Washington D.C., Mar 15, 2018 / 07:00 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the CIA, oversaw a secret prison in Thailand where US intelligence targets were reportedly subject to waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
As Haspel prepares to face Senate questions about her work with the agency, a national debate over whether “enhanced interrogation” techniques amount to torture has reignited.
It is not clear whether Haspel directly participated in the “enhanced interrogation” of intelligence targets. But at the Cat’s Eye, the code-name for the CIA compound Haspel took over in 2002, al-Qaida suspects were subjected to new interrogation techniques implemented shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks. These methods of “enhanced interrogation” included sleep deprivation, humiliation, painful stress positions, and simulated drowning, known as “waterboarding” in an effort to obtain information about terrorist organizations.
Haspel is also suspected of pushing to destroy videotape evidence of “enhanced interrogations” conducted by CIA operatives.
In the 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor, Pope St. John Paul II taught that torture is “intrinsically evil.” What does that say about the morality of waterboarding or other methods of “enhanced interrogation?”
“When an interrogator in some other way imposes physical or psychological pain, at least significant pain, until the one being interrogated ‘breaks’ and talks, then I think this is clearly torture and morally evil,” Dr. Kevin Miller, a moral theology professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, told CNA.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.”
“I think that this would clearly encompass some things that the US did in the early or mid 2000s, most especially waterboarding, but very likely some of our other ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques also,” Miller said.
Miller clarified that even if these interrogation techniques were not defined precisely as “torture,” the Church would still object to them due to its firm defence of the dignity of each human person created in the image of God.
The theologian referenced Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world: “Whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself…all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed.”
He noted that “attempts to coerce the will itself,” are condemned in the passage, one that Saint John Paul II repeatedly quoted.
“If one is inflicting physical or psychological distress in order to – and to a degree that one thinks will likely succeed in – getting someone to answer questions that he/she would not otherwise agree to answer, then one is engaging in an attempt to coerce the will – whether or not the distress being inflicted rises to the level of torture. And this is intrinsically evil – contrary to both justice and charity,” said Miller.
An intrinsic evil is an evil that is wrong in the chosen act itself, independent of one’s intentions or the surrounding circumstances, Miller explained.
“Returning to Gaudium et Spes,” continued Miller, the “general principle underlying its condemnation of various evil acts is ‘reverence for man,’ grounded in the need to see every human person as one’s brother or sister, with whom one has been offered a communion that is a participation in the Trinitarian communion.”
The U.S. bishops’ conference has condemned the use of enhanced interrogation techniques for years, particularly after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released part of its 2014 report on CIA’s use of interrogation in the years following the September 11 terrorist attacks.
“The acts of torture described in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report violated the God-given human dignity inherent in all people and were unequivocally wrong,” stated Bishop Oscar Cantú of Las Cruces, who was chair of the U.S. bishops’ international justice and peace committee at the time.
In a letter to U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis on October 2017, Bishop Cantú affirmed American bishops’ support for “legislation to make torture, which some euphemistically refer to as ‘enhanced interrogation,’ illegal.”
President Barack Obama prohibited the CIA and military from using waterboarding and similar interrogation techniques when he took office in 2009. During a debate during his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said that he supported reinstituting the use of waterboarding “and more.”
“Current U.S. law is clear in banning enhanced interrogation techniques. Any nominee for Director of the CIA must pledge without reservation to uphold this prohibition, which has helped us to regain our position of leadership in the struggle for universal human rights—the struggle upon which this country was founded, and which remains its highest aspiration,” said Senator John McCain in a statement released shortly after Trump announced Haspel as his pick for CIA Director on March 13.
“Ms. Haspel needs to explain the nature and extent of her involvement in the CIA’s interrogation program during the confirmation process,” continued McCain.
“The torture of detainees in U.S. custody during the last decade was one of the darkest chapters in American history,” said McCain, who was himself a victim of torture during the Vietnam War.
