LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Going into the Iraq war, U.S. military officials described the overwhelming force they intended to employ as “shock and awe.” Now it seems that same phrase could be used to describe the overall cost of that war and the one in Afghanistan and the U.S. engagement in neighboring Pakistan. It’s much greater than predicted by the government, according to a report compiled by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. It’s called the Eisenhower Research Project, codirected by Professors Catherine Lutz and Neta Crawford.

PROFESSOR NETA CRAWFORD (Political Science, Boston University): I’ve been looking at the history of war and its conduct for a long time, and what struck me about these three wars most startlingly was how much we don’t know about the costs.

PROFESSOR CATHERINE LUTZ (Anthropology and International Studies, Brown University): The reasonable estimate is approximately $4 trillion for the war, up to today and including some of the future costs that we’re obligated to pay for veterans care.

SEVERSON: That estimate includes the cost of the fighting that hasn’t ended yet, but it does not include as much as a trillion dollars just for the interest payments on the war debt through 2020. That’s a unique aspect of these wars.

CRAWFORD: Every other war the US has fought historically has been paid for by revenue, either by raising taxes or selling war bonds. In this war, the United States has almost entirely financed it, paid for it by borrowing.

LUTZ: What surprised me most was this idea that wars have such a long tail into the future of negative effects that we pay environmentally, we pay in human suffering, we pay in financially decades into the future.

President George W. Bush in 2003: “My fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

SEVERSON: Originally, the Bush Administration projected the Iraq war would be short and cost approximately $60 billion, clearly off the mark, but historically not unusual.

LUTZ: Governments often try to sell wars to the public and they use, at best, a very, very conservative estimate that will seem the most attractive and reasonable to the public. There tends to be an assumption that force will work, and therefore the job will be done in a couple of weeks or a month.

CRAWFORD: That doesn’t usually happen. In fact, it hardly ever happens. You have to really destroy a country to get people to roll over, and in every instance, the duration of war is almost always underestimated.

SEVERSON: To date, more than 6,000 U.S. troops have come home in coffins, although until recently images of the solemn event at Dover Air Force Base have been forbidden. Less well known is the fact that more than 26,000 allied military and security forces, most of them Iraqi or Afghan, have also been killed.

LUTZ: A lot of the information about the war is not available to the American public. For a variety of reasons, the idea that you want to have a sanitized version of the war available for purposes of morale, for the public at large, for the troops.

SEVERSON: Hundreds of aid workers have been killed, others kidnapped. Twenty-three hundred U.S. contractors have died. But what we rarely hear about are the numbers of civilian deaths, and they are considerably greater than military casualties.

CRAWFORD: In Iraq, it’s been about 125,000 people killed, civilians killed. In Afghanistan, the conflict has killed directly about 12,000 to 14,000 civilians.

SEVERSON: The hostilities In Pakistan have actually taken more lives than the war in Afghanistan—about 35,000, including civilians and militants. There, the U.S. military relies increasingly on drone attacks. The cost of this operation is classified.

CRAWFORD: These strikes have killed about 2,000 people. We don’t know exactly how many, and we don’t know exactly how many of those people were insurgent targets. Now this is a secret war, but it’s an open secret.

SEVERSON: Another war statistic is the number of wounded. Among U.S. servicemen alone that number is nearly 100,000, and the wounds are often severe.

LUTZ: This war differs from previous wars in a number of ways, and so there are certain kind of injuries and severity of injury that we did not see in previous wars. Survival rates are higher because of battlefield medicine and other factors.

SEVERSON: The insurgents’ use of IEDs or improvised explosive devices has been a major cause of injuries.

LUTZ: So we have a lot more injuries that are, again, whole body impact rather than just a single bullet kind of injuries, and these kinds of traumatic brain injuries that have such long-term negative effects and often interact with some of the other problems, the PTSD and other injuries that have this major effect on the person.

SEVERSON: It’s the hidden costs or unquantifiable costs of war that keep popping up in the Watson Institute report, which was compiled by 20 academics from around the country—the cost, for instance, to our civil liberties. The report says there has been unprecedented surveillance of American behavior and phone conversations that have been allowed through the Patriot Act, which was enacted to fight terrorism at home.

LUTZ: It is common to wars in general that they have often expanded the power of the government beyond what they were, what those powers were in peacetime, and that those powers are often maintained past the end of the conflict, and so in line with the idea that wars are never over when we think they’re over, that’s one way in which that statement’s true.

