[1] In the July 2004 issue of the Lutheran, John
Hoffmeyer, a theologian at the Lutheran seminary in Philadelphia,
comments on the Abu Ghraib scandal by posing a quandary of the sort
that ethicists used to love: what if by torturing one person you
might extract information that would prevent a major terrorist
attack? Hoffmeyer resists such a raw utilitarian choice
by arguing, on deontic grounds, that torture is inhumane and
destructive of social bonds. This argument is morally
powerful, but unlikely to satisfy hardbitten realists,
neo-"Wilsonian" crusaders or other enlistees in the war on
terrorism. Perhaps for this reason, Hoffmeyer makes a
further, consequentialist argument. Torture is ineffective
because it is unlikely to yield the information that the U.S.
interrogaters want. The humanitarian in us will prefer the
first argument, if our moral consciousness is dominated by a deep
revulsion against inflicting pain upon other human beings.
The hard-nosed realist or neo-"Wilsonian" in us might find the
latter argument more compelling. But that leaves us with
split personalities, in a manner reflective of (insufficiently
paradoxical!) two-kingdoms thinking. Can we be both
humanitarians and realists-that is, fully open to both kinds of
arguments? Or must we privilege one over the other, and
simply default on the question of how to retain a unified moral
self in the face of the temptation to commit human-rights abuses in
pursuit of national interest?
[2] The way forward, it seems to me, is to back up to the
basics. To paraphrase the question H. Richard Niebuhr posed
as war-clouds gathered in the 1930s, we need to ask: what is God
doing in Iraq-particularly in a moral sinkhole like Abu Ghraib
prison? And how ought we to be responding? These
questions present us with a difficult problem of discernment,
particularly if we seek a biblically responsible answer, as I will
try to develop later in this article. Three perplexing
alternatives present themselves. First, we might argue, with
H. Richard Niebuhr and perhaps John Hoffmeyer, that God is
with the victims; that God's blessing cannot be claimed by the
torturers or any of the antagonists in the Iraq war, no matter how
righteous a cause they may trumpet. But to identify God
strictly with victims ignores a considerable body of Biblical
testimony that God is very actively involved with the actions and
responses of combatants to each other, particularly in the
historical narratives of the Old Testament. Second, we might
therefore argue that God is with whoever is victorious, but this
claim ignores the testimony of the Isaiah's suffering servant, of
Jeremiah, of Jesus and of other biblical figures who discern God's
will in national defeat or suffering, whether deserved or
vicarious. Third, we might look to the quality of the cause
the combatants pursue. We might argue that God is with
President Bush's crusade to establish democracy, or with the
militants' crusade to establish theocracy, or with an apparently
broad swath of Iraqi nationalists who simply want their country
back, even at the price of renewed authoritarian leadership.
These visions of victory do not enjoy moral equivalency, of course,
although it might be a close contest between tenuous democracy and
familiar authoritarianism. In any case, none of these
alternatives provides us a distinctively biblical vision for
discerning where God is in the Iraqi war, and in particular, Abu
Ghraib prison.
[3] I propose a more modest approach, one which aims no higher
than offering us insight about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners in
Abu Ghraib. The Abu Ghraib prison was and remains an
instrument for isolating prisoners from the general Baghdad
population, for intimidating them into releasing information, and
for punishing them by depriving them of liberty, privacy and
comfort. The question to ask is: to what extent, if any, does
such punitive action reflect the will and action of God, as
conveyed through the Old and New Testaments?
[4] In a richly argued recent study of penal justice,
Christopher Marshall begins by arguing that New Testament writers
take a dim view of judicial power. They affirm, in principle,
the functions of the state in keeping order, butvoice suspicion
about how coercive police power is used, particularly against
Jesus.[1] It would be
easy at this point to cast a pall of moral restraint over the
coercive authority applied by prison authorities, but Marshall, to
his credit, does not. He goes on to develop a detailed and
persuasive argument about the priority of restorative justice over
retributive justice in the New Testament. God is engaged
primarily in the work of reconciling and repairing relationships;
the violence often interpreted to be retributive is actually aimed
at this more holistic purpose.(2-4) Now, I have reservations
about Marshall's argument, which is insufficiently attentive to how
the communal boundary between insiders and outsiders might play
into the distinction between retributive and restorative
justice. Yet the Biblical writers offer a way to comprehend
imprisonment and even coercive interrogation within God's agenda of
restorative justice, and so suggest how we might re-envision what
God calls us to do at Abu Ghraib.
