Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist Committee of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), based in Washington, DC. Tooley says he has reviewed the declaration issued by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and has noted the document does not say anything about torture in places where it really occurs. That causes him to question the group's motive.

"If this group were genuinely interested in torture, of course they would be addressing those regimes that actively and deliberately do practice torture rather than focusing exclusively on the United States," he comments. He says he detects a "double standard" in the campaign against torture. "[It] is primarily a creation of the religious left and whose interest is not so much in torture, per se, but about opposing U.S. foreign policy."

Of course, he avoids engaging with the campaign's mission statement, which says:

As United States-based organizations, we feel particular responsibility for the abusive practices being utilized by the United States government today. The United States has historically been a leader in outlawing these practices. The ever-increasing evidence, however, makes it all too clear that current grim abuses are not isolated incidents, but rather constitute a widespread pattern.

Tooley apparently believes that feeling such "particular responsibility" is illegitimate, and that he can therefore smear the statement's authors as being uninterested in opposing torture in places elsewhere. It's a strategy he uses with tedious regularity - a few months ago he was lecturing Palestinian Christians for complaining about the Israeli occupation rather than attending to Islamism.

Tooley is particularly annoyed that Ted Haggard and Rick Warren have endorsed the campaign, and he has a warning for them:

"A growing number of evangelicals are ultimately repeating the same mistakes that mainline Protestant church leaders first started making 50, 60, 70 years ago," he states. As a result, says Tooley, those denominations suffered deep theological divisions and great declines in membership.