Let me begin by saying that I don’t like situational ethics, they are a slippery slope on which it is nearly impossible to stand.  Having said that, there are times when one simply does what one has to do.  My earliest encounter with one of these times was very mild in nature, but it has shaped my thinking for many years.  We were returning to the mission field, in this case Borneo, not long after the Second World War.  Transportation was difficult, and we often spent long periods waiting for our next ride.  One of those times was on the small island of Ambon.  We lived in a tropical house (open windows and doors) made entirely of poured concrete.  Plumbing was a split bamboo aqueduct that brought water down the mountain from a spring higher than I was allowed to go.  Gray water drained into a shallow trench cast into the concrete porch that ran the full perimeter of the house.  I was strictly forbidden to touch that water because it was “nasty.”  One day I found a .50 machinegun slug in the water, and being young and male, really wanted it.  I expressed my stress to my mother who just said, “Wash you hands after you pick it up.”  I was stunned; the stone-engraved commandments had exceptions.  

In the 14^th chapter of Luke, Jesus was engaging in a little Pharisee baiting-one of his favorite pastimes.  He was eating with them on the Sabbath, and there was a man there with dropsy, a form of edema.  Jesus asked these moral scholars if it was legal to heal on the Sabbath.  They did not answer, so he healed the man’s illness, and sent him on his way.  Then he asked them, “Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the Sabbath day?”  Obey the law, or save a valuable animal from a slow death.  Humm.

The news is full of debate over an interrogation technique called “waterboarding.”  The technique is much older than the name; I was taught its use, and techniques for resisting it, in the early 60’s.  It was always torture.  The real question has nothing to do with waterboarding, the question is whether the United States condones the use of extreme methods of extracting information.  The answer is simple-we do not.  The real world, however, is seldom framed with such clarity. 

Imagine for a moment that a man has kidnapped your child, and buried the baby in a box with only an hour’s air.  Imagine that you had captured the man, and were trying to find where he had buried the box.  He refuses to tell you. As the hour drains away, where do you draw the line.  Under those circumstances, most of us would not even contemplate the existence of a line.  Some might even pretend to hold onto their principles like the Quaker who, hearing a noise in the middle of the night, came down the stairs with his shotgun in hand.  Finding an intruder, he said, “Friend, I wouldst not hurt thee for the world, but thou art standing where I am about to shoot.”  Most of us would simply improvise, using any technique available to wring an answer from the kidnapper.  In one of Tom Clancy’s books (don’t ask me to go back and try to figure out which one) the mysterious Mr. Clark has a line something like, “It’s not how you break the finger, it’s how you manipulate it afterwards.”

No, I don’t approve of torture, but when time is limited, and lives are at stake, one sometimes does things that are personally repulsive.  My problem is that we did those things routinely, even when time was not limited, and the information sought was more than slightly ambiguous.  It is unthinkable to me that the leaders of our country would meet to consider a policy, however classified, to allow torture.  When the circumstances demand it, no policy forbidding torture will stop it from happening.  When we try to define when torture is appropriate, we allow it to become routine, and tumble head-over-heels down that slippery slope into the pit of savagery.  If we plan to torture, if we have the implements on hand, we have just regressed humanity about 20,000 years (6,000 to 9,000 if you believe in a Young Earth.)