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Front Line Dilemma
Christians in intelligence services are conflicted over the use of torture.

...Christians told CT that they desperately needed biblical insight, because Christians are deeply involved in the chain of influence, all the way from Washington to military and intelligence operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba's Guantanamo Bay, including:

• President Bush, who exempted suspected terrorists from protections in the Geneva Conventions. On February 7, 2002, Bush signed a statement that declared, "I … determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world."

• Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who, with acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, argued behind closed doors that U.S. torture policies harm the war on terror.

• Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, his aide John Yoo, and other evangelical lawyers, who promoted a "new paradigm" to fight the war on terror, which they claimed "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners."

• Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin (popular as a speaker at churches before the Pentagon told him to lower his profile), who has been a key Pentagon planner in the worldwide pursuit of Al Qaeda terrorists....

..."Ladies, you can get a 'special visa' to Guantanamo," an interrogator with the Third Army Division told his male Muslim prisoners in Afghanistan. The soldier, who asked for anonymity, recounted his experience during a recent interview with ct.

"You will be placed in cages where you may be dealt with at leisure by a bull of our choice," he told the prisoners. "Or, you can tell us what we want to know now." The soldier is an ordinary Southern Baptist churchgoer from Texas. He voted for fellow Texan George W. Bush, explaining, "He's a Christian man."...

...Christians in intelligence services told CT that the torture debate must be approached as a worldview issue in another sense, as well. Recalling his stint as an interrogator in Afghanistan, Mackey said, "I was drifting toward relativism in my faith. But I was confronted with militant Muslims who want to destroy us, and also my own ambivalent moral responses. I am not a relativist any more."

For however long the global war on terror lasts, Christians in America's intelligence services say that believing Christians must never surrender their absolute spiritual values.