Christianity, Torture, and the Need For Resistance
Posted on May 16, 2009
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By Larry Jones
On the day of his death, Dilawar had been chained by the wrists to the top of his cell for much of the previous four days. A guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling. … Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen.
It would be many months before Army investigators learned that most of the interrogators had in fact believed Mr. Dilawar to be an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
The dreadfulness of Dilawar’s experience was depicted in the award- winning film Taxi to the Dark Side. Such depraved treatment of any human being on earth for any reason whatsoever should evoke a response of revulsion and horror. But there are Christians – mostly fundamentalists and biblical literalists – who justify torture in the name of god and country.
An April 29 Pew Research poll found that 62% of white evangelical Protestants believe that torture can often or sometimes be justified. The same total for the general U.S. population is 39%. The Bible can be used to justify torture if one believes it is the literal word of god which must be followed.
Here are a few examples: If they violate by statutes and do not keep my commandments, then I
will punish their transgression with the rod and their iniquity with scourges. Psalm 89:31, 32’
That slave who knew what his master wanted, but did not prepare himself or do what was wanted, will receive a severe beating. Luke 12:47. A parable of Jesus: And I contended with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair. Nehemiah 13:25: A condemnation of those who believed in inter-marriage with non-Jewish tribes.
There are many more, but you get the gruesome idea. Fundamentalists have in modern times have generally been associated with the Republican Party, and this, along with their biblical views, also tends to cause them to agree with the policies of the Bush Regime. President Barack Obama has now released the four memoranda of law written by lawyers in the Bush Department of Justice which gave legal cover to the “enhanced interrogation”/torture such as Dilawar experienced.
One such Bush lawyer, Jay Bybee, was rewarded with a lifetime seat on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which includes Hawaii. He was hearing cases in Honolulu on the week of May 10th and was exposed by scores of World Can’t Wait protesters and others calling for his disbarment and prosecution.
Gary Bauer, president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families, is a far right Christian fundamentalist who served under Ronald Reagan and was for eleven years the president of the Family Research Council. He also ran for president in 2000. He says that the question Christians should ask about torture is “What is a follower of Jesus permitted to do?”
The answer he says is “it depends … I think if we believe the person we have can give us information to stop thousands of Americans from being killed, it would be morally suspect to not use harsh tactics to get that information,"
It’s interesting to note that fundamentalists have long accused liberal Christians of applying “situational ethics” (e.g., it’s o.k. to lie to the Nazis if you’re hiding Anne Frank). Yet that is
precisely what this so-called defender of family values is doing. One of the problems with Bauer’s reasoning is that such ticking-bomb situations almost never exist, but are an often used hypothetical to justify torture.
Bauer also said that he doesn’t believe water-boarding is torture. But the panic of believing you’re drowning is certainly both physical and psychological torture. Abu Zubaydah, a presumed Al Qaida leader, was waterboarded 83 times, even though he reportedly gave such information as he knew before the waterboarding began. The torture that took place 83 times was pure sadism and was given legal cover by none other than the aforementioned Jay Bybee.
In an October 21, 2007 NY Daily News article, Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism consultant for the government’s special operations, homeland security, and intelligence agencies, stated that “In the media, waterboarding is called ‘simulated drowning,’ but that’s a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that.”
The victim IS drowning. “Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the
word. … “A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs that show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.”
Former VP Dick Cheney is now appearing on numerous news or quasi-news shows, such as Fox, which has a mutual love affair with right wing Christians, proclaiming how the torture techniques used by his and W’s administration have saved the nation from any further attacks. Of course, it was under his watch that 9/11 took place. How come?
In contradiction to Cheney’s claims, on the May 4th Democracy Now show former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan called the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques “slow, ineffective, unreliable and harmful,” while former State Department counsel Philip Zelikow said he was told to destroy a memo he wrote criticizing the torture’s authorization.
Some Conservative Mainline Christians Are Against Torture
“[T]orture is like a bone caught in our throat — we can’t swallow it and we can’t spit it out," said David Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta and president of Evangelicals for Human Rights. Gushee has been a leading anti-torture advocate. He led the drafting of a 2006 “Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror." The declaration was signed by 250 evangelicals who renounced torture and "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees."
In a May 13 story, AP religion writer Eric Gorski reported that “Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest
evangelical church body, revealed this month that he believes water- boarding is torture and never justified. He said part of his conclusion is based on his belief that it’s "very likely to cause
permanent psychological damage."
"It seems to me,” said Land, “once you accept the ‘end justifies the means’ argument, then you have taken a step onto a very steep and slippery slope to dark and dangerous place." Far too many religious and even non-religious people have begun to step onto that slippery slope. Still, it is true that, according to the Pew poll, the use of torture is positively correlated with religious devotion. White mainline Christians (Presbyterians, Methodists, United Church of Christ, etc.) are less inclined to support the use of torture than white evangelicals. However, non religious people, including atheists and agnostics are less likely to support torture than people in any religious category.
Strong Resistance and Demand for Prosecution
The Abu Ghraib torture photos from 2004 shocked the world, but only low level soldiers took the fall. All the people above in both the military and the Bush regime got off scott free, with the exception of Janis Karpinski. As a brigadier general in the 800th Military Police Brigade, she was in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison and other detention facilities during the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Karpinski was demoted in the aftermath of the prisoner abuse scandal and is now retired and she, along with many people and groups, is calling for the release of the large number of detainee photos from Afghanistan and Iraq, which the president and the pentagon control. (Look here for what took place at Abu Ghraib).
Such ghastly pictures are the reason Obama does not want the release of any more photos, although he says that it would “further inflame anti-American opinion, and … put our troops in greater danger." The issue will be settled in court. World Can’t Wait is among those calling for the release of the pictures and the prosecution of all the Bush regime war criminals who enabled the torture outrage to take place. An important article in the May 17 issue of Revolution newspaper is entitled “The Torture Memos … And the Need for Justice.” It concludes with these essential words:
“[If] those who set up, legitimized, and endorsed open torture simply walk away, if those who concocted the legal ‘golden shield’ for the torture go free, and if those who ‘almost choreographed’ the torture go free, that is nothing other than a statement that torturers need not look over their shoulders in the future. Regardless of the honeyed promises of the representative of the imperialist system, Obama, it would leave intact the ‘right’ of the U.S. imperialists to order torture. “And on the other hand, if people DO resist, if they DO demand that the criminals be prosecuted and wage a serious political struggle to make that happen, it can be the beginning of a struggle that can, among other things, lead to the beginnings and possibility of real justice—and not some phony, feel-good, ‘let’s-forget-about-the-past- and-move-on’ so-called redemption and/or “reconciliation” that only ultimately enables still more, and still worse, crimes by the bloody criminal enterprise known as America. “