Five lights? Or Four?

We keep circling 'round the central question of torture as a form of interrogation, and that is:

What do we know about interrogation?

Any lawyer who has ever questioned a client, much less a witness, will tell you that cooperation and conciliation works much better than bluster and animosity. You don't intimidate witnesses; you cajole them. I once questioned a witness in an administrative hearing. It was a bit nerve-wracking as I was used to confronting witnesses at trials after having taken their depositions; I knew what they were likely to say. Not so in this case; but the witness was brittle and pompous, and I found it easy to prove her grossly unreliable and foolish. I became a bit harsh, a bit aggressive. Not that it did a great deal for my client's case, but he loved the spectacle. The verbal "torture" I inflicted on the witness (it was hardly that, but as close as one gets in the legal system) delighted him so much he decided he didn't need me anymore when I couldn't do it again. My calmer and more persistent questioning better suited his case, but he wanted the fireworks and sense of triumph. He wanted, in short, what all clients think is best: to crush his enemies and drive them before him, to delight in the lamentations of their women.

This is pretty much what everyone seems to want, from the still out-pouring articles and TeeVee interviews and justifications for torture: all given by people with no experience in interrogating prisoners or getting information out of people who's just as soon not tell you anything. We would never allow torture in a criminal case or a civil case (it was once quite common) because we know it's unreliable. Except we don't know that, when we are told the informants are scary enough. Then, only torture will work.

At least that's what Michael Hayden and Dick Cheney keep saying. And, as Juliet Lapidos points out, this is a standard scenario of blockbuster movies, too. Whenever we want to underline just how vicious the "bad guys" are, we have them torture our "good guys," all in the name of getting information they'd never otherwise give up. Because kindness and blandishments won't work (they are, after all, bad guys, and our good guys know it!), and severe pain will...well, it will prove how tough our good guys are.

Except when it doesn't; as in the STNG episode Lapidos writes about, and from which the picture above is taken. Picard is absolutely broken by the torture; he confesses as much, at the end. And for what? What was the point? To extract information? Or to win a contest of wills? We know the answer. It is plain. Torture is not about extracting information. It is about the raw use of power, about holding someone helpless while you inflict cruelty and savagery upon them. Dick Cheney insists otherwise:

Cheney said that by getting rid of the enhanced interrogation techniques and the Bush adminstration's surveillance program, "you reduce the intelligence flow to the intelligence community upon which we based those policies that were so successful."

But we may soon know whether or not that is true. Even so, it's the utilitarian argument, and loathsome for that reason alone. It is troublesome we are even discussing the issue. How many times do we have to point out:

The point of torture is to violate the integrity of the human person and to coerce the will itself.

How many times do we have to defeat the consequentialist argument, or the utilitarian one? But it's also an argument from ignorance. We don't torture because it is cruel and unusual punishment. We don't torture because it is against US as well as international law. We don't torture because is it not an interrogation technique.

Above all, we don't torture because we are not monsters. Well, some of us are; but that's why we have laws. That's why the situation of Robert Bolt's "Man for All Seasons" applies here, too. We must give the devil the benefit of the laws; but we must also hold the devil to account under those laws. God demanded of the Hebrew prophets that even God be held to account under God's law. We can do no less for the former Administration officials who committed these crimes against our own humanity.

Whose Church Is It, Anyway?

Maybe it's the church I choose. Maybe it's just me.

But thinking about this subject, I realized that, for my entire life, I have always been one of the youngest people in the room in any church I've ever joined or attended. I'm 50 something now, and that has never changed. When I was a child in church, I remember clearly my parents were of roughly the same generation as their friends in church. There were a few people older, but they were a distinct minority. The bulk of the congregants were people of my parents' age. But every church I've attended, visited, or pastored, I've been one of the youngest people there. Consistently.

