I'm not holding my breath...

I freely admit that George Weigel's writing consistently upsets me. I literally can taste the enamel grinding off my teeth as I clench my jaw and try to force myself to try to hear what he has to say with an open mind. My long standing complaint is that, for all the mountains of writing he has done on Iraq, he has never really discussed his relationship with PNAC, which has a much less ideological interest in Iraq occupation.

Something I have noted before is that my father believed that the only principles we really believe in are the ones we will stand by when they cost us something. Anything else is just a principle of convenience. When I saw that the Senate Armed Forces Committee has released a report on the treatment of detainees in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, I recalled this column which Weigel had once written. Interestingly, the archive copy differs a bit from the version that was published in The Tidings (I cut it out and kept it). In the version I first read, Weigel is less ambiguous, if torture is a matter of policy, not deviant behavior, then ius in bello, the rules governing the waging of a just war are broken.

The Catechism covers this succinctly in CCC 2313. We cannot mistreat detainees and the standard given is international law, not our own discretion.

It has been clear for a very long time that torture and indefinite detention have officially entered US policy. This breaks a long standing precedent going back to George Washington, who ordered his troops not to respond to atrocities by the enemy in kind, but to treat all prisoners humanely. Books like The Dark Side, whose title comes from a quote from Vice President (and fellow PNAC participant) Dick Cheney, have done a very good job of tying together all the evidence that has tricked out over the last 5 years - including President Bush's public insistence that he, personally, was involved.

So the Senate report really just confirms what we already knew. Yet, Weigel continues to write about the war in Iraq and the so-called 'war on terror' as if they are unarguably just and historically vindicated. It is not terribly Christian of me, but this makes me wonder if the problem is disassociation from reality, or insincerity when it comes to the theological principles he invokes in his columns.

I suppose the charitable interpretation is that he does not yet find the evidence of torture as official policy compelling, but when a certain threshold is met he will acknowledge the moral implications and alter his position. But like the title says...