Psyche, Science, and Society

London Times with the Mahdi Army in in Sadr City

US reporters are regularly embedded with US troops, giving them a distorted view of the conflict. A reporter for the London Times spent four days in Sadr City with the Mahdi Army, but also talking to civilians, including several with relatives killed by US bombs and missiles. It is an important read to understand why the US and Iraqi “government” won’t succeed in their current offensive unless they unleash death on a truly massive scale.

I found Lina Mohsen, 24, walking in a daze at the hospital, her face covered in brown dust. One minute she had been watching her 18-month-old toddler Ali play in the courtyard of their home, she said; the next, a rocket had struck.

“I began screaming for him, shouting his name, trying to find him, but I couldn’t see him for dust and smoke,” she said. Eventually, she saw that he was dead.

“I blame Maliki and his government and all those who are sitting in power and letting this happen,” she said. Then she burst into tears and walked away.

Read it.

Add comment May 4th, 2008

Sam Provance: Standard Operating Procedure continues the Abu Ghraib cover-up

Sam Provance accuses the film Standard Operating Procedure of obscuring the truth about the torture at Abu Ghraib. He asserts that the film continues the cover-up blaming the abuses on the MPs, rather than the civilian contractors and chain of command. He further claims that the film relies about the testimony of one of the CACI torturers, who, as part of the cover-up, focus the blame upon the MPs.

I have not seen the film and can’t judge Provance’s claims. But I feel that Provance, by speaking out when others remained silent, has earned the right to have his claims taken seriously.

“Sam Provance, a former Army sergeant specializing in intelligence analysis, refused to remain silent about the torture of Abu Ghraib, where he served for five months at the height of the abuses. He was punished for refusing to take part in the cover-up, and pushed out of the Army.”

Here is Provance’s article:

Abu Ghraib Film Obscures Truth

By Sam Provance
April 30, 2008

Editor’s Note: Former Army Sgt. Sam Provance was the only uniformed military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib who broke the code of silence surrounding the infamous prisoner abuses. He spoke out during the Army’s internal investigation, at a congressional hearing and in press interviews.

For his brave integrity, Provance was punished and pushed out of the U.S. military, clearing the way for the Pentagon to pin the blame for the sadistic treatment of Iraqi detainees on a handful of poorly trained MPs. Now, history is repeating itself in Errol Morris’s supposedly hard-hitting documentary on the scandal:

Representatives for film director Errol Morris told me during pre-production that “Standard Operating Procedure” would be the very best documentary on the abuses of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib - the one that would tell the whole truth.

I had pinned great hope on that. It didn’t turn out that way.

My perspective on the Abu Ghraib scandal came from spending from September 2003 to February 2004 at the Iraq prison as a sergeant in Army Intelligence. Working the 8 p.m.-to- 8 a.m. night shift, it was impossible not to notice who was directing the operation. And I shared all this with Morris.

But now I’ve seen the film and I’m disappointed. Morris does little to get to the bottom of what happened. He muddies already opaque waters regarding who was actually responsible for the abuse of prisoners.

The film focuses on the awful photos, the people in them and those who took them. This perspective plays right into the hands of the cover-up artists. It perpetuates the myth that the abuses are rightfully laid at the feet of those impressionable, but very human, young soldiers.

Morris should have been looking up the chain of command; at the civilian and military officials actually responsible for ordering these Military Police Reservists to rough up prisoners.

A no-holds-barred documentary? Give me a break.

Finally, the Whole Truth!

I was first put into contact with the makers of “SOP” while I was still in the Army. From the beginning, I was told this was going to be a huge project with the production support of Sony Pictures Entertainment; and that Morris, who had won an Oscar with his documentary, “The Fog of War,” would be at the helm.

This was to be the breakthrough investigation into what really happened at Abu Ghraib, who was responsible for the abuse and why it was ordered - the project that really got people’s attention, going where previous investigators and media had feared to tread.

