"The thought of Jesus being stripped, beaten and derided until his final agony on the cross should always prompt a Christian to protest against similar treatment of their fellow beings. Of their own accord, disciples of Christ will reject torture, which nothing can justify, which causes humiliation and suffering to the victim and degrades the tormentor."
- Pope John Paul II, Address to the International Red Cross, June 15, 1982

The last Sunday before Lent, while listening to the reading from the Gospel, I heard once again the well-known words from the New Testament: "I was in prison, and you visited Me."

This year, however, these familiar words of Christ had a bitter and even an ironic ring to them, given that our government—led by a Christian president—tells us that we cannot visit Christ in prison.

According to the brief filed by his lawyers, Padilla was kept in total isolation from human contact for two years...

How so? There exists today a category of prisoners whom no one can visit. These so-called high value detainees are being isolated from outside visitors because, we are told, the "alternative methods of interrogation" being used against them number among the United States’ "most sensitive national security secrets."

Such tortured logic has, unfortunately, become typical of the present administration. One hears it so often it hardly even registers. Perhaps that explains the inadequacy of our response.

But is a specifically Christian response really needed here? Yes, it is—urgently, and for reasons that go to the very heart of who we are.

Let us start with the fact that a man who is in prison, whatever he may or may not have done before getting there, is defenseless.

To be sure, in the absence of impartial legal representation (which by definition is denied when prisoners are kept in isolation from the entire outside world), we have no way of knowing whether a given prisoner is even guilty of a crime.

But even this obviously central legal and moral question must be set aside, for a moment, in order to make a point that, from the Christian point of view, is even more important. When we torture a defenseless man, we torture Christ. Why? Because Christ on the cross is the very symbol of the defenselessness of every person who faces the machinery of brute force. Christ is this defenseless person in prison, whom we can no longer visit, and who is almost certainly being tortured.

We have no way of knowing whether a given prisoner is even guilty of a crime.

"There is no greater sacrilege than insensitivity toward those who suffer." This message, wrote the French philosopher Simone Weil, is the early intimation of the Christian sensibility already available to us in the poetry of the ancient Greeks. It can be found in the myth of Prometheus, for example, or in the Iliad (‘the poem of force,’ as Weil aptly named it).

"Insensitivity toward those who suffer." This phrase, no doubt, will offend the martial spirit of some readers. These same readers may even be skeptical that the U.S. treatment of its prisoners has ever risen to the level of true torture. After all, have not the president and vice president authorized nothing more rigorous than CID—cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment—of terrorist suspects?

Well, there is nothing like first-hand evidence to clear up such arguments. Precisely what CID entails is now known in some considerable detail. We may discover it, for example, from the case of Jose Padilla, who was finally given legal representation after first being held for several years in total isolation.

Mr. Padilla is the U.S. citizen accused of plotting with Al Qaeda to detonate a radiological ‘dirty bomb’ in a major US city, or such was the government’s claim until Padilla’s case actually reached—after a three and half year delay—the stage of indictment. At that point government prosecutors dropped the dirty bomb charges and substituted vaguer ones which, in the words of U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke, are "very light on facts."¹

According to the brief filed by Padilla’s lawyers, during the first two of those three and a half years Padilla was kept in total isolation from human contact. He was kept in a tiny, nine-by-seven foot cell with no windows—not even to the corridor of his empty cell block. He had no way to tell whether it was day or night, no access to a watch or a clock. Such sensory and temporal disorientation is already a well-known form of torture.²

'There is no greater sacrilege than insensitivity toward those who suffer.'

But this was just the beginning. Mr. Padilla was also allegedly subjected to sleep deprivation. "His captors would bang the walls and cell bars creating loud startling noises. These disruptions would occur throughout the night and cease only in the morning, when Mr. Padilla’s interrogations would begin," said the lawyers’ brief. His only bedding consisted of a cold iron frame with no mattress.

Is this ‘just’ CID? According to Vladimir Bukovsky, the renowned Russian dissident who languished for years in Soviet prisons, barbaric instruments of torture are, in our enlightened age, no longer needed: "a simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night."

