Deliver Us from Evil

It has been a season of gruesome images.

The world’s greatest power send troops to the Middle East to create a more civilized social order, but barbarity infects the chain of command, and the soldiers engage in the degradation of another human being. The prisoner is stripped, humiliated, subjected to physical and psychological pain, while his captors laugh—amused by human suffering. These soldiers will forever bear the historic stain of betraying their country’s good name; their victim is elevated to martyr status.

The general public finds such images of torture almost unbearable to watch, and our media fan the flames of controversy: do we approve the dissemination of such awful images? Parents everywhere anxiously guard lest their children glimpse even “edited” versions in newspapers or on TV. And even adults are unsettled, ashamed that humans could treat another human this way. We instinctively distance ourselves from the soldiers, telling ourselves they do not represent us, hoping against hope that our imperfect lives would never embrace such evil.

And yet we cannot keep our distance—so we flock to these inhumane images by the millions, and half a billion dollars later The Passion of the Christ has become the #3 money- maker in movie history. Millions leave theaters in tears, saying their faith is renewed by witnessing the victim’s suffering and humiliation and agony. Jesus, millions proclaim, suffered for all of us. The soldiers’ cruelty, they say, has to be seen to appreciate his sacrifice—and because they do represent us, our sins, our capacity to inflict hurt and pain on others.

I wonder: are these millions also moved by the newest images from the Middle East? Now the occupying soldiers are American Christians, not Roman pagans, and the victims are Iraqi Muslims, not a Galilean Jew. The presiding official is not Pontius Pilate but an American general. The captors include women, and the prisoners are not necessarily convicted of any crime (many were arrested “by mistake”). Yet despite all differences the images tell a remarkably similar story of sadistic cruelty and callous inhumanity. Are we similarly moved?

Of course, one might argue that Jesus' mistreatment was real torture—beating and whipping and bloodletting and crucifixion. So we don’t think twice when most US media avoid the taboo term “torture” and repeat “abuse” in every headline and soundbite. Surely, such mistreatment pales next to the tactics of true tyrants? Surely the American empire remains morally superior to that of Rome, of Napoleon, of Hitler? Certainly, some soldiers did bad things, but wasn’t that just a few bad apples? Mentally, we have already washed our hands of any responsibility.

Of course, not all the “abuse” was limited to stripping and humiliation. The Secretary of Defense tells us that photos to come include images of prisoners raped and murdered. These may be exceptional cases, but the more troubling reality is that the images we have already seen reflect a broader, more systematic pattern of behavior. It turns out that, while soldiers may have acted without explicit orders in these cases, they were acting out methods of “prisoner exploitation” long since developed by the US intelligence community—methods that, far from falling short of Roman cruelty, actually inflict greater damages to the prisoners. We are witnessing the most modern form of torture: “No-touch torture.”

University of Wisconsin historian Alfred W. McCoy has reported that, between 1950 and 1962, the CIA invested $1 billion devising “new and improved” torture methods. Experiments with drugs, shocks, and sensory deprivation led to the greatest advance in interrogation techniques in more than 300 years. Their startling discovery: “no-touch” psychological torture—using hooding, sleep derivation, sexual humiliation, and prolonged stress positions—actually works better than old fashioned physical torture.

Beginning in 1963, the CIA spread the new gospel of “no-touch” torture to police in Asia and Latin America, first through USAID’s Office of Public Safety and then (after that office was closed for promoting torture) through the US Army’s Mobile Training Teams.

The CIA’s torture manuals were abandoned by US intelligence officials in the early 1990s, but no-touch torture resumed after 9/11 (especially in the Guantanamo prison camp in Cuba), leading to the death of two afghan prisoners in 2002. The techniques these manuals teach closely mirror the images we have seen from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Unless we have extraordinary faith in coincidence, we will not be surprised if the blame for this torture goes beyond the soldiers in the photos. As Senator John McCain has said: “Everything that I see indicates it goes further up the line.”

Defense officials admit that these techniques violate international law (e.g., the Geneva Accords) and in fact constitute “Torture” under treaties signed by the US. After 50 years of quiet systematic use, these methods may be so taken for granted among intelligence officials that they have come to seem mild, but Professor McCoy says otherwise:

“Although seemingly less brutal, no-touch torture leaves deep psychological scars. The victims often need long treatment to recover from trauma far more crippling than physical pain. The perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to cruelty and lasting emotional problems.”

If we are tempted nonetheless to minimize these crimes, it might be prudent to ask: how would we feel if The Passion of the Christ portrayed these methods? Crucifixion itself is a long stress position producing suffocation—but what if prolonged stress positions had so disabled Jesus beforehand that he could not walk to Golgotha, let alone carry the cross? What if sleep deprivation had left him so disoriented he could no longer recognize those around him, could no longer say to Mary, “Mother, behold your son,” nor to John, “behold your mother”? What if Jesus had been sexually humiliated? What if Jesus were forced to masturbate before women? What if Jesus were raped?

The movie The Passion of Christ moved millions of Christians by sending a very dubious message: that Jesus suffered extraordinary and unique physical agony on our behalf. The fact is, of course, that Jesus’ physical suffering was appallingly ordinary for convicted felons in first century Judea. And however acute his psychological agony may have been, his Roman tormentors were simply no match for the clever and calculated cruelty of the CIA’s scientists.

The sad truth is, torture remains appallingly common in the new millennium as well, and torture in Iraq did not end with the fall of Saddam Hussein. Those seeking to justify this war as humanitarian intervention are now reduced to selling it as the lesser of two evils.

We can only hope that the millions of Christian moviegoers who were moved to tears watching the torture of Jesus are just as heart-broken to see those serving our country committing such a disservice to humanity. And we may hope against hope that God will not measure 2000 years of Christian civilization by our “progress” in finding better, more modern ways to inflict pain on our fellow human beings. The new torture may not “touch” its victims—but we should not remain untouched by it.

Send Your Comments and Questions to bfswain@juno.com