Getting bashed by Mark Shea

Mark Shea, a prolific and well-known Catholic author and a man I erstwhile admired, has for some strange reason decided to slander me in a recent post on his blog after I politely disagreed with him regarding America's treatment of detainees captured while prosecuting the War on Terror. Mark insists that these detainees have been tortured, and further insists that such torture is always and everywhere wrong, and actively condemned by the teaching magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. As many of you know who have been following Mark's blog, he has been banging away at this with impressive frequency for quite some time. His responses to commentators who present reasonable and well-argued criticisms of his views have not always been gentlemanly, as the following post will show.

This dust-up started when I posted what I took to be a polite, mild opposition to Mark’s views on torture (and the applicability of the Church’s teachings regarding torture to the current circumstances), in which I pointed out that Fr. Sirico of The Acton Institute was on the record disagreeing with Mark’s stated position. The exchange that followed between Mark, myself, and several other followers of his blog is indicative, I believe, a rather narrow and uncharitable caste of mind on their part. Mark himself acted in a manner ill befitting a public figure of his stature. I have collated and annotated that exchange, and attempted to reproduce it here in as logical an order as possible, consisting as it does of various comments and quotations strewn throughout several posts on Mr. Shea’s website, to which I will provide links so that they may be viewed in context. First up, my original comment to Mark which occasioned the exchange:

Hello Mr. Shea,

I have seen you perform as Innocent Smith on EWTN, and I belong to my local Chesterton society (Denver). I've just started coming to your blog and perusing your quite extensive and informative writings, so I regret that my first comment here must be one of mild opposition.

While I fully agree with the statements made about the political divide within the Church, abortion and punitive interrogation practices do not share a parity of wrongness. I have a few brief words to say about this torture debate which I hope will help settle the issue.

First of all, it is all only rumor and gossip at this point. Nobody accept the prisoners and the interrogators know what really happened inside those prisons, and there is no wisdom in everybody going off half cocked.

Secondly, I was very pleased to see that Fr. Sirico of The Acton Institute granted an interview on EWTN's The World Over Live last Friday night in which he refused to condemn waterboarding as torture. Fr. Sirico recognizes that any statement of his which denounced Bush & Co. as being in violation of the moral law would be seen as him lending his pastoral support to a certain pacifist interpretation of Catholic social doctrine, which would not only hinder our country in dealing with its foreign policy challenges, but would throw fuel on the flames of a partisan divide such that the side least likely to advance a genuine moral agenda would reap the net advantage. This conflict is dividing the Church, sadly, into many subversive or misguidedly pacifist Catholics on one side, many pseudo-tough Mel Gibson-like "conservative" Catholic charlatans on the other, with hotheads on each side arrogantly approriating for themselves the title of "magisterium of the day." Since my concern is for the integrity of the Church, the leavening of the world, and the protection of the country (in that order), I can only applaud Fr. Sirico's suave handling of the question, in which he effectively told the blogosphere to "mind its own business."

To simultaneously insist upon the broadest definition of torture and the strictest application of moral proscriptions against it, during a time of war, accomplishes little more than the emboldening of enemies abroad, fifth columnists at home, and other less sordid political opposition in the opinion pages of the world. No state could function under that kind of scrutiny, which raises in my mind the suspicion that those who demand the impossible from the state are motivated not by the pure desire to see it conform to the image of Christ, but by some benighted instinct that the the entire eartly order of things is somehow ipso facto illegitimate. This cannot be squared with any proper understanding of Catholic social doctrine, but it remains a constant temptation within the religious life of man, for those who misunderstand the statement "my kingdom is not of this world."

End of first Letter.

To this rather innocuous dissention Mark Shea decided to respond with a slanderous post, not in the comment boxes, but on his regular blog, in which he both grossly misrepresented my positions and accused me of certain grave sins against the Church. The name of that post is Boy, do I get sick of having to say the same stuff over and over. Well Mark, nobody said you had to say anything. Did I strike a nerve, perhaps? The complete post, including his quotations of me, is reproduced below:

A reader wries:

Hello Mr. Shea,

Hi!

I have seen you perform as Innocent Smith on EWTN, and I belong to my local Chesterton society (Denver). I've just started coming to your blog and perusing your quite extensive and informative writings, so I regret that my first comment here must be one of mild opposition.

Your regret is nothing compared to mine, now that I've read what you have to say.

While I fully agree with the statements made about the political divide within the Church, abortion and punitive interrogation practices do not share a parity of wrongness. I have a few brief words to say about this torture debate which I hope will help settle the issue.