It didn't used to be this way. It wasn't supposed to be this way. At my age, I should be preaching to my peers. Instead, I'm still preaching to my parents, or people as old as my parents. And most of my peers, like my parents, are set in their ways, and their ways are not the ways of church goers. If they are, they are more likely the ways of the church of their childhood than the church of Bultmann or Crossan or Patterson or Borg or the Jesus Seminar. Or even Niebuhr or Tillich. Certainly not Derrida. Nobody I know knows Derrida. Or Kierkegaard, for that matter.

So some of it is me. Certainly some of it is me. But some of it is the way things are, and the way things weren't supposed to be. True, pastors have always preached to people older than themselves, as well as younger; in that, I'm no exception. But I've never preached anywhere where I wasn't one of the youngest people in the room. And I've only been preaching for about 10 years, now. Which might explain, as much as anything, why young people are leaving the church in droves. It just isn't their place.

What was supposed to bring them back was "popular music." Funny, that's what was supposed to bring my generation back to the church. Yup, that didn't start with Gen X or the rise of the mega-church or the insidious marketing intent of fundamentalist evangelicals. There is, indeed, nothing new under the sun. Luther's hymns were the popular songs of the day. Wesley's hymns were the same; why do you think they're still so popular now, at least in churches? Shaped note hymnals were wildly popular at one time (I still remember one from my grandparent's church; and yes, they were some of the oldest people in the room in their little church, so long ago now).

I know many churches now use "popular music," but more often than not it's performed music, meant to be watched; not hymn singing, meant to be sung by the congregation. I can only report from video-tape on some of this, and nothing I have to say has the backing of sociological studies, so it may be too narrow a range of experience to mean anything. But the tapes I saw in seminary of the "mega-church" we were told then was the cutting edge of a "new Reformation" (I still cringe for the professor who told me that) showed mostly people my age or older in the "seeker services." Not a lot of young people there; teenagers, 20 year olds. Not the dominant crowd. The "entertainers" on the "stage" (they seemed more that than worship leaders, to me) were young; but that's because they were energetic. People my age could never generate that much energy. And yet, it still didn't do much good.

Then there's the "ghetto" position of "youth minister." Truly large churches, of course, subdivide their ministries into "youth" and "elderly" and "shut in", etc., the better to serve a truly vast community of persons. (Such as my brother in law's church, a large mainline congregation, almost of "mega-church" size. I considered for a moment that his church might point to a myriad of exceptions to my experience; but I've lectured his Sunday school class, and no one in the room was as young as me, including my BIL, who's almost ten years older than I. And he's one of the younger people in the class.) The youth minister is the person who's supposed to keep the youth in church. But again, my experience with churches with "youth ministers" is that it's a second-class position, under the thumb of the ruling powers (Priest, pastor, church council, session, what have you), and their usual tenure is only a few years. They entertain the "youth," but sooner or later get their chain yanked, or find the youth have all gone on to college, never to return, and their novelty has worn off. The last youth minister my daughter knew was fired by the priest, for reasons obscure and irrelevant. The youth understood what it meant: they were being patronized, catered to, and had no voice in the church, and the one person they related to, could be snatched away as easily as a kleenex could be discarded. My daugher drifted away, as did everyone else in her group. So it goes.

Youth groups have been doing that since I was in church. Some youth ministers have the respect of the church and thrive; most don't. Those who do thrive do so by training up the youth in the ways of the adults, making young adults of them as soon as possible. This is not a slight, it's a fact. The churches I've known where youth ministers stayed on were churches where the youth were funneled into the adult church ASAP, and encouraged to think as much like their parents as possible. This is not a complaint, it's admiration, actually. I imagine the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches thrive (inasmuch as they do) in much the same way: by making the children prematurely adults, binding them with ties of loyalty and fealty and confession that, to outsiders, look bizarre and confining but to them are just and good and true.