Call me gullible but, believing this was to be a groundbreaking work, I fully cooperated with Morris. I assisted him in his quest for documents, videos, photos, notes and helped him contact fellow soldiers who were at Abu Ghraib and knew what happened.

When I was discharged from the Army in October 2006, I went to Boston for a two-day interview.

Morris asked me to sign several contracts before and after the interviews, and I did as he asked without paying much attention to them. I do remember however, that in one contract Morris agreed to pay me one dollar.

In any event, I never got the dollar, but was reminded of this last week when I read in the New York Times that others got paychecks for their participation.

I have never asked for or taken money for media interviews. To me, that undermines the process and trivializes the importance of the issues of torture and prisoner mistreatment and their meaning for the moral atmosphere in our country as a whole.

When the film was finished, Morris told me he had intended to use some of the footage from my two days of interviews and the materials I provided, but decided in the end to “narrowly focus” on the Military Police. This, of course, is what so many others have done and is in the worst tradition of a Nixon-style “modified, limited hangout.”

Chain of Command?

Here’s the oddest thing: Even though Morris’s lens is trained on the Military Police, he does find room for a civilian interrogator, Tim Dugan, who worked at Abu Ghraib for CACI, a contractor factory for civilian interrogators.

I witnessed for myself how civilian personnel, like Dugan, corrupted the military. Indeed, they were the genesis of the break from conventional interrogation techniques into what Vice President Dick Cheney hinted at when he spoke of the “dark side” of intelligence.

It was they who ordered the Military Police and some of my own unit’s Military Intelligence soldiers to “soften” the detainees for interrogation, and encouraged the behavior depicted in the photographs. I know; I was there. And, of course, I told Errol Morris.

So I was surprised, to say the least, to see Morris giving Dugan a place to contend that, essentially, the abuses were all the military’s fault.

Odd indeed. Even Maj. Gen. George Fay, whose investigation of Abu Ghraib left much to be desired, reported the pernicious effect civilian interrogators had on the impressionable and inexperienced soldiers.

Fay reported, for example that Daniel Johnson, one of Dugan’s CACI interrogator colleagues, whom I knew at Abu Ghraib, was using Spc. Charles Graner as “muscle” for his interrogations.

And yet, Morris describes Dugan as “remarkable.” Remarkable, indeed, Errol.

Did no one tell you that CACI, Dugan and several of his fellow interrogators were sued by their victims in Abu Ghraib, seeking to hold them accountable for their behavior?

In the civil case brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Abu Ghraib prisoners, the lawsuit implicates Dugan in the abuse.

“CACI interrogator Timothy Dugan also tortured plaintiffs and other prisoners,” the lawsuit alleges. “For example, he physically dragged handcuffed plaintiffs and other prisoners along the ground to inflict pain on them. He struck and beat plaintiffs and other prisoners. He bragged to a non-conspirator about scaring a prisoner with threats to such a degree that the prisoner vomited.

“When a young non-conspirator directed him to cease the torture and comply [with] Army Field Manual 34-52, Dugan scoffed at his youth and refused to follow the direction.”

The lawsuit further alleges that Dugan took part in a CACI cover-up of when a detainee died by going through “the charade of interrogating a prisoner who was already dead as part of the conspiracy’s efforts to conceal a murder.” Dugan is accused, too, of threatening a fellow CACI employee who talked to investigators.

CACI has denounced the lawsuit as baseless, and the individual defendants were dismissed out on a technicality. However, on Nov. 6, 2007, U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson in Washington denied CACI’s motion for summary judgment and ordered a jury trial against CACI.

A criminal investigation also is pending in the Eastern District of Virginia concerning some of the CACI employees.

In “SOP,” Dugan presents himself as a whistleblower who tried to stop the abuses. He claims that he reported to his “section sergeant” that two Army female interrogators were stripping detainees naked as an interrogation technique, and how shocked he was to see this.

Dugan claims he got the brush-off; was told not to get involved. So who was this “section sergeant?” And is he/she above the law?

