Bad Move, Dubya

Both in authorizing it to begin with, and now in admitting it unrepentantly.

Algore Offers Words of Encouragement to College Graduates

So uplifting.

No More Linking ...

... to any website or blog that displays this ad:


So far today, I've seen the ad at both HotAir.com and TownHall.com, both sites owned by Salem Communications, an outfit describing itself as "a leading U.S. radio broadcaster, Internet content provider, and magazine and book publisher targeting audiences interested in Christian and family-themed content and conservative values".

Since when did displaying an ad of a young woman wearing a t-shirt declaring "I'd Rather Be Waterboarding" qualify as "Christian and family-themed content"? Since when did celebrating torture as something in which someone would enjoy participating constitute "conservative values"?

If that's the sort of "values" embraced by the modern-day "conservative movement" and the so-called "Christian right", then count me the hell out.


UPDATE (9 March)
I no longer see the ad displayed anywhere on HotAir, so unless I see it again, I suppose I can resume linking to that site. But the ad can still be seen prominently displayed at TownHall.com.


UPDATE (10 March)
Spoke too soon. Just saw this stupid ad again at the bottom of a post at HotAir.

Have the Bishops Missed a Teaching Opportunity With Regard to Torture?

Writing at both First Thoughts and The American Catholic, my friend Chris Blosser ponders whether a prime teaching opportunity has been missed by the U.S. Bishops in regard to the intrinsic evil of torture and the receipt of Holy Communion by those Catholics who advocate on behalf of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques":

Writing at Vox Nova, the author known as “Morning’s Minion” has published a post calling for consistency in the application of canon 915 — the denial of Holy Communion to those who “obstinately persevere in manifest grave sin” — in this particular case, the public advocacy of abortion and torture. The post was occasioned by the recent appearance of Mark Thiessien on Raymond Arroyo’s “The World Over”, in which the duo lobbied vigorously in defense of waterboarding...

[...]

With respect to abortion, readers may recall a number of opportune moments during the 2008 presidential elections when Catholic bishops were obliged to speak out, publicly, forcefully and collectively, in correction of blatantly false presentations of Catholic teaching on abortion by Nancy Pelosi and (then) Senator Joseph Biden.

There have been numerous missed “teaching moments” for our bishops and the Catholic Church on the matter of torture.

The post by our old friend Tony A (aka Morning's Minion) that occasioned Chris's response isn't the first time Tony has raised this issue. And, as I noted at that time, I wholeheartedly concur with the notion that Catholics who publicly dissent from the Church's teachings on intrinsic evils such as abortion and torture should not receive Communion.

But, as has been pointed out in the comments at The American Catholic, it is not altogether clear that Tony actually agrees with the position being advocated. In his defense, I must admit that the torture debate is a tu-quoque-rich target for one intent on exposing the hypocrisy of pro-lifers on the right.

Nevertheless, if pointing out hypocrisy is the true intention of of Tony's post, I think it ill serves the seriousness of the subject matter. It assumes that those in favor of the Bishops taking corrective action against advoctes of legalized abortion are doing so merely for political reasons - to use the Eucharist as a "cudgel" against poltical opponents.

Abortion and torture are about as serious evils as man can devise. And the Eucharist - Christ Himself - is not a weapon to be used to score points - political, rhetorical, or otherwise - against those with whom we have philosophical differences. But if abortion and torture are what the Church claim they are, and if the Eucharist is Who the Church claims it is, then denial of Communion to those who publicly advocate against the Church's teaching on these matters seems not only appropriate, but imperative.

Here's where our old friend the Regular Guy, fresh off his heroic-but-unsuccessful run for the Illinois legislature, comes in with his usual cut-to-the-chase commentary:

As far as I can see, we already have perfectly consistent application of Canon 915. It is virtually never applied.

The bishops have consistently condemned both torture and abortion, and have done precious little against Catholic public figures who advocate either.

Yep, that about covers it.

Just WHAT, Exactly, Is Being "Clarified"?