“In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, our government squandered precious moral authority in a futile effort to produce intelligence by means of torture. We are still dealing with the consequences of that desperately misguided decision,” McCain added.
Pope Benedict XVI spoke out against any type of torture in a 2007 address, “I reiterate that the prohibition against torture ‘cannot be contravened under any circumstances.”
John Paul II presented an even more vivid condemnation in a speech in 1982, “With regard to torture, the Christian is confronted from his childhood with the reading of the passion of Christ. The memory of Jesus stripped naked, hit, mocked while suffering his agony, should always make him refuse to see similar treatment applied to one of his brothers in humanity.”
If confirmed, Haspel will be the first female director in CIA history. At 61, she has had an extensive career within the spy agency, which she has worked for since 1985.
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I have been keeping him in my prayers. I have attended Holy Mass at a chapel that he blessed many years ago. There are many of his sermons and appearances online and I highly recommend them. We need his presence more than ever.
Cardinal Burke is the only Vatican Cardinal to reply back to a letter I wrote. I am wearing out my beads for him.
The Cardinal is a prominent vaccine sceptic. I pray not only for the Cardinal for his quick recovery from COVID but also and above all for the rightist conservative media propagandists that they turn away from and repent of their death dealing (ironically promoting “my body, my choice” pro-choice and anti-life ideology) work in the disinformation and misinformation about the vaccine they have infected upon people like the Cardinal and a lot of Catholics as well.
Can’t we just pray for his healing and leave the divisions aside?
We don’t have all the answers about this epidemic and probably won’t for many years. At this point in time I’m not sure we even have all the questions.
May God bless Cardinal Burke and restore him to good health and send this affliction away. Amen.
That cells derived from aborted babies were used in the designing/testing phase of all three vaccines available in the US and in the production phase of one of them is neither disinformation nor misinformation.
Leila,
You wrote: “Rightist conservative media propagandists”
Do you think this phrase may have been overdone? 🙂
Let’s pray that when he recovers, if he recovers, he will stop with the anti vaccine, anti science propaganda and encourage his listeners to get vaccinated. I worry about every one he infected while contagious and they many who died because they couldn’t get a ventilator. He’s lucky he was able to get one,
Let us pray that when he recovers he will have the great joy of knowing he was not complicit in the evil of harvesting tissue from babies murdered by abortion.
Thank you Leslie
Thank you, Lynda. God bless you!
According to Charlotte Lozier Institute both Pfizer and Moderna used abortion resources in producing their vaccines. On WORLD OVER August 12 2021, Arroyo said enough explicit words that would exculpate these vaccines of abortion taint: the two did not use “abortion-derived cells in production”. It was in the very first part of the program, the segment with Sirico and Lawler. I think that this should be corrected and that Arroyo should use his upcoming program to clarify the position.
I join in prayers for Cardinal Burke and have asked others to pray as well. I also pray for anyone ill with COVID-19 or who will be ill. I think Cardinal Burke has faced many challenges conscientiously and bravely and is an inspiration. Listening to him is a joy.
Found via BIG PULPIT, Dr. Fauci told VIROLOGY JOURNAL August 22 2005, that HCQ is a wonder treatment for SARS/coronaviruses.
Now it could be that his contrary stance for COVID-19 arises from the fact that technically, COVID-19 is not a corona virus.
I am not a scientist as such but I maintain COVID-19 is not a corona virus as previously that term was applied.
It would seem that either way Dr. Fauci has some explaining to do!
http://apriestlife.blogspot.com/2021/08/fraud-dr-fauci-said-hydroxychloroquin.html
It could be that over the past 16+ years much more has been learned about the treatment of many types of virus and that the efficacy of certain treatments that initially looked very promising have been shown to be ineffective.
On the other hand doctors of repute use the HCQ in the present and have made a positive record by far in results; yet it is not being upheld – not even “officially” pursued. Dr. Flavia Grosan of Romania insists that the ventilator is meant to be used intermittently after treatment with medicines and with the treatments continuing. One of the things she has boasted about is that she has kept almost all her patients out of hospital, who also had recovered.