Why did Dugan not offer himself as a witness in any of the various investigations? Where has he been if he felt then the way he now says he did? Again, why sport the good-guy badge now?

I came away with the impression that Morris was unprepared for the interview and was being taken for a ride.

CACI’s Defense

For obvious reasons, CACI has gone to extraordinary lengths to separate itself from the horrors of Abu Ghraib, arguing that the military alone was at fault.

CACI recently announced the release of a book, Our Good Name: A Company’s Fight To Defend Its Honor And Get The Truth About Abu Ghraib.

CACI contends strongly that its interrogators adhered to the military chain of command, something it has been feverishly trying to establish in the lawsuits against it.

And so, the behavior captured in the photos? That was the military’s responsibility, not CACI’s.

That is not what I observed from my ringside seat.

I told Morris that the reality was that the civilian contractors paid little heed to the military chain of command, and that they were the ones actually running the show. That didn’t make it into the final version of “SOP.”

Even though it is now an established fact that between 70 to 90 percent of detainees at Abu Ghraib were completely innocent, something I learned directly on site, Dugan implies that the harsh interrogation practices applied there were legitimate - except of course for the failings of the military.

This myth-making is intended to hold CACI harmless and help it maintain its very lucrative government contracts. CACI International had $1.6 billion in revenues in 2005. Folks have always told me it all has to do with money; I suppose they’re right.

But Congress should be asking some simple questions. It should start by asking why civilian contractors are being employed in connection with the interrogation of persons under detention in wartime, a function which previously has been entirely in the hands of the uniformed military?

This could yield some interesting answers. Indeed, evasion of military rules and discipline as well as avoidance of congressional oversight might be at the heart of the answers.

Morris takes pride in calling “SOP” a horror movie and - with the mood music and the needless slow-motion reenactments - he makes sure of that.

However, “SOP” does little more than humanize some of the “bad apples” (a good thing, I suppose), while gratuitously absolving the civilian interrogators actually responsible for fouling those apples.

But, wait. Abu Ghraib is not primarily about Military Police - or civilian interrogators. It is about the many thousands of wrongfully detained Iraqis - many of them abused, tortured and even killed. It is also about their families. What about their story?

Morris has called “SOP” just “the tip of the iceberg,” citing the unused volumes of material he’s collected since production began. But Morris owed his viewers a glimpse of the whole iceberg, not just the small misleading piece that bobbed above the surface.

He has announced his next film project: a comedy. Go figure.

Sam Provance, a former Army sergeant specializing in intelligence analysis, refused to remain silent about the torture of Abu Ghraib, where he served for five months at the height of the abuses. He was punished for refusing to take part in the cover-up, and pushed out of the Army. For his sworn testimony to Congress, click here.

Add comment May 4th, 2008

Kristof: A Prison of Shame, and It’s Ours

Nicholas Kristof devotes his Sunday New York Times column to the horror and the shame that is Guantanamo.

He makes a critical point in his conclusion:

When I started writing about Guantánamo several years ago, I thought the inmates might be lying and the Pentagon telling the truth. No doubt some inmates lie, and some surely are terrorists. But over time — and it’s painful to write this — I’ve found the inmates to be more credible than American officials.

As one who was once partially taken in by military psychologists brought to American Psychological Association conference to tell us that everything was fine and dandy at GTMO, I know what Kristof means. We were told that all the abuses were long past, including the isolation. We were painted a lecture of inmates playing games in the rec hall all day. These psychologists seemed so sincere that we doubted ourselves. Further, we wanted to bend over backwards to entertain the possibility that we might be wrong.

One colleague, asked what he thought after the conversation, said “I think we’ve made fools of ourselves these last few years.” He went on to think that we’d been taken in by delusional detainees and their biased attorneys.