A) I do not claim a "parity of wrongness". I think such attempts to parse "which grave evil is more evil" debates are fruitless and stupid. I simply point out that Holy Mother Church tells us in Veritatis Splendor and in the Catechism that both torture (what you call "punitive interrogation techniques") and abortion are gravely and intrinsically evil. That's why we are instructed:

"In carrying out investigations, the regulation against the use of torture, even in the case of serious crimes, must be strictly observed: 'Christ's disciple refuses every recourse to such methods, which nothing could justify and in which the dignity of man is as much debased in his torturer as in the torturer's victim'. International juridical instruments concerning human rights correctly indicate a prohibition against torture as a principle which cannot be contravened under any circumstances." -- Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, n 404

The internal quotation is from the 15 June 1982 address to the International Committee of the Red Cross by Pope John Paul II (available in French and Italian at vatican.va).

First of all, it is all only rumor and gossip at this point. Nobody accept the prisoners and the interrogators know what really happened inside those prisons, and there is no wisdom in everybody going off half cocked.

No. It is not. It is abundantly documented fact, including (but by no means limited to) pictures of corpses, reliable accounts of how they got to be corpses (and of Administration protections for the CIA interrogator who tortured the victim to death), as well as documentaries chronicling horrors inflicted on prisoners.

Secondly, I was very pleased to see that Fr. Sirico of The Acton Institute granted an interview on EWTN's The World Over Live last Friday night in which he refused to condemn waterboarding as torture. Fr. Sirico recognizes that any statement of his which denounced Bush & Co. as being in violation of the moral law would be seen as him lending his pastoral support to a certain pacifist interpretation of Catholic social doctrine, which would not only hinder our country in dealing with its foreign policy challenges, but would throw fuel on the flames of a partisan divide such that the side least likely to advance a genuine moral agenda would reap the net advantage.

If that is what Fr. Sirico said, and if EWTN lets it go unchallenged, then shame on them. This is an elaboration of Peg Noonan's counsel to simply ignore grave evil. A refusal to condemn waterboarding as torture is not a quibble about definitions: it is participation in an obvious and grave evil. We have *executed* soldiers from other countries who waterboarded people. It's a preposterous falsehood to say that it's impossible to know if waterboarding somebody 183 times is torture. Tom Kreitzberg summarizes the ridiculous incoherence of Fr. Sirico's reported argument this way:

"I don't understand. Is the idea that Fr. Sirico thinks Bush & Co. violated the moral law, but he won't say so because that would make pacifists happy? Or that he doesn't think they violated the moral law, but he won't say so because of... some other reason? Or that he hasn't formed an opinion, because if he did then it might make pacifists happy?

"And whatever it is, this is very pleasing and applause-worthy?"

I hope somebody at EWTN wakes up.

This conflict is dividing the Church, sadly, into many subversive or misguidedly pacifist Catholics on one side, many pseudo-tough Mel Gibson-like "conservative" Catholic charlatans on the other, with hotheads on each side arrogantly approriating for themselves the title of "magisterium of the day." Since my concern is for the integrity of the Church, the leavening of the world, and the protection of the country (in that order), I can only applaud Fr. Sirico's suave handling of the question, in which he effectively told the blogosphere to "mind its own business."

This, being translated, appears to mean "Don't listen to the Magisterium, listen to Fr. Sirico." Here's the thing: Fr. Sirico's disastrous attempt to paper over grave and intrinsic evil (and your attempt to anoint that opinion as the Last Word of Holy Mother Church) is *exactly* describable as "'conservative' Catholic charlatans .... arrogantly approriating for themselves the title of 'magisterium of the day.'" The real Catholic Magisterium clearly teaches that torture is intrinsically and gravely immoral. Common international law (including US law), has treated waterboarding (among other tortures authorized by the Bush Administration) as torture. We even hanged people for it.

To simultaneously insist upon the broadest definition of torture and the strictest application of moral proscriptions against it, during a time of war, accomplishes little more than the emboldening of enemies abroad, fifth columnists at home, and other less sordid political opposition in the opinion pages of the world.

Actually, I have not insisted on the broadest definition of torture. I have typically confined my discussions to examples of torture which nobody in his five wits can deny are torture, such as waterboarding, cold cells, and strappado--all of them authorized by Bush. As to the rest of your argument, it basically means "People who authorize war crimes are above the law if I happen to approve of the war" or, more briefly, "Ignore the Church's teaching in ius in bello."