Recently, there has been some buzz around the Catholic blogosphere about the formation of a new group called the "Coalition for Clarity". In case it isn't evident from the moniker the group has chosen for itself, the "Coalition for Clarity" is a coalition of Catholics against torture. A worthy cause, to be sure, and one in which I would, under most circumstances, most gladly join. But it is the fact that the group's name, itself, is lacking in "clarity" and appears to me to be more of a poke in the eye to certain people than it is an identifier of any particular agenda or set of beliefs that prompts me to write this.

As I wrote in my comments at Erin's post on Creative Minority Report, I'm sure this is going to come off much stronger than I intend, but I believe it is something that needs to be said.

I oppose (and have ALWAYS opposed) torture - including such so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" as waterboarding - under ANY circumstances (ticking time bomb scenario included). While I have not been as outspoken on the issue as Mark Shea, I have put my anti-torture views front and center on several occasions.

For example, when Catholics Against Rudy was in its early stages, I argued strongly that Giuliani's torture stance should be in the forefront of the campaign to illustrate where his public record fell short of Catholic teaching (unfortunately, the comments to the linked post do not appear for some reason; but this was one of those rare occasions in which my comments were 100% in agreement with the post's author, my old friend Tony A. (a.k.a Morning's Minion) - for the record, here's another instance).

Also, when Sam Brownback failed to speak out strongly against waterboarding during one of the GOP presidential debates, I publicly withdrew my support from him. Mark Shea even highlighted my letter to Brownback at his own blog.

So, I'll put my anti-torture bona fides up against anyone's, including Mark Shea's. And if anyone - on the basis of what I am about to write - wishes to dismiss me as part of the so-called "rubber-hose right" or a member of the "vast neo-con project" or a "Republicath" (I am a member of no poltical party) or any other epithet to imply that I am somehow more loyal to some political agenda than I am to the Church's social teaching, then you're barking up the wrong tree.

That said, I am reluctant to join anything billing itself as the "Coalition for Clarity" for a number of reasons:

(1) I am uncomfortable with the whole "Coalition for Fog"/"Coalition for Clarity" dicotomy since I have faithful Catholic friends (Shea would label them "Faithful Conservative Catholics[TM]") who oppose torture, yet who have been unfairly accused of being for "fog" in the torture debates;

(2) I'm not so sure that "clarity" is actually being sought, but rather see the effort as something more along the lines of "we're not like the the people who Shea has labeled as being 'for fog'"; and

(3) nothing about the name overtly or otherwise indicates exactly what it is the group stands for.

So, I beg the group's founders for indulgence while I offer this humble suggestion:

How about you drop the cute euphemism, which is really nothing more than a play on Mark's overly theatrical name calling, and adopt a straightforward name that says what you REALLY mean and what you REALLY stand for? Something like ... I don't know ... "Catholics Against Torture"?

That is, unless the REAL purpose of the group REALLY IS to show that you're not associated with people that Mark likes to call names.

Noemie Emery on David Brooks and the "Educated Class"

Noemie Emery writes in The Washington Examiner:

David Brooks notes that in the last year, something dire has happened: The public has turned decisively against the "educated classes" and all of their works. At the same time, it has also moved against Barack Obama, who began his term with approval ratings that bumped up against 70, and have now sunk to the high to mid-40s, with "strongly disapprove" ratings that rival those of George W. Bush at his worst.

It has also moved strongly against his -- and the educated classes' -- ideas. It is more pro-life, more anti-climate change, more free market, less statist, more inclined to favor "harsh" measures against terrorism suspects, more in favor of "waterboarding" the terrorist [ED.: Unfortunately, I think the majority of the public has always looked the other way on torturing terrorism suspects] caught in the brief-bombing effort, more opposed to the closing of Guantanamo Bay.

While the liberal Left controls the White House along with both houses of Congress, the country it governs has moved to the Right. These phenomena are all interrelated: The country is moving Right in reaction to Obama's theories of governance, and Obama and the educated class are one and the same.

He epitomizes that class and was sold by that class to the country, which purchased the product and has come to regret it. It now wants its money returned.

In a sense, Obama has never been more than his education (Columbia, Harvard), which for some people was more than enough. When Brooks met Obama in 2005, the new senator had no experience and no accomplishments, but he was perfectly briefed in the requisite talking points.

