Million Souls?

This discussion, now raging in Washington, about the efficacy and legality of waterboarding sickens me. There should be no discussion. The moral lines are drawn clearly for all to see: torture such as waterboarding is repugnant and totally antithetical to any norm of civilized behaviour. Countries, and individuals, who stoop to torture define themselves as belonging to that group who hold humanity, dignity, and decency in contempt.

Arguments based upon specious expediency are simply signs of weakness. To argue, as some do, that if a large number of lives depended upon the immediate extraction of information from a single suspect, then torture is justified, try to absolve themselves of immorality. They identify themselves with the supposed perpetrator. They become indistiguishable from their enemies. They adopt the pose of tired and tarnished protectors who, despite sacrficing their own moral standing, somehow recoup that standing by saving the lives of an unidentified mass of otherwise helpless and doomed citizens. How heroic they must feel.

But they are merely torturers. They join a long line of barbarians leading back to the Jesuits of the Inquisition who used torture to protect a vision. Besides, as the Jesuits found out, the information gleaned from a victim of torture is highly suspect. By the standards of their own morally challenged world view torture should fail as an instrument of state.

I suspect something else is at work. Within the desparation of those who torture it is weakness and craven insufficiency that drives them to any length to demonstrate their false power. They can claim to those they seek to protect that they are taking all steps deemed necesary to provide that protection. Yes even steps that some call immoral. Their claim extends to include the equally false argument that times are now different, that the threat is now somehow so magnified that it justifies even immoral countermeasures. They do this evil work on our behalf. So it we who are demeaned, just as they are. It is the protected who now inhabit the same gutter of immorality. We too are sullied by their actions.

The debate rages on and I am driven to ask: why? Where are is moral majority? Where is the voice of religion? Where are our philosophers? Our thinkers? Who will defend our principles? Do we even aspire to those same principles anymore? We need to hear from the hearts of those who seek to stand for something rather than simply stand against something. We need to expose the soul of America to an examination to a simple question: are you really a nation that tortures? We need not ten, not a hundred, nor even a thousand Americans to answer. We need a million. We need them now to step forward and stop this debate.

No America does not torture. Where are those million souls?