Monthly Archives: April 2009

Torture: the skinny

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Aric Clark at Two Friars and a Fool has provided a pretty comprehensive summary of the torture news. Reposting, in its entirety, A Deluge of Torture:

It has been a positive deluge of news about torture lately. In case you’ve been living under a rock, I have collected some salient points for you to consider.

Firstly, the United States government has tortured people. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross it was systematic and widespread.

The use of torture was supposedly justified by legal opinions issued by the Justice Department in 2003.

But the legal opinions were both wrong, and too late. Because according to the Senate Armed Services Committee torture was being planned and implemented in early 2002.

Which means that the memos weren’t a carefully considered response to an early inquiry from eager intelligence officials, but an attempt to silence dissent from within the CIA when interrogators questioned the legality (and morality) of torture.

Torture had always been the plan. In fact, the Bush administration, starting from the very top, was preparing to use torture from just a few months after 9/11/2001, and were urging its implementation to attempt to find an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.

Of course the link never materialized and the early CIA uses of torture bled into the military and were widely practiced in Iraq and Afghanistan which means that Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Bush lied and the Abu Ghraib incident was not just a few bad apples.

Can there be any doubt that prosecutions must follow? Let’s hope the senate wises up and follows Patrick Leahy’s plan.

Also, there’s a useful timeline over at Daily Kos: What We Know So Far: A Torture Timeline, starting from August 2001.

Link for today

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  • Just Asking – a must-read 2007 musing by David Foster Wallace – a thought experiment on “what is the price of freedom”. It seems particularly prescient given the recent revelations of the torture policy. Quote:

What if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price?

Torture – Our nation’s shame

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Just wanted to pass along this primary documentation about the unquestionable torture that the former administration directly authorized.

Here’s the president’s full statement (via):

The Department of Justice will today release certain memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005 as part of an ongoing court case. These memos speak to techniques that were used in the interrogation of terrorism suspects during that period, and their release is required by the rule of law.

My judgment on the content of these memos is a matter of record. In one of my very first acts as President, I prohibited the use of these interrogation techniques by the United States because they undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer. Enlisting our values in the protection of our people makes us stronger and more secure. A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals, and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past. But that is not what compelled the release of these legal documents today.

While I believe strongly in transparency and accountability, I also believe that in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is classified for purposes of national security. I have already fought for that principle in court and will do so again in the future.

However, after consulting with the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, and others, I believe that exceptional circumstances surround these memos and require their release. First, the interrogation techniques described in these memos have already been widely reported. Second, the previous Administration publicly acknowledged portions of the program – and some of the practices – associated with these memos. Third, I have already ended the techniques described in the memos through an Executive Order.

Therefore, withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time. This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States. In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.

The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world. Their accomplishments are unsung and their names unknown, but because of their sacrifices, every single American is safer. We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs. Going forward, it is my strong belief that the United States has a solemn duty to vigorously maintain the classified nature of certain activities and information related to national security.

This is an extraordinarily important responsibility of the presidency, and it is one that I will carry out assertively irrespective of any political concern. Consequently, the exceptional circumstances surrounding these memos should not be viewed as an erosion of the strong legal basis for maintaining the classified nature of secret activities. I will always do whatever is necessary to protect the national security of the United States. This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history.

But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future. The United States is a nation of laws. My Administration will always act in accordance with those laws, and with an unshakeable commitment to our ideals. That is why we have released these memos, and that is why we have taken steps to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again.

Link for today

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Andrew Sullivan: Thinking. Out. Loud. Essay profile of blogger extraordinaire, gay, conservative, Catholic, Andrew Sullivan, by Johann Hari for Intelligent Life Magazine.

On blogging:

He pioneered blogging as a form where a writer can “think out loud”. He believes it suits an Oakeshottian temperament: like his favourite philosopher, it is radically provisional, always aware of its own limits in time and space, and always poised to have to correct itself in light of new evidence.

On his initial support of the Iraq War:

“I was terribly wrong. In the shock and trauma of 9/11, I forgot the principles of scepticism and doubt towards utopian schemes that I had learned.” He was jolted back to “sanity”, he says, by the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.  He had always seen torture as the negation of American values—and was stunned that this man he had cheered on was authorising it.