[5] On the one hand, the biblical writers deepen our
understanding about what went so wrong within the prison.
While the Bible depicts much violence, it provides scant precedent
for the U.S. practice of isolating Iraqi prisoners deep within the
walls of a prison and inflicting humiliating punishment.
Recall how the punishments were imposed in a personalized manner,
by isolating the individuals, then targeting their personal
sensitivities and deeply held beliefs. These punishments
included, according to one list:
…shackling in a bent
position to a ring in the floor for hours or days, isolation for
weeks or months, being held naked, kept in freezing air
conditioning, sleep deprivation, near-starvation, imposed
injections, forced shaving of hair and beard, withholding of family
mail, refusal of medical attention, beatings, interrogations,
psychological torture to force false confessions or false testimony
against others, being confronted with confessions they never made,
sexual humiliation, being shown pornographic photos and
videos.[2]
[6] Such torture appears to have been undertaken to satisfy the
private sadistic lusts of certain guards (think of the Roman guards
in Mel Gibson's The Passion). The very idea of imposing, and
enjoying, suffering in such a personalized manner reflects an
atomistic individualism that is alien to the thought world of the
Biblical writers and, for that matter, to much of the subsequent
Christian tradition. These problem with the sheer isolation,
personalization and twisted gratification characteristic of
punishment at Abu Ghraib is that they drive out any restorative
impulses, which as Marshall argues, are central to God's sense of
justice. Justice is restorative when offender and victim are
opened to the possibility of living beyond the offense and
punishment. Isolation, humiliation, and sadism clearly are
antithetical to restoration.
[7] On the other hand, a biblical perspective reveals the
limitation of our own revulsion at what the guards did. We
are likely to focus upon pain and humiliation as the major counts
in the moral indictment against the torture applied at Abu Ghraib,
yet there is the equally deep offense of isolation.
Restorative justice requires, at the very least, that offender and
victim be engaged in each other's lives-interpreting, responding,
shaping each other in ways that begin to build trust, however
minimally. Clearly the isolation of Abu Ghraib from its
surroundings, jailer from prisoner, prisoner from prisoner,
prisoner from the wider population was working against such
restoration. Yet we are culturally ill-equipped to reflect
morally upon isolation as pernicious to God's restorative
justice. Generations of individualism have blunted our
capacity to appreciate the sheer interactive richness of the
biblical worldview, and so limit our capacity to assess coercive
interrogation. Our individualistic thoughtworld offers a
comfortably stern prohibition against invading the privacy, comfort
and property of others, but few categories for evaluating the range
of relationships which lie between sheer liberty and sheer
coercion, with their thicker textures of pressure and
counter-pressure. We are thus likely to swing between demanding an
end to all coercive interrogation, at the one extreme, and caving
in to arguments that the war on terror necessitates any means
necessary to extract needed information from suspects-the two
extremes that John Hoffmeyer, like the rest of us, voiced in
his Lutheran article.
[8] The biblical writers are not so limited. They see God
and God's people enmeshed in a vortex of mutual influences whose
range and intensity are astonishingly rich. Consider, in contrast,
the range of ways God seeks to shape the belief and actions of the
people of Israel and the church, as narrated in the more historical
sections of the Biblical record: God variously promises, tests,
rescues, delegates, disciplines, punishes, forbears, commands,
reassures, teaches and ultimately engages in self-sacrifice.
All of these actions are oriented to restoring a relationship of
faith and trust with the people. The people, for their part,
variously question, resist, apostasize, misunderstand, obey,
ignore, pray, sacrifice, learn, harden their hearts, hear, and
follow-displaying a wide range of responses to God's
initiatives.[3] Pressure comes
in many forms in the biblical narratives; not even Ecclesiastes is
a self-sufficient, isolated monad. Achieving restorative justice is
a messily interactive business. As a result, the biblical
writers have far richer intuitive resources than we for negotiating
the morally slippery terrain of coercive relationship, such as
between prisoners and guards.