No state could function under that kind of scrutiny, which raises in my mind the suspicion that those who demand the impossible from the state are motivated not by the pure desire to see it conform to the image of Christ, but by some benighted instinct that the the entire eartly order of things is somehow ipso facto illegitimate. This cannot be squared with any proper understanding of Catholic social doctrine, but it remains a constant temptation within the religious life of man, for those who misunderstand the statement "my kingdom is not of this world."

And we finish with the sotto voce suggestion that "If you don't support war crimes, you may be an enemy of America" and the blasphemous invocation of Jesus as being all in favor of covering up grave evil.

Since you are a Chestertonian, try contemplating some of these sayings:We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong.

[Note: Mark here proceeds to quote G. K. Chesterton to me, but I will omit those quotations for the present. He resumes his invictive against me by plainly stating that I meant something other than what I said.]

Oh! Says the torture defender, "Did I say 'punitive'? I meant "enhanced". We aren't doing this to punish, but purely to obtain information".

[Finally, he outright accuses me of betraying the Lord Jesus.]

Here's your 30 pieces of silver.

End of Mark Shea's response.

Obviously I could not let this slander stand unchallenged, so wrote back once again to correct this injustice:

Hello again Mr. Shea,

I agree with the sentiments expressed by poster Jeff above. If you feel like you are saying the same things over and over again, that may be because my comments were filtered into some preexistent perceptual category of yours to which you have a readymade response. As it stands, the straw man you attacked in your rather heated blog post directed against me has little to do with my actual arguments. You seem to think you know exactly what I am really saying and why I am saying it, but I will not allow words to be put into my mouth. I was not rude to you; I did nothing to merit such animosity. I respectfully disagreed with you while expressing admiration for your work and showing due deference to your blog and your opinions. Now I will take my stand against this slander.

MS: ”A) I do not claim a "parity of wrongness". I think such attempts to parse "which grave evil is more evil" debates are fruitless and stupid. I simply point out that Holy Mother Church tells us in Veritatis Splendor and in the Catechism that both torture (what you call "punitive interrogation techniques") and abortion are gravely and intrinsically evil.”

Actually, you did claim a parity of wrongness here in your post An Interesting Letter from North of the Border. You said: “…We can even manage that much without placing, as core values at the heart of our various parties, some practice or idea that is directly repugnant to natural law and revelation. With the Dems, it's the sacrament of abortion. With the Rubber Hose Right, it has become the sacrament of torture.”

Furthermore, such debates are by no means fruitless and stupid. I do not want to reprise the entire history of moral reasoning on this subject here, but suffice it to say that waterboarding a known terrorist strikes many people as somewhat less gravely disordered than murdering an unborn child. If you disagree with such people, that’s fine; but they are expressing a visceral response, hardly uncommon to basic humanity, deserving of thoughtful consideration, not dismissal as “fruitless and stupid.”

Finally, I have read Veritatis Splendor 80, and I don’t see that it has much to do with the matter under consideration. The portion of that document upon which you continuously rest your case (actually a quotation from Guadium et Spes) does not apply here. The fundamental question under consideration is sovereignty, not morality. The right to administer punishment, up to and including capital punishment, is a right that belongs intrinsically to any justly constituted authority and cannot be rescinded. It is not moral to tell the state that it cannot act like a state; Augustine, Aquinas, Bellarmine, Suarez, and other thinkers of the “just war” tradition have said as much.

MS: ”If that is what Fr. Sirico said, and if EWTN lets it go unchallenged, then shame on them. This is an elaboration of Peg Noonan's counsel to simply ignore grave evil. A refusal to condemn waterboarding as torture is not a quibble about definitions: it is participation in an obvious and grave evil.”

To be fair, Fr. Sirico also said that the Church’s default position is always to do no harm, but he was unwilling to apply the default position in this case. I believe he did so because he knew that A) we were talking about a sovereign act of war, not sadistic torturing for thrills, and B) he knew that strong condemnation of the practice at such a juncture would be interpreted as a political act in itself (a rather unhelpful one) as I have explained.

MS: ”This, being translated, appears to mean ‘Don't listen to the Magisterium, listen to Fr. Sirico.’”

That’s not at all what it means, and you know better than that. This is pure misrepresentation. I said that I agreed with Fr. Sirico’s handling of the situation; I did not impute any infallibility to his opinion. But while we’re on the subject, you would do well to remember that he is in fact a priest, and deserving of a bit more respect from you. But more importantly, you have accused me of saying “don’t listen to the Magisterium.” In effect, you have accused me of heresy. That is a very foul thing to do, and in this case wholly unjustified.