[...]

He was hardly alone. People in newsrooms all over the country decided that someone who talked the way they did was the cure for what ailed the country, and are stunned to find out it is not.

[Read more at The Washington Examiner]

Torture ... Excuse Me ... the Use of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" Works! And We Should STILL Oppose It

The torture apologists are crowing over the release of the CIA Inspector General's 2004 report, which suggests that torture has indeed proven effective - at least in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - in turning the previously uncooperative mastermind of 9/11 into a fount of important information. (Needless to say, I draw completely different conclusions from that fact than does the torture-happy author of the linked piece.)

About one matter, however, the torture proponents do have something of a point:

The Post report, together with CIA documents released during the past week, demolishes a key argument of opponents of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques — that “‘torture’ never works.”

This contention always betrayed an insecurity. For all their thundering about the criminal immorality of coercive interrogations, opponents never dared admit that they could have elicited important, perhaps lifesaving, information. They treated it as a kind of metaphysical impossibility.

In so doing, they left a hostage to fortune. They had to hope that Cheney was wrong when he said that classified documents proved the effectiveness of the interrogations, and failing that, had to hope the documents would never be declassified. On this front, the release of the 2004 Central Intelligence Agency inspector general report — declassified thanks to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit — has been a disaster for them. In the intelligence business, it’s called blowback.

I've said before that Catholics (and others) opposed to torture should not resort to arguments against its effectiveness since: (a) when something is intrinsically evil, whether it works or not is completely irrelevant; and (b) those making the argument that torture is ineffective may turn out to be wrong, and then our ethical and moral arguments against torture are thereby undermined. See my comments here, here (agreeing with my friend Paul Zummo), and here for more details.

And, yet, the meme that "torture doesn't work" has nevertheless been widely adopted by a number of Catholics in St. Blog's - including the blogger who has achieved the highest profile in the torture debates on the Catholic blogosphere - as a means of bolstering their argument against the practice.

The question I have always had is: "Why go there?", when, again, whether torture is effective or not is completely irrelevant from a Catholic and Natural Law standpoint, given the intrinsically evil nature of the practice. The argument that Catholics should be honing in on and never departing from is this: "Torture is immoral because it violates the dignity of the human person, EVEN IF it is useful for obtaining information from the detainee, and EVEN IF such information is potentially life saving."

The risk for those making the argument against torture's efficacy was always that there were bound to be examples - even if isolated - where potentially life-saving intelligence was gathered through the use of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques". And the problem is compounded when those making the argument continue to insist that torture is ineffective in the face of at least some evidence to the contrary, because the anti-torture movement risks forfeiting its credibility.

So what's going on? My guess is that the fear among those making the ineffectiveness argument appears to be that the consequentialist times in which we live will lead the populace, upon learning that torture "works" in at least some circumstances, to reject all moral arguments against its practice and embrace torture whole hog. Those putting forth the argument don't appear to be prepared to do the heavy lifting of making the argument to the general public on behalf of the Church's "hard teaching", which mandates that torture should NEVER be utilized EVEN IF it means foregoing critical intelligence that might save lives.

It's one thing when you can browbeat foot-dragging-on-torture-but-otherwise-faithful Catholics into submission (and, in my view, the browbeating was necessary, if a little hyperbolic at times) by continually hammering on the words of papal encyclicals; it's quite another form of persuasion that is necessary to convince a consequentialist public that embracing the evil of torture, even where some good may result, is giving evil mastery over us all.

I Dare Him to Call Me a Torture Apologist

There has been much written in the Catholic blogosphere over the last couple of days about Mark Shea's latest foray into calumnious rumor-mongering.

Christopher Blosser, Patrick Archbold, and the Cranky Conservative (as well as others) have all made fine contributions. But it's Red Cardigan's post that I believe distills the issue down to its most basic elements:

... Mark is saying that it doesn't matter if the story is true or not, but that because we know this administration has condoned torture, murder, and the cover-up of murder we can't dismiss this out of hand.