Since then, every accusation that, based on the word of these military psychologists, we had doubted, has been confirmed by official sources. Inmates’ bizarre almost psychotic-sounding accounts, of having toilet paper removed for minor infractions were validated when Wikileaks posted the leaked 2003 and 2004 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures, which revealed an obsession with toilet paper as a “comfort item” and its removal on the part of the torture bureaucrats. That same document revealed that all new prisoners were subjected to a minimum of 4 weeks of isolation

to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process

And then, last week the New York Times that three-quarters of Guantanamo prisoners are held in 8′ by 12′ cells in isolation for 22 hours a day, released only for exercise, which, as detainees have long claimed, may be scheduled in the middle of the night:

According to military statistics, three-quarters of the detainees have been held recently in two “camps” that look much like American prisons. Camp 5 and Camp 6, heavily guarded concrete buildings, hold men who have yet to face trial. Behind a heavy door, each cell has a handful of sanctioned items including a cup and a Koran.

Officials concede that the daily two hours of recreation in a chain-link pen is sometimes offered in the dark. From inside their cells, detainees cannot see the outdoors. From the exercise pens they sometimes can see only a sliver of sky.

So much for the idyllic image that was described to us by those earnest military psychologists. In later reflecting upon our discussion withe them, I decided that it was significant that there were two of them and that they never spoke out of earshot of each other. This arrangement guaranteed that they wouldn’t stray from the official line. I don’t feel bad about being skeptical and considering the claims of these military psychologists. I believe firmly that one must question all factual claims,, especially those consistent with one’s biases and prior beliefs.  But in this instance I learned, yet again, that official accounts are not worth the breathe they’re uttered with.

Here is the Kristof column:

A Prison of Shame, and It’s Ours

My Times colleague Barry Bearak was imprisoned by the brutal regime in Zimbabwe last month. Barry was not beaten, but he was infected with scabies while in a bug-infested jail. He was finally brought before a court after four nights in jail and then released.

Alas, we don’t treat our own inmates in Guantánamo with even that much respect for law. On Thursday, America released Sami al-Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera who had been held without charges for more than six years. Mr. Hajj has credibly alleged that he was beaten, and that he was punished for a hunger strike by having feeding tubes forcibly inserted in his nose and throat without lubricant, so as to rub tissue raw.

“Conditions in Guantánamo are very, very bad,” Mr. Hajj said in a televised interview from his hospital bed in Sudan, adding, “In Guantánamo, you have animals that are called iguanas … that are treated with more humanity.”

Al Jazeera’s director general, Wadah Khanfar, said by telephone from the hospital that Mr. Hajj was so frail when he arrived that he had to be carried off the plane and into an ambulance. Guantánamo inmates are not allowed to see their families, so that evening Mr. Hajj met his 7-year-old son, whom he had last seen as a baby.

Reliable information is still scarce about Guantánamo, but increasingly we’re gaining glimpses of life there — and they are painful to read.

Murat Kurnaz, a German citizen of Turkish descent, has just published a memoir of his nearly five years in Guantánamo. He describes prolonged torture that included interruptions by a doctor to ensure that he was well enough for the torture to continue.

Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, an American woman of Afghan descent who worked as an interpreter, has written a book to be published next month, “My Guantánamo Diary,” that is wrenching to read. She describes a pediatrician who returned to Afghanistan in 2003 to help rebuild his country — and was then arrested by Americans, beaten, doused with icy water and paraded around naked. Finally, after three years, officials apparently decided he was innocent and sent him home.

A third powerful new book about Guantánamo, by an American lawyer named Steven Wax, is summed up by its title: “Kafka Comes to America.”

The new material suggests two essential truths about Guantánamo:

First, most of the inmates were probably innocent all along, but Pakistanis or Afghans turned them over to America in exchange for large cash rewards. The moment we offered $25,000 rewards for Al Qaeda supporters, any Arab in the region risked being kidnapped and turned over as a terrorism suspect.

Second, torture was routine, especially early on. That’s why more than 100 prisoners have died in American custody in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo.

