As a grizzled veteran of a Catholic education I have, despite an agnosticism that verges on unbelief, an inordinate and ingrained interest in the health of men’s souls. Old habits die hard. One of the things that concerned me about the Bush administration’s commitment to torture in the name of enhanced interrogation, for example, is that Americans were being asked by an ostensibly Christian administration to do it: to commit acts that seemed unjustifiable by any Christian code, and to expose themselves to the risk of judgement, whether in the here and now or in the great beyond.
I know that Andrew Sullivan had the same kind of upbringing, and have always suspected that he has the same kinds of concerns. Which is why it surprised me when in his Wednesday post on my story about “The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama,” he seemed to buy in to the Obama administration’s largest unspoken assumption:
That killing represents a moral upgrade over capture and interrogation — over torture.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/drones-vs-torture-10621413#ixzz20VcAdtOT
