Next Sunday you will decide as a congregation whether or not you want to take part in the torture awareness month of June, called by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, by placing a banner on the property, readable by the public, which says Torture is a Moral Issue. You will decide as a congregation because it is our heritage that we come into association freely and each member has a vote. No one can speak for all of the congregation unless the congregation grants that authority. This decision is yours to make. And in order to help each one make it, talking about torture as a moral issue seems useful today. My aim is less to offer answers than to provide information and raise questions that will assist you in your deliberations as Unitarian Universalists.

First, however, let me set some parameters. I find the issue of torture surprisingly complex, from a moral standpoint and I want to turn that complexity over and over, maybe shaking loose some of our seemingly solid viewpoints. Friedrich Nietzche said, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. "Thus with torture. In examining the morality of torture I do not want to come from a place of moral superiority. I do not want to point fingers and set up a "them and us " scenario because I believe that the one who is capable of torturing another lives inside all of us. All of us are capable of becoming a monster. To look into the abyss of torture can reveal something about ourselves. Do you think torture is always wrong and never should be employed? Or do certain times and circumstances permit it? Do you think you could never carry out torture? Have you ever acted more cruelly than necessary, just because nothing stopped you? When we look into the abyss, the abyss also looks inside us. We cannot afford to cast those who order torture and those who carry it out and those who find it necessary at times into some kind of moral pit when the shadows of our own beings are, potentially, just as murky. There's no moral superiority here.

What is torture? The standard definition is found in the UN Convention Against Torture, which has been ratified by the United States and says "For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. " In other words, torture is 1. the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering, mental or physical, 2. at the instigation or with the consent of a person in an official capacity, 3. for the purpose of obtaining information or a confession or to punish, intimidate or coerce.

Human beings, I dare say, have always found ways to torture one another. What we call water boarding, simulated drowning, for instance, began in the Middle Ages. But in the modern era, it is since World War II that nations have cooperatively tried to put limits on such. After the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps were discovered, international law, as specified in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and ratified by the United States in 1955, laid out "rules " regarding the treatment of prisoners of war, civilian detainees and protected persons. Detainees must at all times be humanely treated (Geneva III, art. 13, Geneva IV, art. 27). Detainees may be questioned, but any form of "physical or mental coercion " is prohibited (Geneva III, art. 17; Geneva IV, art. 31). Women shall be protected from rape and any form of indecent assault (Geneva IV, art. 27). Torture or inhuman treatment of prisoners-of-war (Geneva III, arts. 17 & 87) or protected persons (Geneva IV, art. 32) are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and are considered war crimes (Geneva III, art. 130; Geneva IV, art. 147). Detainees in an armed conflict or military occupation are also protected by Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions. Article 3 prohibits "[v]iolence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; ??¦outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment. " Even persons who are not entitled to the protections of the 1949 Geneva Conventions (such as some detainees from third countries) are protected by the "fundamental guarantees " of article 75 of Protocol I of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits murder, "torture of all kinds, whether physical or mental, " "corporal punishment, " and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment, " and any form of indecent assault. "

Prohibitions on torture are also found in other international documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment, and the U.N. Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. Among the relevant treaties are the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.? Further, the United States has incorporated language prohibiting torture into its domestic statutes, as recently as in the 1994 federal anti-torture statute, (18 U.S.C. ?§ 2340A) and the 1996 War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. ?§ 2441).? (Information from the Human Rights Watch website, www.hrw.org)

So if torture is so clearly prohibited by international and United States law, why is this an issue? Why is our country torturing people? Or using methods that others claim are torture but our government does not? Here's where the moral questions come in.

A moral issue has three parts to it. There is the action itself, for example torture. There is the one who acts, for example, the US government, the military, the CIA. Finally, there are the consequences of any action, whether intended or not. When people think in moral terms they often take only one part of those three parts and use it to guide their thinking. So for instance, a person might just consider the act of torture in reaching conclusions about its morality, ignoring those who inflict it and its consequences. When we do that, I think we arrive at incomplete moral judgments. We must consider each part of the moral landscape in order to understand and determine the morality of any issue.

What is the act of torture? We saw above that the definition of torture talks about severe pain or suffering, intentionally inflicted. Can you see the vagueness in that definition? I don't have a better one and I wonder if torture can be definitively explained in any case. But the UN explanation leaves the identification of torture open to interpretation. Which raises the first moral question. If the act of torture is not unambiguously defined and is therefore open to interpretation, who gets to make the interpretation? In our legal system, the courts interpret the laws. In the case of international law and treaties, and in the absence of the equivalent of an international Supreme Court, the governments of individual nations have claimed the right to interpretation. Likewise, if a nation wants to get out of a treaty which it has signed, there is no international legal procedure in place for this, except for the nation to disregard the treaty. The combination of the vague definition of torture and the weaknesses in the system of international law have led to moral ambiguity. Thus our government, since the 9/11 attacks, has struggled with finding a definition of torture that suits it. I think the underlying cause of this is fear. 9/11 frightened all of us, but it seemed to have frightened the executive branch of government most of all. It also unleashed the cowboy-pilgrim side of our psyche. The side that goes off unilaterally, claiming to save the world. The side that is often in tension with our self-proclaimed identity as a moral beacon for human rights around the world.