SEVERSON: Then there’s the image of the U.S., which has suffered globally, first after the torture pictures from Abu Ghraib, then the reports of the secret prisons and the detention of hundreds of terror suspects at Guantanamo, many of whom were released after several years.

CRAWFORD: It’s tarnished the image of the United States as a country of the rule of law.

LUTZ: For the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, this has been a nightmare decade.

SEVERSON: The report says the psychological effects for the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have been “massive”—depression, post traumatic stress disorder, broken families, targeted victims and collateral damage of a counterinsurgency war.

LUTZ: The number of refugees from these wars have been estimated by the UN at 7.8 million persons in those three countries—Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And that’s equivalent to the population of Connecticut and Kentucky being forced from their homes.

SEVERSON: The environmental harm is difficult to calculate but significant: damage from spilt fuel, spent munitions, toxic dust, increased rates of respiratory and cardiovascular disease, which is also showing up in returning troops.

SEVERSON: The report also takes into account what the wars have accomplished—the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the diminished ability of the Taliban, greater rights for women in Afghanistan, the spread of democracy, although Iraq and Afghanistan are listed as two of the world’s most corrupt countries. But like the costs, it will be impossible to measure the benefits until well into the future, and it’s the future that concerns the authors of this report.

LUTZ: The data is out there, but it’s very difficult to access. In some cases it’s not there at all. We need to know what those data are for past conflicts in order to try and project forward to other conflicts. That’s how a democratic society should operate is with full information about what public policy decisions are being made and who’s being asked to pay what. These have been costs that have also been born very unevenly, so the people who are paying the costs, military families, veterans, civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan—those people deserve to have their story told.

SEVERSON: Benjamin Franklin is quoted as having said, “Wars are not paid for in wartime. The bill comes later.” The Watson Institute report says the bills for these wars will keep coming in for as long as 40 years later.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Lucky Severson in Washington.

ABERNETHY: It’s been an emotional week since the dramatic US operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. On Thursday (May 5), President Obama laid a wreath at Ground Zero. He met with loved ones of some of those killed on 9/11 and told them he hoped bin Laden’s death brought them a small measure of comfort. The president repeatedly cited the 9/11 attacks when he announced the operation on Sunday (May 1).

Obama: Justice has been done.

ABERNETHY: When the news broke, spontaneous celebrations began in front of the White House and across the country. That prompted vigorous debate about whether jubilation was appropriate. In some parts of the Muslim world, there were anti-American protests and vows of retaliation. Obama made a distinction between Islam and Al Qaeda:

Obama: Our war is not against Islam. Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader. He was a mass murderer of Muslims.”

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile, as details of the raid emerged so did moral questions about the bin Laden mission. Joining me with more on all of this is our managing editor Kim Lawton and Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, a former Pakistani diplomat, now the chair of Islamic studies at the American University in Washington. Akbar, welcome. Kim, welcome. Akbar, let’s start with the popular reaction in the Muslim world.

AKBAR AHMED (American University): Bob, the reaction to bin Laden’s death tells us a lot about what’s going on in the Muslim world. There have been threats, there have been some explosions, people were killed in Pakistan. There have been processions being taken out by the religious parties mainly, but what it’s telling us is that over this decade from 9/11 the leadership model of Bin Laden has become almost irrelevant. You’re seeing this revolution sweeping the Arab world. It’s being led by young people wearing jeans, and Facebook, Twitter. They want an inclusive society, a democratic society. They want to be part of the world order. They don’t want to blow up America or Israel or whatever.

ABERNETHY: But are you saying that Osama Bin Laden was kind of yesterday’s leader?

AHMED: Conceptually, yes. Bin Laden is suddenly, to me, as an analyst writing about the Muslim world for the last several decades, overnight he seems almost like a dinosaur. His methods failed. His vision still resonates. Muslims would still like to have justice and dignity and so on, but his method of achieving these means seems to be dated and irrelevant in today’s Muslim world.

ABERNETHY: But in this country he was very, very much an important figure.

AHMED: The dominant symbol of 9/11, because rightly he was linked to this terrible event and then the chain of events that followed which resulted in, over this decade, the deaths of literally millions of people, displacement of millions of people.

ABERNETHY: And Kim, in this country?