Where I live the emphasis in the private practice of a handful of doctors is on regular style oxygen; also I heard of a doctor who uses oxygen tent in order to be as gentle as possible.
I am not a doctor. I suspect HCQ aids osmosis so that the immune system gets at the disease. On the other hand (I think), hydrocortisone penetrates cells and would help blunt the disease within there, which gives the immune reaction an advantage.
If as I contend COVID-19 is not a corona virus, it would appear the HCQ helps treat it anyway, quite fortuitously.
Sister Wanda Boniszewska, please intercede for dear Card. Raymond Burke.
Cooperation, appropriation, and vaccines relying on fetal cell line research, by Stephan Kampowski, for The Catholic World Report
January 24, 2021
Praying for him! Also praying for all those w/those “ far right” illogical ideas!! God gave us brains to avoid all of this needless suffering & death!! Yes , Your body , your choice— well you now have caused the needless suffering & death of so many !Young & old !! I think Our lord is shaking his head, saying what is wrong w/my people???
“God gave us brains to avoid all of this needless suffering & death!!”
All? That goes contra all of human history, logic, and experience.
Hi Carl, Focusing on this interpretation of Gail’s use of the word ALL is being a bit literalist, don’t you think? In the context of Gails comment it would be reasonable to interpret the suffering she is referring to all that is caused by an adherence to illogical ideas, ie needless suffering from Covid caused by the lack of co operation with mitigating strategies for decreasing the spread of the virus, the lack of co operation being motivated my Ideology rather than common-sense, or the practical application of scientific knowledge specific to the spread of the virus.
In this light Gail’s comment is entirely reasonable.
I cannot understand the reasoning behind your comment.
While I’m at it I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for your diligence in doing the job you do here. No doubt it is a very demanding vocation and I greatly appreciate the great job you do of the many difficult tasks involved. Ditto for all the other moderators, editors and staff.
No, I think my comment was fair and on point, especially considering that even if one interpreted Gail’s comment as you do, it would still be contra all of human history, logic, and experience–even if that history only dated back to March 2020. Apparently, both you and Gail (using my reading skills, which date back to when I was three years old) think that all of the illness, suffering, and deaths from COVID has been due to people not wearing masks (which are essentially useless, as the data and evidence show) or getting a shot that leads to another shot, which leads to a booster shot, which may help, unless of course you still get sick, etc., etc. No matter how you slice it, Gail’s comment is not rational; in fact, it seems mostly ideological.
“I cannot understand the reasoning behind your comment.”
Clearly.
In your explanation you have failed to establish on what grounds Gayle’s original post is contra to all of human history, logic, and experience.
Firstly you narrowed the implications of her comment to two issues that of the wearing masks and that of vaccines. You have failed to take into account effective strategies for slowing the spread of the virus to lower the curve so a resulting overwhelming of hospital resources and staff is avoided. I do not see where Gayle nor I even mentioned in specifics masks and vaccines.
Furthermore is seems a bit ridiculous to assert that Gayle and I think that all of the illness, suffering, and deaths from COVID has been due to people not wearing masks and avoiding the vaccine. This is not my view. I do believe that, being spread by air borne particles, in confined spaces, the wearing of masks slows the spread and are of assistance in preventing contamination. Also of assistance is the regular washing of hands and other strategies known and advised by epidemiologists and virologists. Ideology is not a determining consideration with how I come to my point of view. So far in the state of Victoria where I live we have managed to prevent hospitals and other services from being overwhelmed. We have followed the advise of competent epidemiologists not because of Ideology but as a reasoned response to the nature and presence of this virus. A comprehensive understanding of the nature of this virus is an ongoing process and given how it mutates it is a shifting ground.
An expression of this type should be an acceptable contribution to this debate and by any means does not merit an accusation of being contra to all of human history, logic, and experience. Cardinal Bourke, being a leader has a duty of care in the leadership he provides and is not above accountability or critique in this regard and accountability is not nor should ever be a partisan endeavour.