One of the men still in Guantánamo is Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi. He is a Libyan who had been running a bakery in Afghanistan with his Afghan wife. Bounty hunters turned him over to the United States as a terrorism suspect, and he has been in custody for more than six years.

Mr. Ghizzawi was taken before a “combatant status review tribunal,” which ruled unanimously in November 2004 that he was not an “enemy combatant.” One member of the tribunal later scoffed that the supposed evidence against him was “garbage.” But a later tribunal reversed the first one’s finding, and Mr. Ghizzawi is being held indefinitely, though he is unlikely to face trial.

Candace Gorman, a lawyer for Mr. Ghizzawi, says that his health has sharply deteriorated since she first saw him. He is in constant pain from severe liver disease resulting from hepatitis B that first manifested itself in Guantánamo, Ms. Gorman said, adding that he also contracted tuberculosis there.

Worse, a doctor at Guantánamo twice told Mr. Ghizzawi in December that he has H.I.V., she said. Ms. Gorman believes that officials were just trying to torment him.

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, denied that any doctor ever told Mr. Ghizzawi that he had H.I.V., or that Mr. Ghizzawi contracted tuberculosis or first suffered from hepatitis while in Guantánamo.

Granted, it can be hard to figure out what version to believe. When I started writing about Guantánamo several years ago, I thought the inmates might be lying and the Pentagon telling the truth. No doubt some inmates lie, and some surely are terrorists. But over time — and it’s painful to write this — I’ve found the inmates to be more credible than American officials.

Both Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates have pushed to shut down Guantánamo because it undermines America’s standing and influence. They have been overruled by Dick Cheney and other hard-liners. In reality, it would take an exceptional enemy to damage America’s image and interests as much as President Bush and Mr. Cheney already have with Guantánamo.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.

Add comment May 4th, 2008

Review of School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas

The journal Latin American Politics and Society had an interesting review  by J Patrice McSherry of a fairly recent book by Lesley Gill on the infamous School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas. A few excerpts:

A notable contribution of Gill’s study is its theoretical framework, which places the school squarely in an analysis of U.S. hegemony and what Gill calls the U.S. imperial project. Gill argues that through the SOA and other training schools, institutions, and programs, Washington transformed the Latin American security forces into “extensions of its own power in Latin America and internationalized state-sponsored violence in the Americas” (p. 7). The SOA shaped Latin American militaries into proxy forces under U.S. control, Gill posits, thereby extending U.S. control of political developments throughout the region.

Gill thus argues that the SOA is one of the instruments through which Washington imposes its political will and pursues its economic interests in other countries. Seeking political, military, and cultural domination, she writes, the U.S. government also has established a constellation of military bases worldwide, an enormous defense budget, a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons, and a system of ongoing alliances with repressive regimes. U.S. imperialism, Gill contends, means more than military interventions and intrusive economic policies: it is a “way of life,” a means of exercising power through indigenous military, paramilitary, and security forces as they “enforce the systems of order required by dominant groups to manage different kinds of people” (p. 4).

And:

U.S. officers at the SOA depict Latin American military brutality as intrinsic to the Latin American nature, while any U.S. role in the region’s dirty wars and human rights violations is never mentioned. Thus, Gill argues, the history of U.S. involvement in Latin American repression is “disappeared.” Army commander Colonel Glen Weidner, for example, refers in a speech to “a strain of incomprehensible violence in Guatemalan rural society” (p. 55). (Weidner, the SOA commander, seems to dedicate most of his time to public relations and managing the school’s image.) Gill observes that the “millions of dollars of military aid and decades of counterinsurgency training in U.S. schools [are] believed to play no part in the creation of murderous security forces” (p. 32); yet one of her interviewees openly discusses lessons learned at the SOA in the torture and killing of prisoners (p. 99). [Emphasis added]

Some of the material may be particularly important in light of the radical political/social movements that have recently won electoral victories in a number of Latin American countries. One of the major dangers they face is the threat of coups from a military that has greater loyalty to Washington than to their own elected governments:

Another strength of the book is Gill’s analysis of the school’s efforts to break down nationalist barriers and weld the Latin American militaries into a transnational anticommunist (and currently, counterterrorist) force under the leadership of the United States. The SOA and other such U.S. schools have been crucial settings for the creation of U.S.-dominated military networks, along with secret programs, such as Operation Condor, the Cold War-era intelligence operations network that “disappeared” and executed hundreds of leftist activists-a conclusion confirmed in this reviewer’s own research.