On conservatism:

At the core of Oakeshott’s thought is the belief that human beings are extremely limited in what we can know. As Sullivan puts it: “While not denying that the truth exists, the [Oakeshottian] conservative is content to say merely that his grasp on it is always provisional. He begins with the assumption that the human mind is fallible, that it can delude itself, make mistakes, or see only so far ahead.” In light of this extreme fallibility, human beings should err on the side of inaction. Claims to certainty—in religion, or political ideology—are invariably hubristic. We have to build our politics on “the radical acceptance of what we cannot know for sure”.

–

“Of course sometimes I feel like throwing in the towel and saying, ok, I’m not conservative any more, if Bush and Palin are what conservatism means. But I believe in [conservatism] enough to try to reclaim it from these people.” He sees Sarah Palin as the “reductio ad absurdum” of the American conservatism he opposes.

On why fundamentalism was formerly appealing to him:

“I remember feeling that without the structure of my faith, without my knowledge of its infallible truth, I might have been completely overwhelmed,” he says. Fundamentalism “was a way of sealing myself off from the world”. He sees American Christians turning to fundamentalism as a panicked response to change and doubt too. They have ended up pining for a theocracy that is contrary to his beloved US constitution and basic liberties for gay people.

He says his next battle is to “turn Christianity against the fundamentalists”. For him, “their certainty is the real blasphemy; their desire to control the lives of others the real heresy; their simple depiction of the Godhead proof positive they do not really understand him.”

Link for Today

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Newsweek – The End of Christian America

The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become.

Good discussion over on Metafilter, especially this comment by Pater Alethias:

The story of the temptations of Christ is a familiar one. After forty days and nights of fasting, the devil came to Jesus with three temptations. The first was to turn stones into bread, the second, to throw himself off the peak of the temple and have the angels catch him, the third, to have all the kingdoms of the world. We could summarize these as temptations be comfortable, to be impressive, and to be powerful. I am inclined to believe that those are also the three most common temptations of the church. Until recent years, the American church was offered each of those and gladly accepted them. Christianity was the default religion for the world’s greatest superpower—a position that should have made us tremble with concern that we were in danger of sliding off the path of self-denial that leads to the cross—but it seemed to occur to very few people that having such a position could be spiritually problematic. We built impressive structures, including dining facilities, recreation and entertainment centers. We turned praise and worship into a profit and star-making industry, and we gladly took our place in the halls of power. It seems that Satan offered us the same things he offered Christ, but we responded “Yes! Yes! Yes!” I doubt that the contemporary trends that are stripping away the power and prestige of the church are the work of the evil one—more likely it is the work of the Holy One, who is leading us step by step back to the paths of righteousness.

A Tale of Two Theologies

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I still have a fascination with Christian theology, and still enjoy discussing it with people. I’d like to start sharing some of my thoughts that come from those discussions here.

Keep in mind the standard disclaimer that I may not always agree with myself.

I grew up in the world of an underlying “story” about how the world works. The implicit (or sometimes explicit) story of Modern, Western, Protestant, Evangelical, Conservative (my specific version had a couple more adjectives, but I’ll leave them off for now for the sake of clarity) Christian theology is approximately this (apologies if I overstate or indulge in hyperbole):

Humankind is evil, wicked, and hopelessly immoral because of breaking God’s rules. Therefore, because God’s perfection demands such strict adherence to the rules that humans are unable to conform, God is unable to tolerate humans – in fact, he must punish such lapse in perfection with eternal torture. The only way an individual human can escape this wrathful torture is through the death and bloodshed of a perfectly innocent animal – a goat, cow or bird for a “temporary resolution”, but ultimately and finally Jesus, who being perfect was able to take on himself the wrathful, torturous punishment God demanded. If humans symbolically join themselves to Jesus in his death and resurrection, they will be seen by God as perfect and go to paradise after they die.

So in this version of the story the “problem” and offered solution is purely individualistic, otherworldly, metaphysical and existential. The issue I’ve come to have with this version of the story is that no one in C1 Judaism or Christianity would have thought along those lines.

In contrast, here’s the basic “story” according to first-century Judaism:

Our community is the good creation of a good God, and are nurtured by God’s loving care. However, because of our communal unfaithfulness to God, we have been exiled from the land, and cut off from the peace and prosperity promised to us. Though we have been returned to the land, we still consider ourselves to be “in exile” because we’re suffering under a tyrannical and oppressive government force. God will rescue us and fulfill [his] promises to us if we demonstrate that we are “true Israel” by {x}.

Before I discuss the values of {x} for the various factions within Judaism (and eventually get to where Jesus fits into the equation), I just want to point out the main points of difference between this worldview and that of classical conservative evangelicalism. 1) both the “problem” perceived and the “solution” expected were temporal. It wasn’t existential crisis or a metaphysical state of “sinfulness” that threatened postmortem blessings or punishments; it was a physical crisis that threatened the very existence of the community. Which brings me to 2) the entire schema presupposes community. It’s not the individual that is in trouble and needs divine rescue, it is Israel herself. Salvation would be a benefit not to a single individual choosing (or being chosen by) it, but rather a benefit to the entire people of God, and through that people, benefit the entire cosmos.

On to the factions. Generally speaking, as I said above, Jews in the second temple period believed that God would act to rescue and restore Israel. The issue then became, “Who is True Israel?”, i.e., what do we do to demonstrate in the present that we are part of the community that God will rescue in the near future? Some of the answers came in these ways:

  • Zealots, who believed that God wanted them to physically rise up against the oppressive tyrant of Roman occupation,
  • Herodians/Sadduccees, who believed that God had sided with Rome, or that amassing political power within the Roman system was the way forward,
  • Essenes, who advocated complete withdrawal from society,
  • Pharisees, who scapegoated “the sinners” in society, believing that God would act to rescue Israel from the oppressors if they increased the morality of society by strict adherence to the Mosaic Law.

And so we arrive at Jesus. He steps in to this context, and I suggest that if we can’t make sense of Jesus within this context, we’re probably misunderstanding or limiting the meaning of his words and actions. Here’s what I see when I look at Jesus: he did not play into any of the competing narratives of the day, but subverted them all. He rejected violence (“Turn the other cheek”), assimilation (“seek first the kingdom of God and his justice”), withdrawal (“give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”), and scapegoating (“let he who is without sin cast the first stone”), in favor of a completely new way of being “true Israel” – through generosity, selflessness, embrace of “the other” (indeed even “the sinner”!) and care for the poor.

Something that helped me understand this more fully was when I learned of a passage in Josephus’ autobiography. Josephus, writing in the first century (thus in approximately the same cultural and linguistic genre as the New Testament) believed that Israel’s god was now fighting on the side of the Romans, and that the Jews should assimilate into Rome. He recounts an encounter with a brigand (someone fighting against the Roman government – maybe a better word might be “insurgent” or “terrorist”), where Josephus urged him to “Repent and believe in me“.

He was, of course, not telling the brigand about Original Sin and the natural condition of the human heart. Josephus was not claiming to be God, or telling the man how to go to heaven after he died, or how to avoid eternal torture at the hands of a wrathful god.

Rather, he was warning the brigand that the path he was on, that of opposition to Rome, was futile and dangerous. He was urging the brigand to rethink/repent/change his mind from the direction he was going, and instead follow Josephus’ way.

So when we see Jesus say those same words, “Repent and believe in me“, we may well think that he meant more than Josephus did, but he surely didn’t mean less. In short, what Jesus advocated “repentance” from was the competing narratives of how the people of God was to be defined and determined. What he advocated repentance to was joining the family of God, the covenant community, in a whole new way. And, there were very real consequences for the community if they failed to heed his warnings – “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish”, “not one stone will be left on top of another”, etc. – as with the example of Josephus, he was warning that the path Israel was currently taking was headed toward destruction. Only through repentance and following the way of Jesus could Israel avoid the coming calamity of war with Rome.

Mark your calendars

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Two Seattle events I’m extremely excited about:

The Challenge for Africa seeks to dispel many of the stereotypes and assumptions laid out by the western media and, at the same time, casts a strong challenge to African people themselves to redirect their individual and collective destinies.

Tree Mother of Africa

I haven’t voluntarily read a review of one of my books since 1977, though I’ve had a couple stuck in my face. But in a New York Times review of the one before last, the writer said something like, “Robbins needs to make up his mind between whether he wants to be funny or serious.” And I remember thinking, “I’ll make my mind up when God makes up his.” (sw)

Conversation about Tom: "That's a weird picture." "That's a weird dude."(Image via)