With your ability to move goalposts, you really should work for the CDC or the WHO…
The origin and cause of suffering, pain, and death (and even likely stupidity) is revealed in the first chapter of Scripture. The superior endowment of intellect in Eve and Adam’s prelapsarian state part has been taught and accepted since the Early Church Fathers first contemplated it.
Let those with eyes to see and brains to reason use them as God would have us do. Sans a passive-aggressive stance, I thank you for your work with us fallen creatures, Carl.
You would Probably have been right there in the early years of the Church saying “oh, go on, pinch a little incense to the gods, God gave us brains to avoid all this suffering and death.”
Leslie, another seemingly needless spiteful comment, in this instance aimed at Gayle, showing some consistency in this regard with your responses to those who legitimately express a different perspective than yours.
My own mother found this character trait the source of much distress in her early marriage in her relationship with the female parishioners of the Portland parish in the 1950’s.
Carl, without an explanation of what you are referring to in the overall gist of my reply I am led to believe I may have actually scored a goal.
Oh! Let me get your thinking straight!
You say, “Yes , Your body , your choice— well you now have caused the needless suffering & death of so many”
So, you seem to say that those who have refused a vaccine are the reason, the cause of those who have suffered and died from coronavirus. Is that your position?? Your statements surely seem to suggest that.
What’s the name of the game are you playing?
Your mother has my deepest sympathy.
It was not needless, nor even seemingly so; and it wasn’t spiteful. It was accurately pointing out her un-Christian attitude, since her argument seems to be that physical suffering and death are the absolutely worst possible things that could happen to anybody. Don’t like the analogy I made? Here’s another. Her attitude is the same as someone who would have told the early Christian martyrs, “God gave us brains to avoid suffering and death, by clinging so stubbornly to your conscience you’re endangering your relatives and other Christians who might also be arrested and killed.”
Informed conscience:
https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P60.HTM
II. The Formation of Conscience
1783 Conscience must be informed and moral judgment enlightened. A well-formed conscience is upright and truthful. It formulates its judgments according to reason, in conformity with the true good willed by the wisdom of the Creator. the education of conscience is indispensable for human beings who are subjected to negative influences and tempted by sin to prefer their own judgment and to reject authoritative teachings.
1784 The education of the conscience is a lifelong task. From the earliest years, it awakens the child to the knowledge and practice of the interior law recognized by conscience. Prudent education teaches virtue; it prevents or cures fear, selfishness and pride, resentment arising from guilt, and feelings of complacency, born of human weakness and faults. the education of the conscience guarantees freedom and engenders peace of heart.
1785 In the formation of conscience the Word of God is the light for our path,54 we must assimilate it in faith and prayer and put it into practice. We must also examine our conscience before the Lord’s Cross. We are assisted by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, aided by the witness or advice of others and guided by the authoritative teaching of the Church.55
What I find really disturbing is how the sociopathic leftcaths are crowing over Cardinal Burke’s illness and implying that he somehow deserved to contract Covid for being a “vaccine critic”. It’s just plain disgusting.
Yes, Johann it’s deeply sad but not unexpected.
Johann, I am not sociopathic! In no way am I implying Cardinal Bourke somehow deserved to contract Covid for being a “vaccine critic”. Nor have I read any other comment implying so. I do not neatly fit into the box you seem to want to squash me ( and all others you label as ‘left’ into. This is the example of an unfortunate pattern of thinking and communicating that is frequently displayed in comments here. How is it that you think this way? You make a tiny little mean minded box made up of your mostly false assumptions, and judgements of someone you perceive as the other (us and them) and you put a whole person into it then proceed to call them disgusting etc etc! Is this behaviour in pursuit of honouring your faith? Perhaps because you fail to see the distinction between discussion from differing positions and attack of the person? There is always hope. What do we have at our disposal? All of us? Faith Truth and Reason pursued in the spirit and mindset of love. Is your action in pursuit of any of these? Leftcaths??? No wonder the Body Of Christ is wounded. Endemic toxic thinking! No though that we all in fact might need each other, our differences moderated by faith truth and reason in the spirit of love and applied reconciliation in order to be whole as the Body of Christ.
