Torture, according to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, is "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

This bill was a congressional effort to prohibit the Central Intelligence Agency from using the "harsh interrogation techniques," i.e. torture, that are prohibited by the military and law enforcement agencies. In his weekly radio address, President Bush defended this interrogation technique that has made the U.S. a pariah around the world. “Because the danger remains,” he said, “we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists.”

The President’s veto of this bill reveals the fundamental moral problem of this administration—the attempts to keep torture legal for some interrogators betray the fact that those in this administration who justify torture do not believe in the very human freedom that they use as the value to justify torture.

In Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, one brother tells another a parable about the return of Christ to earth at the time of the Inquisition. Christ performs a number of miracles, the people believe in him, and he is arrested by the Inquisition and sentenced to be burned the next day. The Grand Inquisitor, the Cardinal in charge of the Inquisition’s practices of torture and death, visits Christ in his cell. Oddly enough, the Grand Inquisitor has no doubts that this person whom the Inquisition has sentenced to be burned is, in fact, Christ returned to earth.

The Inquisitor justifies his condemnation of Jesus to the stake because of the answers Jesus gave to Satan during his temptation in the wilderness. Jesus was tempted by the Devil to turn stones into bread, to be rescued by angels, and to rule over all the kingdoms of the world. Jesus rejected all three of these temptations, the Inquisitor points out, in favor of freedom.
This is why, the Grand Inquisitor argues, the returned Christ has to die. People can’t handle the freedom. They want to be told what to do and when they are given freedom they only misuse it anyway and doom themselves to suffering.

It is actually “the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction” that saves humanity from itself, from the intolerable burden of freedom. People will be happier if they live and die in ignorance, the Inquisitor believes.

This administration, and we the American people if we let them get away with it, are proving that the Grand Inquisitor is right. We can’t handle the burden of our own core value of freedom. When we torture, we deny the human dignity of the one we torture, the human dignity of the one whose country requires the torture and finally the human dignity of our whole society that authorizes torture.

It is in freedom that our claim to human dignity resides; in a theological sense, freedom is the way we image God.

This veto by President Bush is the moral nadir of this administration and unless it is overridden by Congress, the moral nadir of this country’s core value of freedom. This is a dreadful prospect.