Mike, I’m left wondering what your catechism says about bearing false witness. Your seeming generosity of spirit doesn’t alter the fact that, from the very first sentence, your post is a smear. And a careless one, at that. ”Not having followed his work in detail“? How do you not bother to look at someone’s work before labeling that work the advocacy of torture, which you proceed to decry as a “great evil”? If you’re going to indict someone for a great evil, oughtn’t you at least have your facts straight about what he’s saying and what he’s not saying?

Marc has not advocated torture. He has defended the practices that were used by the CIA in its interrogation program. If you had actually “followed his work in detail,” you would know that his book discusses, at considerable length, why the practices employed by the CIA were not torture. There is, for example, a chapter in Courting Disaster called “Tough, Not Torture”, which explains what torture actually is and why the CIA tactics, including waterboarding, did not approach the legal line.

This is not analogous to legalistic hocus-pocus by which killing an unborn child somehow becomes not killing because the law denies the child’s personhood. Our law and our practices did not dehumanize the handful of jihadists who were subjected to forcible interrogation tactics. They recognized the personhood of the terrorists, recognized the evil and criminality of torture, and therefore grappled with the reality of torture in order to make certain that our tactics did not cross into that reality. By contrast, you and the angry declaimers at the parish are demagoguing. You convict first and have the trial later — or not at all. “How to stop U.S.-sponsored torture”? “Resort to [torture] in the past decade is a black spot on America’s record”? Do you ever ask, “Should we first examine whether what the U.S. did amounted to torture” before we start calling people torturers? That’s what Marc did, and after an exacting analysis he concluded it was not torture, and that is why he is defending it. For that, he gets called a “torture advocate”?

It is certainly a principled position to say, “I don’t think we should ever engage in forcible coercion.” I doubt it is ground that you’d be able to defend in a coherent way — we inflict many things on people that are a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding (e.g., killing, harsh physical restraints, lengthy prison sentences) that present little or no moral hand-wringing if the provocation for inflicting them is severe enough. But at least calling it “forcible coercion” would be an argument rooted in fact. Your argument, instead, is in the nature of “Are you still beating your wife?” The accused is presumed guilty and then the accuser gets to feel good about himself by magnanimously listing all the reasons why the wife had it coming.

Torture is the infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering. The physical kind must be excruciating and the mental kind must cause profound and lasting psychological harm. The law has always taken care to distinguish torture from lesser forms of abuse because it is the most heinous of acts. It is important not to trivialize it by applying the explosive label torture to acts that don’t warrant it. Moreover, there has always been a demanding standard of criminal intent: the accused must specifically intend to torture his victim. The police officer who shoots a murder suspect in a gun fight may inflict severe pain, and know full well when he fires his weapon that severe pain is a certain result, but he doesn’t commit torture — indeed, he doesn’t commit a crime of any kind.

And as too often happens in discussions of “torture,” your concerns about morality are entirely one-sided. Officers of the executive branch have a solemn obligation to protect the American people. It is their highest responsibility. They are not good Samaritans. If there is a serious threat of a mass-murder attack, they are obligated to take all reasonable steps to stop it — and what is reasonable depends on the circumstances and the exigency. It is immoral to assume that obligation and then fail to carry it out. Unlike your angry fellow parishioners, these officials don’t get to be detached Monday morning quarterbacks. You condemn them for acting, but they will be just as vigorously condemned for failing to act if a preventable catastrophe happens.

What exactly did the CIA do that you think was “torture”?