[9] Two startling, and perhaps disturbing, insights emerge from
this resolutely interactive biblical perspective. First, when
God applies punishment, the ensuing violence takes place not in
prisons, but out in the open, for the community to see. From
Korah who rebelled against Moses (Numbers 16) to the Ananias and
Sapphira who lied to the fledgling Christian community (Acts 5),
God reveals judgment in a public arena, through death or suffering
dramatically inflicted-sometimes self-inflicted by the
offenders. The purpose of such theater is not to extract
information, nor to humiliate, but to hold up the actions of
offenders to judgment in the presence of the whole community.
God's aim apparently is to strike fear and pity into the hearts of
all the onlookers-who include us, as readers of the book.
King Saul may have sought the help of a sorcerer in secret, but his
failure to retain God's favor was demonstrated publicly on the
battlefield.(1 Samuel 15: 31) Sometimes those who suffer in
public do not deserve to; the dramatic enactments of God's power
can reveal judgment against offenders through the victims they
afflict; consider what the execution of John the Baptist conveyed
about Herod (Mark 6), or what the martyrdom of Stephen said about
his opponents in Jerusalem (Acts 6).
[10] Second, the violence of the punishment is aimed at
restoring the community-even if not the stricken individual-to a
right relationship with God. Korah and his co-conspirators
died in order to restore purity of worship by the Exodus
community. For the Old Testament prophets, the travails and
very public deaths of errant kings served to call Israel back to
fidelity and true worship. In Acts, the deaths of Ananias and
Sapphira served to draw a line against a kind of lying that would
undermine the community. At issue is shalom, that
comprehensive biblical term for the wholeness and well-being-the
justice-of the community.[4]
[11] From these quickly sketched biblical considerations, we
might infer a God who is intensively involved with the people who
claim to be people of faith, and moreover is presumably interested
in the fate of Iraq, even if the Bible offers little guidance as to
what restorative justice means outside the communities of Old
Testament Israel and the New Testament church.[5] It might not be
unreasonable to claim that God wills to restore the social and
political health of Iraq. U.S. prison authorities may claim
they are seeking to restore Iraq by applying coercive interrogation
against suspected terrorists. But it is seems reasonably
clear that such actions work directly against the kind of
restoration that God wills us to practice, particularly when a
large majority of the imprisoned appear innocent. At the same
time, it seems unclear that simply returning the treatment of
prisoners to the most humane standards realistically possible in
that war zone would contribute anything more to the restoration of
Iraq as a social and political community. U.S. authorities
need a strategy for combating terrorism which extends beyond the
guarantees of civil liberty to suspected terrorists.
[12] Let me therefore offer, from an armchair perspective, a
vision of detention loosely derived from the biblical precedent:
public rather than private, restorative rather than retributive,
communal rather than individualistic, immersed rather than
isolated. My proposal is simple: that Abu Ghraib be turned
"inside out." Rather than being sequestered far from public
view, suspected terrorists could be clad with highly visible
clothing and taken to the site of any and every terrorist attack
immediately after the attack has occurred. There they would
be exposed to fellow members of the Iraqi community: relatives of
victims, police, and bystanders. They could be made to stand
motionless for hours amidst the carnage of the attack. They
could be required to face the crowd, and to respond to the
accusations or questions which might be hurled at them.
Whether applauded or more likely vilified, they would not be
allowed to escape being linked to the atrocity. This public
exposure should be limited only to prisoners who have
well-evidenced links with terrorism. The prisoners who
are likely innocent (estimates run as high as 70%, according to the
Red Cross) might be offered a more neutral, praiseworthy role of
helping to clean up the rubble.
[13] This armchair vision may be wildly impractical.
Restoring the prisoners to public view is not without risk to both
the prisoners and their U.S. guards. Turning Abu Ghraib
inside out might incite mob violence or it might expose soldiers to
violent rescue attempts. The prisoners both would have to be
guarded against rescue attempts, and protected against lynchings.
They would have to be kept from communicating with sympathizers
(although interrogators might glean more from overhearing or
bugging such conversations than they currently get from
interrogations within the prison.) These risks might be
reduced by careful advance planning, a careful deployment of
troops, and collaboration with Iraqi authorities. Still,
there may be strong reasons more evident in Baghdad than here as to
why turning Abu Ghraib inside out would be inadvisable.