Gill nicely captures important nuances. Some Latin American officers, she notes, accepted without comment views expressed by U.S. officers that were unintentionally arrogant or that betrayed double standards. In one such case, one Latin American officer told her cryptically, several months later, that some of the things he had heard had made him “want to pull out his hair” (p. 130). The Latin Americans generally knew their place, however, as junior partners to their wealthy and powerful sponsors.

This book looks like a important resource to help in understanding both US torture policy and the history and potential future of US intervention in Latin America, which has frequently overthrown popular regimes to keep local oligarchies and transnational elites in power.

Add comment May 4th, 2008

The Empire Strikes Barack

Add comment May 4th, 2008

Miles: Torture and the Courage to Be Inconvenienced

Bioethicist Steven Miles — author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror — sends us this extremely moving talk he gave to St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church. Miles deals here with the moral challenges posed by torture and the ways in which torture affects all of us by destroying community.

*************

Torture and the Courage to Be Inconvenienced

Steven Miles MD

shmjm@hotmail.com

[I was invited to give this talk at adult education at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church on May 4, 2008 and lead a discussion of this topic on the evening of May 6. The Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul informed me that Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life information@mccl.org encouraged people to contact the diocese to not allow me to speak because I am pro-choice on abortion and pro-euthanasia. Although I am pro-choice on abortion, I have written and spoke against physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. This talk on torture addresses neither. My wife and I have adopted and raised a disabled foster child. The Archdiocese unications@archspm.org instructed St. Joan's that I could not appear at the adult education in the church. St. Joan arranged for a college venue.

The author hereby grants permission to redistribute, download, copy and use this material in any electronic or printed form. No further permissions need be requested.]

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I am deeply honored to be able to speak with you today about the issue of torture.

Torture is not an exotic or esoteric topic. Although we rarely speak of it, it has directly wounded most of us. It is government policy in more than half of the world’s 200 nations. Our relatives fled the torture in East Europe, Latin America, or East Asia. Some of us were dispossessed by torture which enforced United States racial policies. Some of us have lost colleagues to torture in mission. Some of us sent or lost relatives who fought against torturing regimes. Forty thousand families in Minnesota have a torture survivor; we all bear the costs of their diminished parenting abilities, earning power, and sadness.

My family has been touched by torture too. My wife’s ancestors disappeared in the Holocaust of Belarus. Our adoptive son survived the Cambodia’s killing fields and as a nurse put himself in service of the refugees of Ruanda. I have worked with survivors of torture on three continents and assist several groups, including Minnesota’s Center for Victims of Torture, which strives to treat or prevent torture.

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The word “torture” comes from the word for “twist” capturing the design of devices like the rack or the wheel that contort the body. We should however not allow our empathic recoil from the image of a person’s agony to cause us to miss the point that torture is aimed to destroy a community. The destruction of a person is the path-the destruction of a community is the goal. The Passion story has all the elements of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

The ostentatious and unnecessary use of an inside informer,

The mocking purple robe and the public label, “The King of the Jews,”

The scourging and the nails.

Jesus was not some Nazarene carpenter who was picked at random. He was selected and tortured in a manner that was designed to destroy the community carrying His message. In today’s scripture, Jesus reflected on that communitarian nature of his impending arrest and execution,

I glorified You on earth
by accomplishing the work that You gave me to do.
I pray for them. And I have been glorified in them.
And now I will no longer be in the world,
but they are in the world, while I am coming to You.
John 17:1-11a

Torture is generally used to attack and suppress civil society. This is why it is aimed at the monks in Burma, the political leaders of Zimbabwe, the playwrights of Czechoslovakia, the journalists of Russia, the students of Chile, or the union leaders of Uruguay.

