From a recent piece by D.C. McAllister in The Federalist, Yes, Christians Can Support Torture:
“A bad man is worse than a beast, and is more harmful.” Aquinas’ words are definitely in line with how God treats criminals in Scripture. Human dignity is not seen as an absolute, but as conditional. This makes it morally justifiable to kill people who have violated the law—man’s law and God’s law. Since interrogative torture is not worse than killing, and killing is morally justified because human dignity has already been lost, interrogative torture is morally justifiable.
It sometimes seems to me that the machinery of verbal facility can get in the way of clear thinking. Acting like an intellectual-- stepping back from the subject, quoting quotes, getting attributions right, sticking together sentences in a logical way-- can completely distract from the fact that what you're saying is completely abhorrent, fundamentally lacking in sense even if there's a surface logic to the argument...
And that's the problem here with D.C. McAllister: she quotes Aquinas, she steps through the usual "tradeoffs" argument, talks about making a choice between two evils, and so on, and yet she seems completely out of touch with what she's talking about.
There are guys out there forcing human beings heads down under water, taking them to the edge of death in hopes of making them feel the fear of death, in hopes that they're spirit will be broken.
The idea that this is justifiable by someone calling themselves a civilized human being is completely deranged-- if you've gone there, you're totally lacking in anything like a moral center, and without that your logical arguments can't get you anywhere.
McAllister's arguments can be engaged with on her own level-- we can point out that her "choice of two evils" is a choice between an actual, known evil, and a hypothetical, speculative benefit. We can point out that we now know the supposed benefit to our practice of torture has not materialized, as many of us suspected it's useless in addition to being evil (and it's peculiar that McAllister missed that memo, eh?).
All of this is true and valid, and yet is besides the real point: we're trying to reason with a monster in human form. It makes intelligent noises, but lacks any empathy or introspection.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto some of your guys in the future, so you can justify dropping even more bombs on them....
Merry Christmas and to all a good night.
Update: removed link to potentially contentious image.