MS: ”Here's the thing: Fr. Sirico's disastrous attempt to paper over grave and intrinsic evil (and your attempt to anoint that opinion as the Last Word of Holy Mother Church)…”

I made no such attempt.

MS: “As to the rest of your argument, it basically means "People who authorize war crimes are above the law if I happen to approve of the war" or, more briefly, "Ignore the Church's teaching in ius in bello."”

My arguments are arguments about the nature of sovereign authority; they have nothing to do with whether or not I am personally in favor of the war. As it so happens, I was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning on the grounds that it was financial ruinous, to which my postings on numerous internet fora will attest.

MS: “And we finish with the sotto voce suggestion that "If you don't support war crimes, you may be an enemy of America" and the blasphemous invocation of Jesus as being all in favor of covering up grave evil.”

This is ridiculous.

1. I am saying nothing of the kind.
2. I am not arguing specifically for America’s interests in the present conflict, but for America’s sovereignty.
3. Don’t ever accuse me of blasphemy again.
4. Would you not admit the possibility that Christ’s words are, from time to time, misinterpreted?

MS: ”One of the "vivid calculations of remote events" that should occupy the mind of every Catholic (and especially every Chestertonian) is what happens after you grant Caesar the power to torture people whom he regards as "extremists".”

But Caesar has the power to torture people whom he regards as extremists. No one needs to grant it to him. That’s why he’s Caesar, and he can do with his spoils what he will. Caesar stands at the pinnacle of earthy authority, and there is no merely temporal power outside of himself to check his directives. He must hold his decisions before his own conscience. That is that gravity and tragedy of being Caesar.

MS: ”Oh! Says the torture defender, "Did I say 'punitive'? I meant "enhanced". We aren't doing this to punish, but purely to obtain information".”

No, I said punitive and I meant punitive. Punishment is not inherently evil, as you seem to think.

MS: “Here's your 30 pieces of silver.”

As I said, never accuse me of blasphemy or heresy again.

End of my second response.

This all generated quite a firestorm of controversy on Shea's blog. The poster Jeremy asks me this:

Mr. Beck,
I infer from your reasoning that a state actor need not take moral considerations into account, only questions of sovereignty. Is that accurate?

To which I responded with the following post:

Jeremy,

A state actor can and should take moral considerations into account, of course; but his freedom to act in accordance with what he believes to be in the best interests of the state should not be frustrated by temporal subordinates, whether these be courts, churches, or opposing political factions. Otherwise he is not a state actor at all, but subject, at least in part, to the will of these other bodies.

In every historical struggle of parliament against king the cry goes up that monarchy is pernicious, liberty must prevail, that the will of the people must be heard, and that merit should rule. But in fact, monarchy remains the sole legitimate and metaphysically preordained form of government, and the defenders of liberty want not to do away with it, but simply to exercise the monarchical powers for themselves. Governance has only one nature. Power is power; nothing changes that. This truth was brought to the high pitch of expression during the English Revolution when Oliver Cromwell proclaimed that "history has abolished the very name of king," but proceeded to act autocratically himself as Lord Protector.

Magnanimity requires strength; peace requires justice; liberty requires that the political culture of nation be "in form." Those who militate against, not this or that ruler, but order itself (the terrorists in this case) have committed the crime of high treason. They have forfeited their claim upon the mercy and beneficence of society. The just response to their behavior is that they be publicly and painfully put to death, although society may forgo its right to administer this justice if it considers it expedient not to. But to tell a state that it "doesn't have the right" to punish treason with death is to impugn its dignity as a state, and ultimately is a betrayal of all those who have sworn her allegiance or sought her protection.

This can not be moral. Not only is it not moral, it is dishonorable. It forces innocent victims to acquiesce in the suffering of wrongs without the possibility of redress. Human beings were not made for this sort of slavish existence. The very purpose of government, the very meaning behind the vesting of authority, is to serve as a bulwark against the possibility of ultimate dishonor. The state is the incarnation of justice on earth; he who rules, rules with permission of Almighty God and will render an account to Him. True, human rulers are very frail, and power is often abused, but the state as such must continue to exist. The alternative is mere slavery and darkness.

End of my third response.