KIM LAWTON: Well, I was going to say that I’ve been hearing from a lot of American Muslims who were saying that for them he had so much highjacked Islam and highjacked the perception from non-Muslims about what Islam was that there this is a certain sense of relief that maybe that is now finished.

ABERNETHY: But what about on the street? The popular reaction here, the kids cheering.

LAWTON: The celebrations.

ABERNETHY: And everything like that. A lot of people were very upset about that.

LAWTON: There’s been a really lively debate within the religious community about whether or not those celebrations were appropriate, and both sides have been using Scripture passages to sort of bolster their arguments. Some people saying that Scripture says that one should never rejoice when one’s enemy falls. But then others saying Scripture says that you should rejoice when good wins over evil, and so there’s been a little bit of debate. The Vatican issued a statement saying while Osama Bin Laden certainly was responsible for sowing hatred and division, one should never rejoice over another human being’s death.

ABERNETHY: And is there any agreement about where justice ends and revenge begins?

LAWTON: Well, that’s been another big topic of discussion. Where are those lines? And a lot of people saying, as President Obama said, justice has been done. But then other people questioning, was this revenge? Or when you see the celebrations does it appear that it looks more like revenge than justice?

ABERNETHY: Akbar, there are a lot of other people watching this besides Pakistanis and Afghanis and Americans and all. What does this open up in the way of imitation? Do you hear anything about that?

AHMED: I do, Bob. In fact, a lot of people in Pakistan are commenting on this. They’re saying that if America just flies in, kills someone, takes the body out, then this is a precedent for other people in the neighborhood, and Pakistan and India have had a very tense relationship for the last half-century, three wars between them. India’s been wanting the people behind the attacks in Mumbai, former city of Bombay. They want them. They want to try them for terrorism. And a lot of Pakistanis saying, suppose India does the same thing, just flies in, kills these people, takes their bodies out. What is there to prevent people from doing this kind of copycat imitation of what the Americans did?

LAWTON: There, well, it has been a debate about the means that were used in this and whether they were ethical or legal. And that’s a hard thing to say, because for a lot of people this is obviously a very emotional thing.

ABERNETHY: It’s a war.

LAWTON: And that’s what people are saying. That he was an enemy combatant in a field. But the fact that it happened, this war on terrorism has very unclear lines. There are some questions about that. And, in fact, the United Nations has asked for more details about exactly what happened and was it legal, was it ethical. So that’s a conversation that’s going to continue, I think.

ABERNETHY: And it also opened up the question of whether torture is worth it, Akbar?

AHMED: I would say, Bob, go back to the founding fathers. Read George Washington on torture when he refused to torture British soldiers who had been torturing American soldiers because, he said, America must always take the high moral ground, and that is critical for this new country that we are founding, the United States of America.

LAWTON: It’s unclear exactly how much information that led to all of this was obtained through these enhanced interrogations.

AHMED: Kim, that whole thesis collapses if we discover, it’s all conjecture and debate right now, if we discover that Pakistani intelligence and American intelligence were in fact working together. Then this thesis…

ABERNETHY: But we didn’t know that.

AHMED: We don’t know. So therefore you can’t build up the argument that the information came through torture.

ABERNETHY: But let me ask you quickly. What good can come of this in terms of better relations, not worse relations, but better relations between Pakistan and the United States? Do you see some kind of opening there?

AHMED: Not only these two countries. I would say the United States and the Muslim world. Because the war on terror, whether you like it or not, Bob, was driven by the symbolism of bin Laden, who towered over the horizon. He’s dead. It’s closure. Both the leaders of the Muslim world and the Untied States should really pause, reflect, take this moment and say it’s been a decade of death and destruction, so much pain and misery through out the world, let us now move towards a different direction. A world of peace and harmony and challenging the global problems that we face. There’s so many global problems facing us right now, and the United States can and must take the lead. This is the superpower, it has a moral vision, it must now lead us in that direction.

LAWTON: And I heard that a lot this week from the religious community. A lot of people whether they thought this was a good thing or they were celebrating or not, just the idea that indeed this is closure for one era and a lot of hope that we are being a new era.

ABERNETHY: Well let’s hope so. Kim Lawton, many thanks. Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, nice to see you again.

AHMED: Thank you, Bob. Thank you, Kim.