I do not sit in judgment. My preference is for Taize forms of worship, for liturgical practice and the almost fanatical adherence to the Protestant form of the liturgical calendar (I don't follow saint's days and most feast days). I understand what Merton meant when he said in the monastery he found the "four walls of [his] freedom." I am, in many ways, painfully traditional, and become so more and more as I find in those traditions the living presence of the clouds of witness and all the saints that surround me. Surely those children who were shaped by those churches (mostly Baptist, in my childhood experience) found the same.

All the same, they are a distinct and dwindling minority. If these numbers can be read to show anything, it's that this decline is across the board, not just among "liberal" churches which are "wishy-washy."

That raises another issue, one Anthony McCarthy raised in comments to the post below. I don't think this decline is a result of a cultural conspiracy, but it is the result of a failure of "liberal" churches to take advantage of the vocabulary of the culture for its own benefit. The roots of the church lie in culture. Peter tried to stay true to Jewish/Hebrew culture (it was one becoming the other in his time). Paul took up the culture of the Gentiles. While Peter wore the shoes of the fisherman, Paul won the debate, and long after him Augustine used the language of Plato and the Hellenes to justify his church as the Roman empire, itself in many ways as Greco as it was Roman, fell. Aquinas, several more centuries after, took up the other "wing" of Hellenistic thought, interpreting Christian doctrine in the language of "The Philosopher," Aristotle. Most of Christian theology still alternates between these two poles. But for centuries, the discussion in those terms was the accepted discussion. Luther was a prolific and profound thinker. Melanchtion labored to put Luther's ideas into systematic form, to give them the intellectual armor of rigor and justification within the philosophical and theological framework of the day. Calvin, a lawyer, was fundamentally systematic in his thought, and fundamentally concerned with detailed and careful analyses of every position of his Reformed movement. There is a reason theology was once "the mother of all the sciences," and it is because it was so deeply interwoven into all of European, and Western, thought. It was the fountainhead, the source.

It lost that position, of course, beginning in the Enlightenment, and long and great was the fall of it. One problem is the "death" of metaphysics; a death that may have been prematurely announced. One response was to declare the "death of God," not because theologians decided to side with Nietzsche, but because they wanted to see what would really happen to theology if they took that stance.

Nothing. Nothing happened. Despite the attention of TIME magazine, no one noticed. But it is clear that Humpty Dumpty has had a great fall, and no one has put Humpty together again. Yet faith persists. It could almost be a mystery.

But the mystery is not the persistence of faith: it is the lack of a vocabulary for talking about religious belief. William James could do no better than to call them "living options" for those who believe. Rudolf Bultmann began the purge by arguing against what he labeled "primitive mythology," but that did more to darken counsel by words without knowledge (Job 38:1) than anything else, and set us all down rabbit trails trying to distinquish "mythology" from "confessional narratives." Enter Paul Ricouer, who helped as much as he hurt (mostly because he's so difficult to understand and, unlike Aquinas, we have yet to decide whether to absorb his observations, or not.) Paul Tillich could do no better than to speak of our "ultimate concern," a term so vague and amorphous it never caught on, and probably led directly to the far more existential and concrete "Death of God" movement (which never felt so well, itself). Ironically, the most popular contribution to our theological discourse has been Reinhold Niebuhr's "Serenity Prayer" (which he discarded almost as soon as he had used it) and his concept of "Moral Man and Immoral Society" (which has inspired Andrew Bacevich, but almost no one else. And it is easy, in the use Bacevich makes of it, to forget Niebuhr was an ordained pastor, the identity he clung to all his life.). This is the central dilemma of Protestantism: if the culture no longer supports your enterprise, do you any longer have an enterprise?

And if it doesn't support it any longer, here and now, at this time, part of the reason for that is that my parents are still alive.

