Peace Messenger

Adventist Protests Extra-Judicial Killings & Environmental Destruction in Marathon Walk

From "Pastor to walk for an end to killings," by Eldie Aguirre and Orlando Dinoy, Inquirer.net, June 14, 2008; forwarded by Monte Sahlin:

DIGOS CITY, Davao del Sur, Philippines -- A 58-year-old Seventh Day Adventist pastor has launched a walk from his hometown in Matanao, Davao del Sur to Aparri in Cagayan Valley to dramatize his call for an end to unabated extrajudicial killings of journalists, militants, and suspected criminals, plus the massive environment destruction.

Edervin Samson of Barangay (Village) Camanchiles set off alone on Thursday and has been in contact with his family through a mobile phone....

"I wanted to stop the practice of extra-judicial killings, which is against the law of God, and to encourage people to renew their faith in Him," Samson told reporters when he passed by here on Thursday.

The trek to Aparri and back is a new endeavor according to the pastor and is the most daring walk he made in his life as marathoner. But he said his past experience in marathons would surely help him in attaining his goal....

"Humans are only stewards of this planet and we don't have any right to kill people or destroy the environment that God has entrusted to us," he said.

Samson said he would be stopping by selected areas from time to time to preach the Gospel....

Was Jeremiah Wright -- Wrong?

That's the question Frederick Russell, pastor of the Miracle Temple Seventh-day Adventist church addressed in his Sabbath sermon on April 26.  More on that below.

As a result of his performance at the National Press Club on Monday, April 28, the condemnation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright has extended even more widely, with many former sympathizers now expressing dismay.  Yet, to a large extent, the controversy remains more about style than substance, about isolated overstatements than the predominant thrust of his message and ministry.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, for example, emphatically declares “I’ve had it with Wright” because the pastor’s response to his critics was so “egocentric” and overreaching in identifying his kind of church and ministry with so diverse a reality as the African American church.

Yet, says Robinson, Wright “made some good points yesterday when he entered the lion’s den of the National Press Club. I especially liked this one: ‘My goddaughter's unit just arrived in Iraq this week, while those who call me unpatriotic have used their positions of privilege to avoid military service while sending . . . over 4,000 American boys and girls of every race to die over a lie.’”

It would be to our own spiritual detriment if we were to use Wright’s rhetorical overkill and confrontational style as reason to avoid what he has to say about the “prophetic tradition” of the Bible and what that has to say about race relations, peace, and economic justice in our time and culture.  If anyone is truly interested in finding out who Jeremiah Wright is and what he stands for, the interview with him on Bill Moyers’ Journal is a good place to start.

And whatever we may think about Wright’s views, there are still more fundamental issues at stake for Seventh-day Adventists, as Pastor Frederick Russell brought out in his sermon last Sabbath at Miracle Temple in Baltimore, Maryland.  In his message, “Was Jeremiah Wright – Wrong?,” Dr. Russell addressed “the dangers of patriotism gone awry, so much so that it seeks to destroy anyone who speaks contrary to what it believes about itself.”

He noted that the political and religious culture of Jesus’ day joined together to “take him out, because he dared to speak something against what they perceived as loyalty to the temple, and loyalty to the culture.” This kind of patriotism “can become a religion in itself,” Russell warned, leading us to “unwittingly begin to worship the country itself.”

Will “the church of the living God” be silent while this kind of “dangerous patriotism” leads to the vilification and demonization of a religious community and its pastor based on distortions?  “As a Seventh-day Adventist Christian,” the pastor declared, “I must stand for religious liberty.”

Pastor Russell’s sermon can be view on PraizeVision or at the Miracle Temple blog

Politics, Prophecy and Peace

Politics and Prophecy: The Battle for Religious Liberty and the Authentic Gospel
Christa and Alan J. Reinach, editor
Pacific Press / 2008

In this new book from Pacific Press, nine Adventist authors collaborate to address current issues of religious liberty, building on "the conviction that there is more to modern culture-war battles than can be understood merely through policy analysis or moral discourse -- a conviction that prophetic perspective is essential." The book seeks to chart a way forward, writes co-editor Alan Reinach, that avoids the pitfalls of both "pietism and power politics," instead helping the church "to fulfill a prophetic function: to speak truth to power" (8).

Authors include John Graz, director of the Department of Public Affairs and Religious Liberty for the General Conference, and James Standish, director of legislative affairs for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, along with several others among the church's leading advocates of religious liberty: Barry Bussey, Jonathan Gallagher, Nicholas Miller, Michael Peabody, and Timothy Standish.

Merely in passing, of course, and with a humility worthy of Stephen Colbert, I also note that the book includes a chapter by the editor of this blog and the Peace Messenger electronic newsletter, described as follows by editor Reinach:

Douglas Morgan, an historian who teaches at Columbia Union College, provides a stirring warning about the abuse of American power in his chapter: “Marching to the Call of History.” He reviews the Adventist understanding of the role of the United States in prophecy, and recovers the Adventist imperative to be patriotic critics of the expansion of American power, and the erosion of republican principles.

More on Politics and Prophecy at the Liberty Blog!

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)

What Have We Learned?

“What Have We Learned, If Anything?” Tony Judt, in the May 1 issue of the New York Review of Books, asks this question about the twentieth century, with its massive-scale brutalities of total war, concentration camps and genocide.  “We have,” he notes, “memorialized it everywhere: shrines, inscriptions, ‘heritage sites,’ even historical theme parks are all public reminders of ‘the Past.’”

But when many respectable and influential Americans – he quotes a Supreme Court justice, a constitutional law expert, a liberal Democratic Senator, and a divinity school ethicist – “favor torture – under the appropriate circumstances and when applied to those who merit it” and thereby erode that “which until very recently distinguished democracies from dictatorships,” what have we learned?