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FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: To the world outside, Cambodia may be best known for its killing fields. A quarter of this country’s population perished during the genocidal Khmer Rouge reign in the 1970s—some two million people.

TELEVISION ANNOUNCER (in translation): Hello and welcome to the 22nd program in our series “Duch on Trial.”

DE SAM LAZARO: Three decades later Cambodians have been able to tune in to the first Khmer Rouge trial. It may seem so little so late, but supporters say the international tribunal could help this country finally move on—help shed light on a period most know little about. Two-thirds of today’s Cambodians weren’t even born during the Khmer Rouge years.

KAENG GUEK EAV (former Khmer Rouge prison chief, alias “Duch”): We treated them as if they were already dead. I allowed four torture methods.

DE SAM LAZARO: Kaeng Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch, is the first to stand trial. He was commander of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison. Under his watch at least 14,000 men, women and children were photographed and documented in a macabre administrative process. They were then tortured and killed. Chum Mey was one of only seven prisoners to survive. He finally had his day in court recalling the torture he suffered, as the man who now has admitted responsibility and “heartfelt sorrow” looked on.

CHUM MEY: On the 10th day they electrocuted me. Every time I think of the Khmer Rouge I think of my wife and children.

DE SAM LAZARO: Chum survived because he was a mechanic with skills the Khmer Rouge needed for fixing sewing machines. Today, ironically, he earns a living giving guided tours of the prison, which is now a museum.

CHUM MEY: This woman’s husband was a Khmer Rouge soldier. He was killed, and they arrested her.

DE SAM LAZARO: On this day Chum told his story to Eric Stover, a California-based human rights activist who is studying the impact of international courts on societies in general and on individual victims.

ERIC STOVER: One of the things I think people will be looking at is to make sure that somebody who is responsible like Duch was for up to 12-, 13-, 14,000 deaths—that his sentence reflects the gravity of those crimes.

Van Nath

DE SAM LAZARO: But in a land unfamiliar with the ways of the tribunal, some people, especially survivors like Van Nath, think it’s too lenient. His life was spared so he could paint portraits of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader. He now sells paintings of his painful memories.

STOVER (speaking to Van Nath): So everyone was blindfolded when they were taken into Tuol Sleng.

DE SAM LAZARO: Van Nath says testifying at Duch’s trial made him angry, at the cross-examination and at seeing how well the defendant seemed to be treated.

VAN NATH (in translation): It was just like a shock when I go there to the court and see him. When I tell them the truth they doubt me, ask me a lot of questions. I don’t feel the trust when I tell them, and that makes me feel bad. It seems like the accused person has more rights that the civil parties do, and I’m really not satisfied with that.

DE SAM LAZARO: Many also are dissatisfied with the slow pace of justice. It was delayed for years by cold war politics and a reluctant Cambodian government that still has former members of the Khmer Rouge in it, though none was senior enough to stand trial. Negotiations led to a court which has two international and three Cambodian justices. It will try only a handful of prominent surviving Khmer Rouge leaders.

STOVER: The Cambodian government itself was not that in favor of this court. Even the negotiations to create it took a long period of time. We say that with evidence, over time evidence loses its value. You’re 30 years later, peoples memories have been—people have forgotten, people have died, so they—going after those most responsible is really all you’re going to get at this point

DE SAM LAZARO: Justice delayed may be justice denied for many victims, but Chum Sirath, who started a group called the Victims Association says that despite the limited number of defendants, the court sends an important message.

CHUM SIRATH: If you can have a bigger number, more number, it would be better. But if not, it’s better than nothing. Even after 45 years when you commit a crime there will be people who try to put you, to take you into account. This is one of the lessons that young generation can learn.

DE SAM LAZARO: Eric Stover is among those who have pushed the court itself to teach some of those lessons—a role courts don’t usually take on.

STOVER: I don’t think any court should be expected to be a social engineering institution, but what we can expect from them is that they should have vigorous programs to try to go out into the population and describe what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and what their limitations are.

DE SAM LAZARO: He says after a slow start the court did launch outreach programs. Twice a week buses have brought thousands of Cambodians on field trips. I asked this group of visitors how many had ever heard of the court before coming here.

A weekly television program during the trial brought the court a much larger audience.

TELEVISION PROGRAM (in translation): Now we’re going to see a selection of evidence given to the court about some of the crimes with which Duch has been charged. Viewers should be aware that some but not all of the stories told here were denied by Duch.