Thus in August, 2002, ". . . officials in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo which argued that coercive interrogations only constitute torture if they intentionally caused suffering 'equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.' That memo was rescinded in 2004. " (New York Times Oct. 8, 2007) In March of 2003, a Justice Department memo outlined "legal justification for military interrogators to use harsh tactics against al Qaeda and Taliban detainees overseas -- so long as they did not specifically intend to torture their captives. Even so, the memo noted, the president's wartime power as commander in chief would not be limited by the U.N. treaties against torture. "Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion.'" (CNN.com, April 8, 2008) That memo was rescinded in December of the same year. Yet, in 2005, the "Justice Department issued a secret memorandum on the subject. The new opinion, according to officials who had seen the document, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures. " (New York Times Oct. 8, 2007) In 2006 the Supreme Court issued a ruling that all prisoners in American captivity had to be treated in accordance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Also in 2006, both the CIA and the military prohibited waterboarding. Yet just in March, 2008, President Bush vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding. The administration would like to determine which interrogation methods violate the Geneva Conventions on a case by case basis, according to the identity of the people it is interrogating.

The danger in this approach, of course, is that if the United States can define torture, so can any other nation. What stops a country from treating American prisoners and detainees severely, claiming as its moral justification that the US did it to their people?

When the international definition of torture leaves room for interpretation and there is no legal way to remove oneself from treaties, then do individual nations get to decide what is the act of torture? Is the definition of intentional severe pain or suffering, mental or physical, inflicted to gain information or confession or to punish or coerce or intimidate, and done at the instigation or with the approval of a person acting in an official capacity, sufficient? Should this definition bind all nations? In all circumstances? Is that even possible?

Leaving aside the question of what does or does not constitute torture, we come to the second moral issue: Is torture ever justified? Unlike the definition question, which based itself upon the act of torture, this issue focuses upon the consequences of torture. Our government asserts that there are times when torture is in our national interests based upon its moral consequences. The President vetoed the bill banning the CIA from using harsh methods because it would end practices that have prevented attacks. He said, "The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror. . . . This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe. " This is a common moral argument supporting the use of torture: it can save thousands of lives. Better to torture one person than to sacrifice hundreds, thousands, millions. Critics of this argument assert that we can never know in advance what information a prisoner or detainee holds, so how can we determine whether or not the consequences of torture justify the act? The Army field manual states that harsh interrogation is a "poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the (interrogator) wants to hear." (CNN.com, March 8, 2008) Others assert that torture has produced life saving information. Do the ends ever justify the means? Can you ever imagine a situation in which it seemed that someone knew something that would save the lives of people you loved? How then might you think about torture?

Let's look at moral questions relating to those who perpetuate torture. What are their motivations? The motivation with the greatest moral force is the one we just spoke of: obtaining information to save lives. But is that the only reason that people torture one another? Do not the emotions of revenge and desire to punish those we call our enemies also play into it? Does not the psychological seduction of power and control play into it? Does not the sadistic enjoyment of humiliating and terrorizing others also play into it? Do we ignore the immoral reasons for torture when we claim that we do it only because we need to obtain information?

Torture dehumanizes both the ones tortured and the ones who inflict torture. What are the consequences of this? Ariel Dorfman, [from his book "Torture: A Collection"] wrote, ". . . [torture] presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others' suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness. " All the people involved in torture suffer the trauma of it.

So how can we think about torture from a moral point of view? We can just declare it wrong, always and in every circumstance. We can reluctantly allow that there might be circumstances in which torture is justified. We can determine that a country must always obey international laws and treaties. We can acknowledge that there could be times when international law does not seem to fit. We can understand it as a part of human nature, albeit a part one would want to keep under strict control. We can factor in possible future danger to American prisoners, and damage to the moral reputation of our country. There are so many facets to consider. Is there a way to consider the three parts of a moral issue at the same time: the act of torture, those who inflict it, and its consequences, intended or not and use them to reach a conclusion about the morality of torture?

Michael Andregg, an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota and a frequent speaker and thinker on ethics for the intelligence community (that's not an oxymoron), writes, "It has been a canon of diplomacy for centuries that morality has no place in international affairs. . . This is the reasoning of cynical men. In a world with weapons of mass destruction . . . and millions of people angry enough to use them, we must do better than that. So I want to share the simple guidance of an operator I know well. His rules, based on experience, not books, are: First, do no harm, especially to innocents. . . . Second, and only if techniques under rule 1 cannot protect the people, choose the lesser evil when moral dilemmas cannot be avoided. . . . Third, remember that the law of unintended consequences is real and that perfection is not possible. So, he urges us to remember that the means chosen to do a thing usually determine the actual results achieved. " Later in the paper he notes, "Every era has pivotal forces or events that define that generation. The pivotal forces of today are Peak Oil and the technical information revolution that has so empowered police-states and the wealthy everywhere. . . . Rather than engage in the global struggle between those who have and those who don't, it is the sacred duty of intelligence professionals during this generation to rise above the habits of the past. . . . It is imperative (for them) . . . to help. . . leaders comprehend that the only way to beat this crisis is to save almost everyone. " (Intelligence Ethics: Laying a Foundation for the Second Oldest Profession)

We live in a world with torture; we always have. The idealist in me wants to say obey the Geneva Conventions. Never inflict torture. Yet the moral dilemmas surround us and that reality seems so far away, and even, at times, unreachable. The above rules may not fully satisfy, but for me they speak to the moral complexity of torture in this world and they give me a framework upon which to hang my thoughts.? First do no harm. If that is not possible, choose the lesser of the evils. Always remember the unintended consequences.

Torture is a moral issue. Yes it is; a complicated one. As you decide whether or not you want to say that publicly on a banner, I would ask you to first consider the moral complexity of torture in order to have the fullest comprehension of your actions. Then I offer three questions. They have to do with the act of the banner, the actors--you, and the consequences. First, does the act of hanging the banner fit with our UU identity and values? Second, why are you doing this? What do you hope to accomplish? Third, will you accomplish it by this action?

To these questions I have no answers -- those you will find for yourselves. May it be so.