This too failed to quiet my accusers, so I called upon the venerable Dr. Edward Feser to help me with my fourth and final reply:

As for the rest of you gentlemen, I will point out that Professor Edward Feser has written a series of three long blog posts treating of the legitimacy of the Iraq War in terms of traditional Just War theory, in which he incidentally examines the treatment of prisoners taken by us in that conflict. Here is the link to the second part, from which I quote the following relevant passages:

"There is also the question of how the U.S. has treated prisoners of war, though, and here many have alleged that the methods of interrogation that have been used are intrinsically immoral. Now there have undoubtedly been individual cases where prisoners have been unjustly abused. But that is bound to happen in any war to some extent, just as it is bound to happen in police work, and by itself it no more de-legitimizes the war as a whole than the occasional corrupt cop casts doubt on the legitimacy of having a police force. What really matters is whether the methods officially approved of and widely practiced are on the whole unjust.

"Here again, it seems clear that the tradition and the manuals support the conclusion that there is no violation of just war criteria. To be sure, the manuals – or at least the ones I have seen – do not specifically address the question of how prisoners of war may be interrogated. But they do nevertheless have much to say that is relevant, particularly in their treatment of the question of how ordinary criminals can legitimately be dealt with.

"So, for example, McHugh and Callan explicitly rule out “torture” as a legitimate way of punishing evildoers, and give as examples of torture “rack, thumb-screw, prolonged scourgings, etc.” (vol. II, p. 130). But they also allow that such “bodily harms” as “wounds, blows, restraint” and even “branding” are permissible as punishments for people known to be guilty of serious wrongdoing, as long as they are administered on “sufficient authority” (such as that of the state), for a “sufficient reason” (such as the “good of the public”), and so long as there is “moderation in the harm or pain inflicted” (pp. 129-130). Similarly, “mutilation is lawful by public authority in punishment of a criminal; for if the state has the right to inflict death for serious crime, much more has it the right to inflict the lesser punishment of mutilation” (p. 127). In short, while torture is always wrong, the manuals allow that under the right conditions such punishments as wounds, blows, restraint, and even branding and mutilation do not count as torture.

"Along the same lines, Prümmer’s Handbook of Moral Theology says that “since the State has the power to put the criminal to death, so it has the power for a sufficient reason to mutilate the criminal (v.g. by cutting off his hand) or to flog him” (p. 126). And Jone tells us that “corporal chastisement is lawful if done by, or with (at least tacit) consent of, competent superiors. Public authorities have this power over malefactors, as also parents over their children” (p. 144)

"If spanking a child can be morally permissible, then, it is hardly plausible to suggest that there is anything intrinsically immoral or contrary to human dignity in, say, slapping a known terrorist. And while my point here is certainly not to defend any particular case of alleged mistreatment of prisoners – much less to recommend the likes of mutilation, branding, or amputation as methods of interrogation – the manuals do clearly suggest that if a certain prisoner (Khalid Shaikh Mohammed or Saddam Hussein, say) is known to have engaged in seriously immoral behavior (e.g. terrorism or mass murder), then it can be justifiable to use rough methods in dealing with him. It is no good, then, piously to condemn as “torture” or as “violations of human dignity” the methods the U.S. has used in interrogating terrorists, since what counts as “torture” is part of what is at issue. And clearly, the tradition and the manuals, while sometimes condemning torture, also sometimes allow that some very harsh punishments indeed fall outside the scope of torture.

"It might still be objected that whether or not certain methods are intrinsically immoral, they ought not to be used because they are incompatible with the Geneva Conventions, or with some other international standard of lawful wartime conduct. But while the manuals hold that such international agreements ought in general to be respected, they also allow that “if they are repudiated by one side, they cease to bind the other, unless they are the subject of Natural law and justice” (Davis, p. 149; cf. also Fagothey, p. 578 ). In regard to reprisals against those who have committed acts that violate international law, McHugh and Callan hold that “if the act of the enemy is opposed only to international law [and not the natural law], it is not unlawful to use the same act against him, for, since he has broken faith, the treaty obligation no longer binds the other side” (vol. I, p. 573 ). Insofar as the tactics used by terrorists are violations of international law, then (not to mention the natural law), the United States has, according to the teaching of the manuals, no moral obligation to respect standards of international law in dealing with them (though of course it does have an obligation to respect the natural law)."

End of my last response.

Part One, Part Two, and Part Three of Edward Feser's essay on Just War theory are here provided for your reading pleasure. All who are interested in the legality of the Iraq War or American interrogation techniques are highly encouraged to take a look at them.