DE SAM LAZARO: Matthew Robinson produced the series with grants from Western donors.

MATTHEW ROBINSON: We have to devise a language and to base our understanding of what was going on in the court that would be intelligible to people whose basic knowledge of legal proceedings, indeed court proceedings, is minimal indeed.

TELEVISION PROGRAM (in translation): Thanks to everyone here for this discussion of Duch’s trial. We hope that this will encourage you at home to talk together about this topic so vital to Cambodia’s future well-being and progress.

DE SAM LAZARO: The program has also encouraged dialogue between survivors and a younger generation that has heard only whispers about the atrocities.

ROBINSON: Anybody from 25 down are not so much skeptical about it, but they lack knowledge. Parents seem to be reluctant, maybe even embarrassed, to talk about what happened to them.

DE SAM LAZARO: Youk Chhang wants to make sure young people get the knowledge they need even if their parents won’t talk about it.

YOUK CHHANG (Director, Documentation Center of Cambodia): This is the textbook for grade 9-12.

DE SAM LAZARO: He’s director of the Cambodia Documentation Center, which has published a textbook that is now being provided to one million Cambodian students.

YOUK CHHANG: Start from the creation of the Khmer Rouge movement all the way to the fall of the Khmer Rouge in ’79.

DE SAM LAZARO (speaking to Youk Chhang): Most kids growing up in this country have never learned about it?

YOUK CHHANG: They never learned about this, but they heard about this. Right now the first time in 30 years from grade 9-12, also the foundation year of every single university, allow to study Khmer Rouge history, and education is very important in terms of preventing genocide in the future. It’s all about the future.

DE SAM LAZARO: The verdict and sentencing are expected early in June. Survivors like Van Nath hope it brings justice.

VAN NATH (in translation): The verdict should be balancing what Duch has done, how many people he killed and how many he caused suffering. For me, I can’t forgive.

DE SAM LAZARO: And even though the Cambodian tribunals may be years late, Eric Stover says that’s not historically unusual.

STOVER: The interesting thing is President Chirac in France was 55 years later after the Holocaust that he actually apologized for the French police sending off Jews to be sent to the concentration camps. So one of the things we have to learn is when mass violence hits a country, a society, and tears it apart, it takes a long time for it to repair itself.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Cambodia tribunal’s next case—a joint trial of four elderly former Khmer Rouge officers—is expected to begin in 2012.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Phnom Penh.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: There were controversial developments this week in the debate over how the CIA interrogated terrorism suspects after 9/11. The Justice Department released details of a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report detailing chilling interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. The attorney general ordered an investigation of what happened and appointed a veteran prosecutor to find out.

Did CIA interrogators go beyond the guidance they had? If so, should they be punished, and should Bush administration officials who authorized the techniques also be punished? We explore the moral issues with Shaun Casey, professor of ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington. Shaun, welcome. Let me take you back to the atmosphere right after 9/11. There was tremendous pressure on the administration to prevent another attack, to do whatever was necessary, to find out whatever they could about whether there was going to be another attack. Didn’t that justify the interrogation techniques that were put into place?

SHAUN CASEY (Professor Ethics, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, DC): I would argue that it’s precisely at those moments of crisis that we need to rely on our moral and legal tradition and resist giving up things like respect for the dignity of the human person, and I think that moral tradition argues that no matter who the person is, as a result of that dignity, they shouldn’t be subjected to the kinds of torture we suspect went on.

ABERNETHY: And even if you’re pretty sure you might be able to save several thousand more innocent lives, that would not trump the dignity of the individual prisoner?

PROFESSOR CASEY: What’s interesting even at the time, and now we know for sure, such information did not exist. We did not extract through torture any information that directly led to preventing another similar sort of tragic event. So in essence no, I think we should resist, because we don’t possess that kind of advance knowledge.

ABERNETHY: Apparently the CIA tried hard to keep what was done within the guidelines that existed but that in some cases people did exceed those guidelines. Should they be punished?

PROFESSOR CASEY: Absolutely. I think if in fact we gave guidance to those interrogators, and they still violated those guidelines, there needs to be a moral accountability in order to reinforce this notion that we do respect the dignity of human beings.

ABERNETHY: And what about up the chain of command? If the investigations reveal that high officials, maybe up to the vice president and the president, authorized things that shouldn’t have been done should they be punished?