To answer your question Meiron, I’m not playing a game and i accuse no one else of playing a game. My reference to kicking a goal was in response to Carl’s comment of shifting the goal. I don’t believe i shifted the goalposts of the subject, rather my comment pursued the subject further. Last night I chose not to comment further on this thread because of the focal point of the article was Cardinal Bourke’s grave illness not the wider debate. This morning I read Johans comment and felt the need to address it’s tone and effect and to explain myself so this thread does not finish in a message of brokenness but rather in the hope of at least some common ground while acknowledging differing points of view.
The original Pelagian heresy is precisely the subjugation of the Commandments. How then are they going to resolve what they have tried to do with “neo-Pelagianism”?
Pelagian heresy primarily revolves around original sin denialism. One can do whatever then – obey (this or that) commandments, build socialism, save planet, practise cannibalism.
And precisely this heresy, among others (most notably gnosis), is being taught at contemporary universities and churches.
The Pelagians’ approach to the Commandments can be found in their various discussions with St. Jerome. Some very poignant quotations used to be in the WIKIPEDIA article on Pelagianism but I noticed the article got changed around some time before Placuit Deo and these are no longer collected in one place on the internet I can identify.
A question for consideration for those who consider the CovidVax complicity in abortion. Should persons who are required to take heart medication, which virtually all are developed in some form in conjunction with embryonic stem cells cease taking their meds? Also, there is the real prospect of developing all meds without the use of Embryonic stems cells, “Adult cells altered to have properties of embryonic stem cells [induced pluripotent stem cells]. Scientists have successfully transformed regular adult cells into stem cells using genetic reprogramming. By altering the genes in the adult cells, researchers can reprogram the cells to act similarly to embryonic stem cells” (Mayo Clinic).
And if that person suffering from a heart condition declines to cease taking his meds, is he therefore complicit in the abortions from which the embryonic stem cells were taken?
Also, if a person with a heart condition knowingly continues with meds tainted by embryonic stem cell research, is he as complicit with the abortions also guilty of serious sin? Or is there no sin? What of someone physically compromised is considered heroic by refusing the CovidVax, is that heroism due to avoiding serious sin, or any sin? But if there is no sin for remote complicity what accounts for the heroism? I ask these questions because as a priest I must counsel parishioners who are led to believe by a large segment of Catholics that somehow the CovidVax is evil, and to refuse it is virtuous. Personally I have deep respect and affection for Cardinal Burke and respect his decision, although I don’t believe it sets a standard for heroic virtue.
You have to distinguish between life threatening heart condition and covid jab taken by healthy man because of traveling, restaurants, and so on. The latter is morally defective even if no murders involved since the jab itself is always hazardous not to mention that it not properly tested yet.
I think the “yes or no known in advance” for every single situation is not the way; and I think Cardinal Burke has not professed such a thing. It depends on circumstances and ultimately personal knowledge and understanding obviously.
Some situations will require a definite no. The fact is we have to be ready. We have to be growing into the maturity of faith.
Meantime, it is not simply about drugs that are tainted with abortion; it is also about industries at work in a conjunction with abortion becoming more and more integrated with it (and with other evils). This requires various other reactions not merely identifying the products in order to refuse to use them.
In some instances alternative products and producers are available but it means we have to find out about it in order to act responsibly.
If, hypothetically, a layperson has charted a true course but the priest has started arguing with him not to do it, wouldn’t be fair to point out that that part of the Church is at risk of becoming incurvatus in se?
So in some cases the act will not be immediately the priest’s but then: is that priest ready to be heroic too?
Leila M. Lawler put her very incisive comments here.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2021/01/24/cooperation-appropriation-and-vaccines-relying-on-fetal-stem-cell-research/