And to those who dismiss sleep deprivation as "only CID," Bukovsky replies: "[C]ongratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin's ‘show trials’ of the 1930s."³

The full list of tortures compiled by Mr. Padilla’s defense team is rather long. It includes countless hours hooded and standing in stress positions, threats . . . and more than I have the stomach to list. What’s clear is that whatever the stated goal of the government’s actions, their inevitable and predictable result was the psychological and physical terrorizing of a human being, the sort of treatment characterized by Pope John Paul II, speaking the day after about the World Day Against Torture on June 26, 2004, as an "intolerable violation of human rights which is radically opposed to human dignity."

Were the Padilla case unique, it would already be an unbearable moral stain on our national conscience. But it is far from being unique. "All of the treatment described by Padilla has been described by numerous other detainees," civil rights lawyer Glenn Greenwald has noted.

It is true that one does not have to be a Christian to be shocked by these actions perpetrated in our name. It is not, after all, in the realm of morality that we Christians have something unique to offer the world. It is not even the case that we know more than others about what it means to be human. Certainly the Greeks, for example, were in no way our inferiors in this respect.

We Christians have a moral obligation to stick our necks out. We need to take the heat, especially now...

All we have (though to us it should be a great deal-indeed, it is everything) -is the example and inspiration of Christ. If we hear the words, "I was in prison," and we neither visit Christ ourselves, nor protest when our government forbids such visits, are we Christians? And what if we are silent when He is tortured?

"By their fruits you shall know them"

What are the results of torture? According to Bukovsky, the immediate practical result is the destruction of the police force that engages in it. Those always rare, truly talented investigators (who have the necessary "patience and fine analytical ability, as well as… skill in cultivating… sources") inevitably leave as the services degenerate "into a playground for sadists."

Not surprisingly, such a degraded force soon becomes incapable of solving even the simplest of crimes. It collapses from within.

But what should concern us even more, however, is that we ourselves, when we allow evil and sacrilege to be practiced in our name, collapse from within. Our worst punishment, as the Church has always taught us, is immanent. We become what we do.

"But these are terrorists, after all, who are being tortured!"

Are they? Then why does the evidence against them so often turn out to be flimsy, or to be provoked by undercover agents, or the result of ‘admissions’ made under torture?

And if we grant that in some cases the detainees actually are terrorists; and if we grant, based on no evidence I am aware of, that their torture makes us safer, what then? For a Christian only one answer is possible to this question: namely, ‘so what?’ The Gospel’s conception of life is hardly one of guaranteed security.

The much-maligned Simone Weil had a remarkably clear-headed understanding of our religion. Christianity, she realized, refers to a practice much more than it refers to a set of beliefs. In this fallen world, the practice of love and forgiveness is extremely difficult. Courage is necessary in this practice, but even more necessary is greatness of heart. "To die for God," wrote Weil, "is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God."[4]

These words could not be so beautiful if they were not also true. But their beauty will fade fast for us if we do not also act on them.

And act we must. We Christians have a moral obligation to stick our necks out. We need to take the heat, especially now. We were the ones who gave this administration its power in the first place. We must be the ones who take it away. They have proven that they either cannot or will not use it properly.

I can hear some readers shifting uncomfortably in their seats. Am I calling for impeachment?

It’s beyond the scope of this article to consider this difficult question. But let’s be honest and admit that impeachment, even if it were the right thing to do, would nonetheless be too easy, too facile a response. At best, it would provide only a first step towards a much-needed national repentance.

It would be shallow in the extreme to pretend that the guilt is not far more widespread than the actions of a few powerful individuals. Did not past administrations condone and in fact encourage torture in Central America and other geopolitical hot-spots? Have we not, as a nation, long had an over-weaning obsession with our own well being at the expense of others? So long as the dangers did not concern all of us directly—so long as the ones killed or tortured were not American citizens, so long as most of us were making good money and had secure jobs, it was easy to look the other way and pretend we didn’t notice the violence going on in some distant nation.

If truth, by some miracle, suddenly became the standard of our national political discourse, there can be no doubt that enough sins will be discovered to cause each of us, of all political and spiritual persuasions, to hang our heads in shame.