PROFESSOR CASEY: I think they should be held morally accountable, and that doesn’t necessarily mean criminalization or actual legal punishment, but I think in a democracy that espouses certain moral values we need to have accountability, not only of what has happened, but it also prepares us morally to face the future when we may find ourselves in a similar sort of situation when we’re facing a crisis and we face pressure to abandon legal and moral precedents that we’ve observed.

ABERNETHY: But if a new administration can have a criminal investigation of it’s predecessor and put people perhaps on trial, that creates an enormous partisan gridlock and nothing else would be done.

PROFESSOR CASEY: Well, that’s right, and I think that’s what the president is struggling with right now. We’re looking at simply about 10 cases where he is, actually where the attorney general has asked the prosecutor to investigate. At this point I’m not aware of any attempt for a comprehensive criminal prosecution. On the other hand, I would argue it might be better to think about a bipartisan commission that in a sense grants amnesty legally to all the participants so we can learn what really happened from the top of the system to the bottom, as a way not only of holding them accountable morally but also preparing us to face the future when we may find ourselves under similar circumstances, and I think that’s a way to in a sense take some of the air out of the partisanship which seems to be growing at this time.

ABERNETHY: You have read what you could of the CIA inspector general’s report in 2004. Quickly, can you sum it up? What did you find? What did they conclude?

PROFESSOR CASEY: They concluded that there weren’t a lot of rules in place, and they had to move very quickly to give guidelines, which they did. Secondly, they confessed that some of their own employees violated those guidelines. But perhaps most importantly of all they concluded they cannot say these enhanced interrogation techniques led to unique knowledge that could not have been gotten by other means, and so that really casts a light of doubt on the effectiveness of these techniques.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Shaun Casey of Wesley Theological Seminary.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: In the ongoing national debate about the morality of torture, the question is whether it is ever the lesser evil. We want to identify the underlying principles in the debate, beginning with part of President Obama’s reply at his news conference last Wednesday (April 29) when he was asked whether he thought the Bush administration had sanctioned torture.

President BARAK OBAMA (at White House news conference): What I’ve said, and I will repeat, is that waterboarding violates our ideals and our values. I do believe that it is torture. You start taking short cuts and over time that corrodes what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

ABERNETHY: But can torture sometimes be justified?

Jean Bethke Elshtain is a professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School and at Georgetown University. She joins us from Nashville. Shaun Casey is a professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington. Welcome to you both. Shaun — never?

Dr. SHAUN CASEY (Professor of Christian Ethics, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, DC): I think the bulk of the Christian moral tradition says that torture is never morally permissible. If you go to Christian Scripture, you go to the wide arc of Christian social teachings, you get a very consistent historical answer that it is never right to torture another human being.

ABERNETHY: What’s the underlying reason for this?

Dr. CASEY: Well, you look at basic Scripture, you look at Jesus in the Gospels about love your neighbor as yourself, do not repay evil for evil, love your enemy—so there’s this sense that each person is created by God in the image of God and has an inherent dignity, and torture would render that dignity undermined.

ABERNETHY: And Jean, what are the underlying principles for you?

Dr. JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN (Professor of Social and Political Ethics, University of Chicago Divinity School and Georgetown University): Well, the underlying principle for me is what I would call an “ethic of responsibility.” That’s an ethic that is especially important when we’re talking about statesmen and stateswomen who often have the lives of thousands in their hands, quite literally.

ABERNETHY: So they have a different rule, a different ethic, a different moral standard than somebody would if he’s just acting as an individual?

Dr. ELSHTAIN: Not entirely different. We don’t want a huge chasm to emerge. But I would say that there are extraordinary circumstances when harrowing judgments must be made by those we tax with the responsibility of keeping us safe, and at those times there may be a “lesser evil” kind of calculation to be made.

Dr. CASEY: We have about a 60-year tradition of international law and domestic law that regulates the behavior of those who, in fact, are called to be our political leaders and there is a consistent prohibition of the use of torture. In fact, the United States has been a leading catalyst in that international movement, so I agree with that. But I think we have some rules that are in place that prohibit torture.

ABERNETHY: But beyond what’s legal is what’s moral. I mean, they’re not always the same, are they?