We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and "exceptional" circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and "terrorists," between "us" and "them" —are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur "never again." So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there?

Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need, I think, to go back and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance.

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

Foreign Policy in Focus Zeroes in on Religion

Foreign Policy in Focus -- a "think tank without walls" -- is making the role of religion in global affairs a theme of emphasis this Fall. Its web site makes available a series of articles that combine the virtues of scholarly expertise, thorough documentation and brevity:

Jon Basil Utley reports on a powerful subset of the Religious Right. Their message: the end is near. Their influence on U.S. foreign policy: considerable.

Religious faith and institutions can be positive factors in peacebuilding, writes Bridget Moix. But there are also many potential pitfalls.

Heather Wokusch describes how the Vatican and Washington have butted heads on several global issues, and how these conflicts are only multiplying.

Ira Chernus writes that Americans crave a foreign policy based on moral conviction. Neoconservatives have offered one version. The left must provide a different one.

Stephen Zunes reports on a meeting with Iranian president Ahmadinejad, whose inflammatory and religiously charged rhetoric has obscured the fact that Iran poses little threat to the United States.

The full text of these and more are available through the "Religion and Foreign Policy" section of the FPIF web site.

FPIF connects the research and action of more than 600 scholars, advocates and activists who believe that U.S. security and world stability are best advanced through a commitment to peace, justice and environmental protection as well as economic, political, and social rights. It is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Unilateral and Unchecked Power

The October 26 broadcast of Bill Moyers' Journal explores the roots of the Bush-Cheney administration's "unitary executive" doctrine. Excerpts from the transcript:

BILL MOYERS: . . . President Bush and Vice President Cheney espouse the theory of the unitary executive. That means the President's orders can't be reviewed, questioned, or altered by the other two branches of government. He alone can say what the law means, or whether or not it will be enforced or ignored. In effect, George W. Bush says his powers must be unilateral and unchecked.

Critics claim the President has used the war on terror to put himself above the law and that he has created a secret presidency of classified decisions and orders, that approve extraordinary renditions, torture, illegal detentions, and wiretapping without warrants with the collaboration of big telecom companies. This boundless secrecy and surveillance evokes images counter to American values. . . .

Thirty two years ago, at the end of the Vietnam War, Congress turned over the rock and found all kinds of things squirming under it — lethal activities from electric pistols and poison pellets to Mafia connections and drug experiments. As well as illicit acts by the executive branch ranging from secret attempts by the CIA to subvert foreign democracies to unlawful domestic spying under such code names as Chaos, Cable Splicer, Garden Plot and Leprechaun. The Select Senate Committee headed by Frank Church found, no mailbox, no college campus, no television had been safe. The Church Committee led Congress to reject presidential claims of 'inherent authority' and restore some checks and balances, including putting an end to electronic surveillance without warrants.

WALTER MONDALE: This kind of unrestrained, illegal, secret intimidation and harassment of the essential ability of Americans to participate freely in American political life shall never happen again.

BILL MOYERS: But advocates of presidential prerogatives chafed at the restrictions and began then to try to reverse them. One of the people who argued most vociferously that a president could exceed the laws was a former White House Chief of Staff who had been elected to Congress. His name. Dick Cheney. Look at this excerpt from the documentary 'Cheney's Law' that was broadcast on FRONTLINE last week:

NARRATOR: Cheney had learned some hard lessons early in his political career. . . .

NARRATOR: Thirty-three-year-old Dick Cheney saw it firsthand.

RON SUSKIND, AUTHOR, THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE: He viewed the searing moments of the Nixon administration, which he was there in the front seats for, as a diminution of what the president ought to be.

NARRATOR: Then in 1975, he became President Ford's Chief of Staff. . . .

NARRATOR: Cheney watched Congress assert its authority over the president.

JAMES MANN, AUTHOR, RISE OF THE VULCANS: You have a wave of Congressional investigations . . . and Cheney is trying to fight off these investigations.

PROF. JACK GOLDSMITH, UNIV. CHICAGO LAW SCHOOL, 1997-'02: He's talked about how Congress unduly burdened the president and in a way that he believed was unconstitutional.

DAVID GERGEN: And Dick came out of that absolutely committed to the idea of restoring the powers of the presidency.

BILL MOYERS: When the terrorists struck on 9/11, Dick Cheney was Vice President, with the opportunity to claim extraordinary power in the name of national security. The FRONTLINE documentary showed how he did it.

JAMES RISEN, THE NEW YORK TIMES: They began to spy on Americans in an unprecedented way, in a way that they never had done before, by creating a special program to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants on their international phone calls and also by mounting a massive data mining operation.

NARRATOR: The data from billions of telephone calls and emails were being captured by The National Security Agency. But in the 1970s, Congress had prohibited such activities without the approval of a special court. . . .

BILL MOYERS: The stakes are still enormous and the argument over presidential power has grown more contentious because Democrats in control of Congress keep calling administration officials to testify only to be rebuffed by claims of executive privilege.

The entire broadcast can viewed online at the program's web site.

Tajikistan Bans Jehovah's Witness for Refusing Military Service

Tajikistan's Jehovah Witnesses have been banned throughout the entire country, Forum 18 News Service has learnt. Culture Ministry officials handed the community a banning order stripping it of legal status and "just said we were banned and should stop all our activity. They didn't say much," Jehovah's Witnesses told Forum 18. Commenting on the ban, which Forum 18 has seen, a Culture Ministry official stated that the authorities' main complaint was that Jehovah's Witnesses refuse military service. "There is no alternative service in Tajikistan yet, so everyone ought to obey Tajik laws," he told Forum 18.... more

NY Times: Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

Excerpts from an in-depth article by Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen, published October 4, 2007:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it....

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics....