Peace Messenger

Torture: White House-Planned and Approved

An appeal from the National Religious Campaign Against Torture:

We now have strong evidence that, as many of us have suspected, the abuses perpetrated on detainees over the past 7 years were not simply the acts of "rogue" agents or low ranking soldiers, but were instead planned and approved of by top Administration officials - including the President himself, as well as Vice-President Dick Cheney.  ABC News and the Associated Press recently reported that the President's top national security advisors met in the White House, on numerous occasions and with the President's approval, to authorize interrogators to torture high-value detainees (by waterboarding them and subjecting them to sleep deprivation, among other abuses).  Unfortunately, these dramatic revelations have been largely ignored by the media and the public.

Please help inform the public about the fact that top Administration officials were directly involved in planning the torture of high-value detainees by writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper expressing your deep concern about learning that your leaders participated in the torture planning meetings and your disappointment that the media and the public have not responded to the news about the meetings with the appropriate vigor and outrage.

--Linda Gustitus, NRCAT Board President, and Rich Killmer, NRCAT Executive Director

Click here for NRCAT's sample letter and letter-writing guidelines.

The recent revelations about presidential awareness and approval of torture techniques came on the heels of another under-reported development in early March -- President Bush's veto of legislation that would have prohibited the use of brutal techniques of interrogation by American intelligence agents.  About this unprecedented, formal blessing of torture as national policy by the President of the United States, Anthony Lewis comments:

No one should be in any doubt that torture was what President Bush had in mind. No one should be fooled by Orwellian talk of "enhanced interrogation techniques."

What Congress sought to outlaw was such things as hanging prisoners from the ceiling by their wrists, beating them, depriving them of food and water, preventing them from sleeping for days, keeping them in freezing temperatures, using electric shocks on them, and subjecting them to waterboarding—an almost-drowning technique that was used by the Inquisition and by Japanese soldiers who were successfully prosecuted for it by the United States after World War II. Torture....

The corrupting effects of the adoption of torture as an American practice have been widespread. First of all, on the law. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which makes binding interpretations of the law for the federal government, issued secret opinions defining torture away to the vanishing point, saying it must be equivalent in pain to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death"—and adding that Congress could not stop the President from ordering the use of torture. (The whole idea of secret official opinions defining the law should be anathema in a free republic, one that has boasted from the beginning of having a government of laws, not men. Secret laws are the hallmark of tyrannies.)

The Justice Department opinions were not abstractions. They were immediately taken up by political appointees at the Pentagon and led directly to the torture of dozens of prisoners and the killing of some at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan....

Lewis concludes his piece with this quote from Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, US Army (Ret.), former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell:

We must start now to recognize our crimes and our complicity. We are all guilty, and we must all take action in whatever way we can. Torture and abuse are not American. They are foreign to us and always should be. We need to exorcise them from our souls and make amends.

(Anthony Lewis, "The Terror President," New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008)

Iran: Our Ticket Out of Iraq?

Maya Schenwar of truthout writes about her interview with Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men and Overthrow:

"Every time I pick up my newspaper and read about what's coming out of Washington, my fears of an American attack on Iran intensify," Kinzer told me during an interview last week....

During our interview, Kinzer pointed to the hypocrisy of Bush admonishing Iran for intervening militarily in Iraq. Kinzer stressed that the US must recognize the legitimacy of Iran's integral role.

"The fact is, Iran does have influence in Iraq, and Iran always will have influence in Iraq," he said.

The two countries are tied religiously, politically, historically and geographically, and the US is in no position to sever those ties, according to Kinzer. Rather, he suggested, we might use them to our advantage, viewing Iran as "our ticket out of Iraq."...

"All the Shah's Men" reminds us that, when it comes to Iran, the backseat is probably where we should be sitting. The US was responsible for the 1953 coup that toppled Iran's democratic government, replacing it with the repressive Shah regime, which hastened the Islamic Revolution of 1970s, inspiring the rise of radical groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda....

Kinzer's most recent book, "Overthrow," shows how the "regime change" model has developed over the past 110 years. In our interview, he discussed the motivations behind that empire-driven mentality - and why, ultimately, it's doomed to fail.

"As long as the US arrogates to itself the right to decide which governments may live, and which must die, these interventions are never going to work out," Kinzer said.

Click here to view the interview

"They Create Desolation and Call it Peace"

A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them.... To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of "government"; they create a desolation and call it peace.

David Bromwich opens his essay "Euphemism and American Violence" (New York Review of Books, April 3, 2008) with this second-century critique of Rome in Tacitus' Agricola. "Euphemism has been the leading quality of American discussions of the war in Iraq," Bromwich contends.  An excerpt:

"Baghdad is calmer now; the surge is working." The temporary partial peace is an effect of accomplished desolation, a state of things in which the Shiite "cleansing" of the city has achieved the dignity of the status quo, and been ratified by the walls and checkpoints of General Petraeus. "The surge is working" is a fiction that blends several facts indistinguishably. For example: that Iraq is a land of militias and (as Nir Rosen has put it) the US Army is the largest militia; that in 2007 we paid 80,000 "Sunni extremists" to switch sides and then call themselves The Awakening. Americans have suggested that the members of this militia make up neighborhood watch groups, and have assigned them euphemistic cover-names such as Concerned Local Citizens and Critical Infrastructure Security. In fact, many of them are "increasingly frustrated with the American military," according to Sudarsan Raghavan and Amit R. Paley in a Washington Post story that ran on February 28.

Daydream Believers

Michiko Kakutani's review of a new book by Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, provides a succinct retrospective on the consequences of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, launched five years ago today.  Joseph Tobing, computer science professor at Columbia Union College, forwarded this review, "Global Strategy or Grand Illusion?" (New York Times, March 18, 2008).

American troops bogged down in Iraq, a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, an overstretched military and National Guard, simmering tensions with Iran and North Korea, and growing hostility toward the United States around the world: these are just some of the consequences of Bush administration foreign policy over the last seven years. To the Slate columnist Fred Kaplan, these woes all stem from two grand misconceptions held by the White House and its top advisers: that the world fundamentally changed after 9/11, when in fact “the way the world works — the nature of power, warfare and politics among nations — remained essentially the same”; and that in a post-cold-war era, the United States “had the power to set the terms of the new world order” and could therefore act unilaterally, without entangling alliances and without compromising “with competing concepts or interests.” ...

[Kaplan] underscores the crucial role the speechwriter Michael Gerson, a self-described evangelical, played in linking the president’s religious and moral imperatives with his expansionist foreign policy. And he argues that Elliott Abrams, a member of Mr. Bush’s National Security Council (and a former Reagan administration official who was involved in the Iran-contra scandal), “embodied both factions behind the administration’s new policies — the moral crusaders and the power-centric nationalists.” ...

President Bush’s strategies, Mr. Kaplan writes near the end of this incisive book, failed “because they did not fit the realities of his era”: “They were based not on a grasp of technology, history or foreign cultures but rather on fantasy, faith and willful indifference toward those affected by their consequences.”

Failing to acknowledge the limits of American power, he writes, President Bush and his aides ended up trumpeting the country’s “reduced powers — and, as a result, they weakened their nation further.” They “set forth a new way of fighting battles — but withheld the tools for winning wars. They aimed to topple rogue regimes — with scant knowledge of the local culture and no plan for what to do after the tyrant fell. They dreamed of spreading democracy around the world — but did nothing to help build the democratic institutions without which mere elections were moot or worse. In their best-intentioned moments, they put forth ideas without strategies, policies without process, wishes without means.”

Quaker Teacher Fired for Making Loyalty Oath Nonviolent

"This is a travesty," says Jiggs Gallagher, who forwarded this article by Nanette Asimov from the San Francisco Chronicle, February 29, 2008.

California State University East Bay has fired a math teacher after six weeks on the job because she inserted the word "nonviolently" in her state-required Oath of Allegiance form.

Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker and graduate student who began teaching remedial math to undergrads Jan. 7, lost her $700-a-month part-time job after refusing to sign an 87-word Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution that the state requires of elected officials and public employees....

A veteran public school math teacher who specializes in helping struggling students, Kearney-Brown, 50, had signed the oath before - but had modified it each time.

She signed the oath 15 years ago, when she taught eighth-grade math in Sonoma. And she signed it again when she began a 12-year stint in Vallejo high schools.

Each time, when asked to "swear (or affirm)" that she would "support and defend" the U.S. and state Constitutions "against all enemies, foreign and domestic," Kearney-Brown inserted revisions: She wrote "nonviolently" in front of the word "support," crossed out "swear," and circled "affirm." All were to conform with her Quaker beliefs, she said.

The school districts always accepted her modifications, Kearney-Brown said.

But Cal State East Bay wouldn't, and she was fired on Thursday....

"I honor the Constitution, and I support the Constitution," she said. "But I want it on record that I defend it nonviolently." ...

"I was born to do this," she said. "I teach developmental math, the lowest level. The kids who are conditionally accepted to the university. Give me the kids who hate math - that's what I want."

complete article at www.sfgate.com

The Militarization of Africa

Excerpts from "Africa Policy Outlook 2008" by Gerald LeMelle. Foreign Policy in Focus, February 7, 2008.

Militarizing Aid

The United States has dramatically ramped up military activity in Africa since 2002. Representative Donald Payne (D-NJ), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health on the House Committee for Foreign Affairs, and many others have described this trend as the “militarization of U.S. aid to Africa.” The total amount of U.S. military sales, financing and training expenditures for eight African countries considered particularly strategic for the “war on terror” has increased from about $40 million over the five years from 1997 through 2001 to over $130 million between 2002 and 2006....