In this use, torture is a strategy to maintain

• The corrupt against the civic minded,
• The empowered over the disenfranchised, and
• The best fed in lands where most are poor and hungry.

Torture is government by intimidation, horror, fear and division. It is antithetical to those who would create societies to flourish by lovingkindness, justice, and inclusion.

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In the still space of our confession, we must speak of our active and acquiescent, personal and collective, complicity with the culture of torture.

• We must acknowledge that torture is a problem for all of us. It has found fertile ground in the lands of Islam, on the Buddhist ground of Cambodia’s killing fields, in the fatherland of the Reformation, in the topsoil of communist nations, in the democratic motherlands of Turkey and the United States and in the loam of the Catholic lands of Latin America.

• We must confess that every people seem capable of torture, even the United States - Convener of the Trials at Nuremburg, co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and instigator of the Geneva Conventions for the protection against “torture, or cruel or inhuman or degrading treatment.”

• We should note that the National Catholic Reporter of March 24, 2006 reports that Catholics–more than the public at large, more than Protestants, and more than Evangelicals, support interrogational torture. Secular Americans were most likely to reject interrogational torture.

Then, we must turn from confessing complicity with the culture of torture to the abolition of torture and to reconciliation in societies of justice and lovingkindness.

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After the crucifixion, Jesus’ community-the real target of His torture–gathered at Olivet.

All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer, Acts 1:12-14

They reaffirmed their faith in the message, the movement, and the kind of civil society that had been entrusted to them.

Whoever is made to suffer as a Christian should not be ashamed,
but should glorify God because of the name. 1 Pt 4:13-16

Reconciliation means accepting our responsibility for building a culture against torture.

We are responsible for knowing the facts. Research by the CIA, the Army, and the National Defense Intelligence University all show that interrogational torture is ineffective. It does not defuse ticking time bombs. The television show “24″ lies. Torture:

• Produces bad information that leads to bad policy and needless dangerous battlefield sorties.
• Radicalizes survivors
• Makes it impossible to recruit human intelligence.
• Alienates populations.
• Causes an enemy to fight to the death rather than to surrender.
• Undercuts the possibility of appealing for the humane treatment of our own soldiers who are taken POW.

We are responsible for resisting the culture of torture.

• Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela were freed by our solidarity with their cause.
• Our amens enabled Martin Luther King to beat back the culture of Jim Crow.
• Our complacency allowed Major Roberto D’Aubuisson to assassinate Archbishop Romero and his forces to oversee the defiling and murder of the Maryknoll sisters.
• Our complacency allowed the sadistic guards at Abu Ghraib to go about their business; but our unwillingness to put their photographs aside saved countless lives.

Oona Hathaway, a law professor at Yale University studied 160 nations some of which torture and others of which do not. She found that the witness of the Mothers of the Plaza in Argentina, the honesty of the Chilean Medical Association, or the dignified protests of the lawyers of Pakistan summoned nations towards curbing the scourge of torture.

In such facts and examples, we can discern the path of reconciliation.

We must summon the courage to be inconvenienced by the culture of torture.

We must accept responsibility for rejecting the culture of torture in our personal and collective actions, including our acts of citizenship.

We must lift our voices and hands in solidarity with civil communities of justice and lovingkindness in order to move from confession to the abolition of torture.

2 comments May 4th, 2008

New photos show human toll at Hiroshima

There are 10 new photographs, taken by an unknown Japanese  photographer, of the human devastation in Hiroshima. Viewing these, one cannot think of that war as “the good war.” Regardless of whether one views war as necessary, these pictures should remind us that no war is good.

Add comment May 4th, 2008