[14] Beyond such practical considerations lies the question of
whether the public exposure I propose would be any less humiliating
than closeted brutality practiced by U.S. guards. The spectacle of
exposing prisoners to civic scrutiny might not be tolerated in the
U.S., where prisoners are not usually subjected to public
view. Defendants in most U.S. jurisdictions are permitted to
hide their faces from news cameras. The access of television
into courtrooms is contested, if not prohibited. Prison chain
gangs have gone the way of Burma Shave signs. Public
executions are carefully scripted and sanitized. These
scruples reflect excellent legal and moral reasons for not turning
Abu Ghraib inside out. Since the Iraqi prisoners would not
have been formally accused, tried, and convicted of perpetrating
the particular terrorist incident they are forced to witness, their
compulsory visibility at the scene would have more than a whiff of
vigilante justice, of grossly violated due process. It is
difficult to see how they could be marched to the scene of a
terrorist bombing in such a way that preserved the presumption of
their innocence until proven guilty. The Cultural Revolution
in Maoist China and other totalitarian outrages suggest that the
distinction between restorative justice and degrading humiliation
may dissolve when the tactics of public confrontation are taken up
by mobs. Only under conditions of extreme social violence
should an accused's claim to due process and privacy be so roundly
violated.
[15] The moral question is whether there is a meaningful,
enforceable distinction between public humiliation aimed at
restoration, and humiliation primarily aimed at degrading
individuals and gratifying torturers. I suspect many Iraqi
prisoners might prefer public exposure to the humiliation by U.S.
guards, but there still remains the theological question: dare we
"play God" by focusing the heat of public attention upon
prisoners? It might be argued that public humiliation belongs
to God, not us, just as much as vengeance does. Matthew's Jesus
commended that a congregation undertake discrete private
initiatives before publicly confronting the fallen (Mt 18).
If it could be shown that God, through Jesus, works for the health
of social and political communities primarily through means which
stop short of public confrontation, the case for turning Abu Ghraib
inside out would collapse.
[16] Turning Abu Ghraib inside out would be justifiable in
biblical terms only if it helps the Iraqi people return to social
and political health. The public spectacle of manacled prisoners
will be tolerable only if it clearly serves to delegitimate
terrorism, to restore the rule of law, to strengthen the role of
legitimate policing, and to render the streets safe. Over
time, it would have to be proven that the popular anger focused
upon the inmates actually does serve to blunt the recruitment of
terrorists and bolster the authority and power of law-abiding
police. Perhaps under the pressure of fellow citizens, the
prisoners might spill information useful to investigators.
They might confess to conspiracies. At the very least, they
would be forced to assert their innocence in front of angry
peers. Of course, these are the utilitarian calculations of
power politics; what is more important is the kind of healing which
can begin when conspirators and extremists are forced to face the
consequences of their destructive politics, and victims are given
someone to whom they can articulate their cry for
justice.
[17] This proposed biblical view of punishment seems to me to
offer a way to link our humanitarian impulses with the power
calculations of realists. If we see that God sides not
exclusively with the victims, nor with the victors, but is rather
active throughout the struggle, we are freed to consider what
strategies might best conduce to restoring the social and political
health of Iraq. The resolutely interactive perspective of the
Bible-with its default assumption that God and the people are
always, in manifold ways, attempting to shape the beliefs and
action of each other-enables us to engage the apparatus of coercive
detention and interrogation without either caving into its
totalitarian logic or rejecting categorically the use of pressure
in coercive interrogation. What the biblical writers commend
us to do is to keep in mind God's restorative justice, being fully
convinced that this is what God wills us to do. Then we are
freed to exercise moral imagination as to how such justice might be
furthered, even in the Abu Ghraibs where it is so clearly
absent.
© September 2004
Journal of Lutheran Ethics (JLE)
Volume 4, Issue 9
[1] John Hoffmeyer, "Would you do it?".
The Lutheran, July 2004, 13-4.
[2] Christopher D. Marshall, Beyond
Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime and
Punishment. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2001, 9-16.
[3] Victoria Brittain, "Britain is
complicit in this horror", Guardian Unlimited,
Wednesday August 4, 2004, The Guardian (
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1275525,00.html)
[4] Stewart W. Herman, Durable Goods: A
Covenantal Ethic for Management and Employees. Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame, 1997, chapter 4.
[5] Marshall, Beyond Retribution, 49,
53.
[6] For an exception, see prophetic
indictments of foreign kings and nations, such as in Amos 1.