Dr. CASEY: That’s true, and as the president said the other night in part of the clip that you played for us, that he believes that a leader in his position who faces those harrowing decisions ultimately is going to decide on both, of the angels and on responsibility if in fact we as a country refrain from using torture.

ABERNETHY: So, Jean, the president then has this primary moral responsibility, would you say, of protecting the people?

Dr. ELSHTAIN: Yes, that’s why we have states. That’s the reason that people made the deal back in the 17th century to organize the state — to prevent capricious power and the slaughter of human beings willy-nilly. That’s the reason we have states and have leaders to protect us.

ABERNETHY: And do you think people generally, American people, expect that a president will, somebody has written, have, you know, has to have dirty hands?

Dr. ELSHTAIN: Well, the problem of dirty hands is a perennial problem in politics. What it means is that one can’t remain absolutely morally pure, that you take actions. You don’t know what the full ramifications of those actions may be. Now I fully agree, by the way, that torture is something that should be ruled out as a general norm. My concern is with certain very specific and tragic circumstances, if there are severe forms of interrogation that may well fall short of torture as we usually understand it but are certainly severe — whether those are permissible.

ABERNETHY: And Shaun, the classic argument for permitting an exception, an extraordinary circumstance is the ticking bomb scenario, you know, that somebody in your custody has information about when a terrible, terrible thing might happen that would cost the lives of thousands of innocent people. Under such circumstances, perhaps others, don’t the people in authority have the responsibility to do something extraordinary if they think that can give them information quickly?

Dr. CASEY: Well, the fist thing we should observe is that there are no historical examples of that being lived out in reality. That’s a hypothetical contrary to fact, that it never obtained in the real world. What I worry about is the lack of rules to govern that exception. Many people argue that because they can create a hypothetical case like this there should be no rules against torture, and I think that is a grave moral error. The problem is we never know if that information can be elicited by other means. There’s no way to verify that, indeed, torture is the only option in those cases. So what happens if you torture that person and you turn out to be wrong, the information proves not to be true? But what do you say then to the person who’s tortured at your hands?

ABERNETHY: Jean, you want to comment on that?

Dr. ELSHTAIN: Yes. I would say that the resort to extreme techniques would be used only after all other possibilities had been exhausted. It wouldn’t be the first resort; it would be the last resort, and again we’d have to be clear about what we’re considering torture here, because some of the most severe forms I think must be ruled out. But there are other forms of enhanced interrogation that, I think, under those extreme circumstances and as an exception, may well, under the ticking time bomb scenario, be resorted to.

ABERNETHY: There is a recent poll by the Pew Research Center that found that 71 percent of Americans — American adults — said torture can be justified often or sometimes or rarely. Only 25 percent said never. Is that influential to you at all?

Dr. CASEY: I think that shows the influence of the Rupert Murdoch school of ethics — that we’ve been watching Jack Bauer, where torture is routinely shown to be effective on our television screens. I don’t think we decide what is moral and what is immoral based on the latest Pew poll about American opinion.

ABERNETHY: Jean, and what do you think of investigation and perhaps prosecution of those who authorized what was done?

Dr. ELSHTAIN: Well, it strikes me that, number one, it would immediately be politicized in a way that would be egregious and unacceptable, and number two, there’d be the question of how far back you go. Extraordinary rendition began under President Clinton, for example. So I think that that kind of going back and second-guessing those who in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were dealing with shock and horror and fear about another imminent attack and were asked by CIA operatives in the field whether certain things were permissible—it strikes me that the best thing for now is to go on and to make clearer what we expect from those who are interrogating even high-value targets and operatives of Al Qaeda, for example.

ABERNETHY: Shaun — investigation, prosecution?

Dr. CASEY: We need a thorough moral accounting of what’s gone on. We’ve had an air of moral permissiveness in the last administration under which tens of thousands of innocent people have been tortured — not simply the special Al Qaeda cases. We need to find out why that happened. We need to find out who was accountable in order to build a very tall wall against this kind of behavior. We need to empower the folks who do the interrogating with very bright lines about what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable. At this point that, in fact, is not clear.

ABERNETHY: But, quickly, would you come out saying that there could be sometimes an exception to the “never” position?

Dr. CASEY: No.

ABERNETHY: No. Never?

Dr. CASEY: Never.

ABERNETHY: Thanks to Shaun Casey and Jean Bethke Elshtain.

Dr. ELSHTAIN: Thank you.