Private Sector Role

Deepening U.S. military ties to the African continent are visible in both the official and private sectors. Since 2002, the U.S. International Military and Training Program (IMET) has invested approximately $10 million a year to train African military personnel, and the FY 2008 budget request increased this sum to $13.7 million. At the same time, under State Department oversight, commercial sales by U.S. manufacturers delivered $281 million worth of weapons and equipment from FY 2006-2007 to Algeria alone. Such licensed commercial sales to sub-Saharan Africa were just $900,000 in 2000, but for FY 2008 they are estimated to reach $92 million, an 80% increase from FY 2006....

AFRICOM's Inspiration

This growing militarization of U.S.-Africa policy is certain to escalate sharply in 2008 as the United States hurtles full speed ahead with the launch of Bush’s still ill-defined Africa Command (AFRICOM)....

AFRICOM began initial operations in October 2007 with temporary headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. But much like 150 years ago when Western countries argued that their real goals in Africa were to bring liberty and democratic ideals to the continent, the Bush Administration has been trying to convince skeptical audiences in Africa and elsewhere that AFRICOM is ultimately driven by altruistic motives.

AFRICOM’s projected structure would place humanitarian work previously done by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under the directive of Department of Defense (DOD). To U.S. and African civil society groups, and even to AFRICOM’s critics in Congress, the Bush administration has argued that the State Department will remain responsible for diplomacy and development while AFRICOM will “support” USAID and other humanitarian organizations in the delivery of humanitarian aid and assistance. The Bush administration suggests there will be more civilian oversight of AFRICOM than any other military command. Yet it remains hard to see how African policy will not be driven by military engagement as opposed to a genuine partnership if the State Department and USAID are positioned under the Defense Department in AFRICOM....

AFRICOM is being touted in Soldier of Fortune and other private military contractor industry publications as ushering in a bountiful new job market. In Iraq, contractors hired by the U.S. government were accountable to no one, resulting in unacceptable human rights violations. It is reasonable to be concerned that mercenaries and other contractors hired for AFRICOM’s work will follow a similar pattern....

Debt: Opportunities and Threats

The Jubilee Act, a bill that would lead to the cancellation of 100% of the debt of 67 impoverished countries without the destructive economic and policy conditions found in previous debt reduction initiatives, is gaining bipartisan support in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. If made into law, the act would be a leap forward toward the eradication of Africa’s $200 billion-plus debt burden that acts as the biggest impediment to sustained development on the continent....

HIV/AIDS: A Legacy Issue

As the HIV/AIDS emphasis in his February trip to Africa demonstrates, Bush wants to leave the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) as a celebrated part of his legacy, but public health experts agree that this program has so far fallen drastically short of the funding levels necessary to make serious progress against the pandemic. Effective implementation of U.S. global HIV/AIDS programs under PEPFAR has also been hampered by ideological constraints in this program and an over-reliance on name-brand drugs as opposed to the more cost effective generic versions.

The next iteration of this plan needs to increase funding levels to a minimum of $50 billion to fight global HIV/AIDS over the next five years, eliminate ideological limitations and provide the full U.S. fair share of support for the multilateral Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria....

Colossians Remixed - 3: Discerning Empire

“I know that her story and mine couldn’t both be true. Either Caesar had brought forgiveness of our sins, fruitfulness and peace through the great victories he had wrought, or Jesus had brought forgiveness of our sins, fruitfulness and peace through his paradoxical victory on a Roman cross.”

Nympha, we learn from Colossians 4:15, was the leader of a Christian congregation in nearby Laodicea. Walsh and Keesmaat imagine Nympha reflecting on the good news about Jesus from another prominent, wealthy woman, Lydia of Thyatira. Through this device, grounded in extensive scholarship, the authors bring us into the historical context of the letter to the Colossians, the first-century world of the Pax Romana. And they draw attention to striking parallels with our twenty-first century context:

In Colossians Paul is telling a story that is an alternative to the mythology of empire. Mythology is always about salvation, peace and prosperity. Rome found salvation in the universal peace of the age after Augustus. The “American Empire” finds salvation in economic progress and global control. Paul tells a story about a salvation rooted in Christ, historical sovereignty located in a victim of the empire, and prosperity that bears fruit in the whole world (62-63).

Please “post a comment” on what strikes you most about this “placing” of Colossians in its historical context, and what that might mean for how we read the text today.

Rule by Law or Imperial Decree?