Patrick, and others, are saying, in effect: hold on. We do know the administration has done some bad things ... But knowing that the administration tried to use all sorts of legalistic wiggle-room about how waterboarding really wasn't torture, not really, and cold cells aren't really torture, not really, etc. seems to me to be a far cry from saying that we know for certain that our non-military intelligence officers are routinely shoving forty-plus prisoners out of cargo planes (despite the enormous difficulty in doing any such thing while the plane is in flight--these aren't skydiving planes, after all) as the sort of thing which is All in a Day's Work, so to speak; or at the very least, that we can't say that the story is impossible.

Now, Mark appears to be saying (and I'll be glad to be wrong) that the only way you could object to this story is because you're bound and determined to give the Bush administration a pass when it comes to torture and murder, and you're so blindly partisan that you can't even accept for a moment that things have deteriorated so much that we now must face the possibility that it might be true that we have members of the CIA hiring civilian contractors to fly cargo planes out of which they plan to push three or four dozen prisoners en route. In other words, he appears to be saying that raising objections on the grounds that this story seems highly implausible, could not be kept a secret if it really were occurring, and might not even be physically possible are all a smoke screen for one's determination to bow down to Moloch and ignore torture and murder so long as it's Our Guy doing it.

But that's a bit unkind. I, for one, don't condone torture, and would be outraged at any proof that our government has been committing wholesale murders of people just as I suspect most of us would be. But I don't read this story and think, sadly, "How terrible it is that we can't categorically deny this!" Instead, I read it and think "Sounds like somebody along the line had Way Too Much to drink, and was determined to tell an impressively horrific tale!" And I don't think I'm covering up for Bush in reaching that conclusion; if anything, I'm employing God's gift of reason, and failing to fall for the latest fashion in conspiracy theory.

[Read the whole thing]

My Comments:
Yeah, what Red said! This story is such obvious B.S. that it is not even debatable that Mark had no business posting it and claiming it to be an "entirely believable anecdote."

Yet, Mark persists in calling his post legit and tarring those who object to it either as partisan torture apologists for the Bush Administration or as fixated upon "trivial" matters of secondary importance to the overall objective of his post.

Let's start with the second allegation. I no more view as "trivial" that one might calumniate an entire group of people in order to denounce the intrinsic evil of torture than I view it as "trivial" that one might torture a captive in order to prevent the intrinsic evil of a terror attack. Mark rightly rages against the consequentialism of the latter, but appears oblivious to the consequentialism inherent in the former. But last I checked, calumny was intrinsically evil, too.

And to address the first allegation: I dare Mark Shea to accuse me of being a torture apologist, especially when he has plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Mark the Date, Folks: I Agree With Morning's Minion

Morning's Minion today asks whether "Denying the Eucharist to Torture Supporters" would be appropriate.

I give that sentiment a resounding YES! If you support torture, "enhanced interrogation techniques", or whatever euphemism with which you wish to pretty it up, you have no business presenting yourself for Communion.

Morning's Minion concludes:

Let me end on a note of irony: the newly-formed, but predictable Catholics Against Joe Biden blog spends a lot of time discussing the worthiness of Senator Biden to receive Communion, while simultaneously giving a big shout-out to none other than Kathryn Jean Lopez. Funny they miss that.

For the record, I'm no fan of Ms. Lopez. Although I have linked to some of her material on occasion, I have spent quite a bit of space criticizing her, especially her statement that Sen. McCain is not "conservative" - her phrase was "not one of us" - because of his opposition to waterboarding.

Although I don't like to play the "shout out" game myself (Lord knows, I link to several people every day and don't expect any thanks in return, and I don't generally take up space here thanking those who link to me either), I will not find fault with my co-blogger for thanking Ms. Lopez for her link to Catholics Against Joe Biden, which significantly increased traffic to the site. Just common courtesy.

In fact, I'll thank Morning's Minion for linking, as well. Thanks, Tony, you're a mensch!


Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
The Big Fat Beam in My Eye

Shea Says "McCain Wimps Out" ... [UPDATED]

"Not One of Us"

Some Clarification

My Message to Sen. Sam Brownback

Does Sam Brownback Condone Torture?