From The Progress Report for January 30, issued by the Center for American Progress Action Fund:

Earlier this week, President Bush signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2008, which included a statute forbidding the Bush administration from spending taxpayer money "to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq." But Bush quietly attached a signing statement to the law, asserting a unilateral right to disregard the ban on permanent bases in addition to three other measures in the bill. "Provisions of the act...could inhibit the president's ability to carry out his constitutional obligations...to protect national security," the signing statement read. Reacting to the statement, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Mark Agrast said, "On the merits, for the president to assert that Congress lacks the authority to say there shouldn't be permanent bases on foreign soil is fanciful at best." Bush's "frequent use of signing statements to advance aggressive theories of executive power has been a hallmark of his presidency," writes the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage, who has authored a book on that topic....

Last November, Bush announced that he and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had signed a "Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship" that set the parameters for negotiating an "enduring" U.S. occupation of Iraq. The negotiations have drawn fire in part because the administration said it does not intend to designate the declaration as a "treaty," and so will not submit it to Congress for approval. Bush's attempt to waive the ban on permanent bases is seen as one more step in the direction of establishing a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq....

Among the other provisions in the Defense Authorization Act that Bush asserted an unfounded right to ignore were two accountability measures aimed at private security firms accused of wartime abuses. One of these provisions would establish an independent, bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting....

The fourth and last provision of the law that Bush sought to ignore was a requirement of the administration to turn over "any existing intelligence assessment, report, estimate or legal opinion" requested by the leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services committees within 45 days. The New York Times writes, "Clearly, this violates the power that Mr. Bush has given himself to cover up an array of illegal and improper actions, like his decisions to spy on Americans without a warrant, to torture prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions and to fire United States attorneys apparently for political reasons."

Colossians Remixed - 2: Colossians and Disquieted Globalization

Context Remixed: Colossians and Empire - B / 2008 Book Discussion Series, Week 2

Walsh and Keesmaat use the rabbinic interpretive exercise called targum – an extended paraphrase putting an ancient text into contemporary idiom – to help us discern how Colossians connects with our post-9/11/01 context of “global disquiet.” As an example, here’s part of their targum’s take on the hope Paul writes about in 1:5-6:

You didn’t get this hope from cable television, and you didn’t find it on the Net. This hope walked into your life, hollering itself hoarse out on the streets, in the classroom, down at the pub and in the public square, when you first heard the good news of whole life restoration in Christ. This gospel is the Word of truth – it is the life-giving, creation-calling, covenant-making, always faithful servant Word that takes flesh in Jesus, who is the truth….Now the Word of truth is producing the fruit of radical discipleship, demonstrated in passion for justice, evocative art and drama, restorative stewardship of our ecological home, education for faithful living, integral evangelism, and liturgy that shapes an imagination in alternative to the empire’s.

“Uh, excuse me, but your translation seemed to add an awful lot to the text.” Thus begins a dialog in which the authors’ defend their targum to a moderately skeptical reader, citing overtones of several powerful passages from the Hebrew scriptures in Colossians 1:1-14, such as: Psalm 85:10-11; Hosea 4:1-3, and Isaiah 11:1-9.

“Post a comment” below on Colossians Remixed, Chapter 2. After reading this chapter, for example, what are your thoughts about authors’ advice to “hear the New Testament with Old Testament ears”?

Colossians Remixed - 1

Context Remixed: Colossians and Empire – A / Spring 2008 Discussion Series, Week 1

Preface and Chapter 1, “Placing Ourselves: Globalization and Postmodernity” (go to Coming Soon...Colossians Remixed! for an introduction to the discussion series)

In establishing context for a reading of Paul’s first century letter to the Colossians, authors Walsh and Keesmaat begin with the context of twenty-first century readers. They characterize that cultural context as one in which “postmodern disquiet” blends paradoxically with “cybernetic global optimism” in a “global consumerist empire.”

We are introduced to “William,” a law student who has worked in international finance, and who becomes the authors’ dialogue partner in grappling with the significance of the ancient New Testament letter in today’s world. Though alienated from the Christianity in which he was raised, William has returned to theism, but is having a problem with the Bible. He says that “as soon as I open it I bump up against the absolute. Actually it is more that the absolute punches me in the face whenever I read this book” (16). A text asserting Truth with a capital T grates harshly against a postmodern hermeneutic of suspicion and “incredulity toward all metanarratives.”

With regard to Colossians, particularly such passages as 1:9, 1:17, and passages on sex and the flesh in chapter 3, William has this to say:

You posit a divine authority that structures and orders the world in a certain way, attribute that authority to yourself as author of the letter, wipe out any opposition that suggests things might be looked at differently, put clear restrictions on personal and communal life, and then top it all off with a divine sanction for patriarchy and slavery. And you want a postmodern person at the beginning of the twenty-first century to read this text, learn from it and maybe even receive it as divinely inspired Scripture? I don’t think so! (18)

There we have it: the challenge – and what a challenge it is! – for our entire discussion series.

"Post a comment" below to express your questions and observations based on the Preface and Chapter 1 of Colossians Remixed. Does the cultural context portrayed there resonate with your own life experience and outlook?