As are most of their generation. By the time my father was my age, his parents were dead; and the cohort of the elderly was small. Now Baby Boomers are nearly elderly, and while demographically the middle-aged and elderly may be the smaller portion of the population, in the churches they dominate. The numbers of young people no longer going to church will tell you that much. And if the younger cohort won't attend church because they see nothing in it for them (for any number of reasons), how does the church continue? Where are the churches for the 20 and 30 year olds? Where are the churches where 40 is old, as in the churches of my youth? The Baby Boomers were supposed to have changed everything, but it was the "Greatest Generation" that returned from war and flooded the churches in numbers never before seen in American history. And they are still there.

It's an interesting problem. In a culture that makes the independence of youth paramount (especially when they are free to spend money!) and emphasizes the importance of the "teen years" as the years when one is most free (and most especially free to spend money, since we expect the parents to pay for the necessities for teens), and in a church (Protestantism) so closely tied, so dependent on, the culture for its very existence: that same church (I cannot speak for Catholics or the Orthodox Christians) cannot, has not, found a way to provide an institution devoted solely to the needs and interests of the dominant demographic of modern society.

And it stands perplexed as to why that group is turning away from it in such numbers. So it goes.*


*I have, in fact, said a lot about this. I'm sure I'll say a lot more, before it's over. And yes, I know this takes us very close to Christ and Culture territory. Maybe we should go there, too.

Justice, or Just Us?

Jane Harman thinks wiretapping is just fine, until her conversations are recorded.

Dick Cheney thinks arresting foreign nationals and throwing them into black prisons or Gitmo with no judicial oversight at all is just fine, but he shouldn't be subject to foreign prosecutions by foreign judicial systems:

"I hear this talk that there is going to be some kind of foreign prosecution of our guys, I just think that’s abhorrent, and I think they ought to do everything they can to fight that.”

Universal jurisdiction for thee, but not for me!

Irony is on the floor clutching its sides, roaring with laughter.

Where's all the people?

You'd think this would be good news for someone like me:

While these young "nones" may not belong to a church, they are not necessarily atheists.

"Many of them are people who would otherwise be in church," Putnam said. "They have the same attitidues and values as people who are in church, but they grew up in a period in which being religious meant being politically conservative, especially on social issues."

Putnam says that in the past two decades, many young people began to view organized religion as a source of "intolerance and rigidity and doctrinaire political views," and therefore stopped going to church.

Sadly, it would be better news if I were more non-denominational. Or otherwise unfettered by institutions, and traditions.

Maybe.

"The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without;..."

Pastor Dan provides me with this new poll from the Pew Forum. The image isn't all that wonderfully readable, and I'm not sure the information is all that new. Indeed, no offense to PD, but much of what he concludes from this I'd already concluded earlier. Some of the numbers, however, are interesting in themselves:

In contrast to opinions on these questions, majorities of those who have become unaffiliated disagree with the idea that science proves religion is just superstition. Only 32% of former Catholics and the same percentage of former Protestants agree that science proves religion to be superstition, and fewer still (less than a quarter) say it was important in their conversion.

I hesitate to jump to the conclusion that the whole "God doesn't exist!" argument isn't really gaining any traction, but that would lead us off into William James territory, and I don't want to go there. It's the reason people leave churches that interests me. Perhaps it's just a personal interest, but the division is very clearly generational:

When asked a separate series of yes-or-no questions about why they left their childhood faith, more than seven-in-ten former Catholics and former Protestants (71% each) who are now unaffiliated say they just gradually drifted away from the faith, making this the most commonly offered reason by both groups. Many also say they left their former religion because they stopped believing in its teachings, with nearly two-thirds of unaffiliated former Catholics (65%) and half of unaffiliated former Protestants (50%) saying they left their childhood religion for this reason. Among both groups, roughly four-in-ten say they departed their former faith because their spiritual needs were not being met. Roughly three-in-ten former Catholics (29%) and more than one-third of former Protestants (36%) were unhappy with their former religion's teachings about the Bible. Most of those who express concerns about the religion's teachings on the Bible say their former religion interpreted the Bible too literally, with only a few saying their former faith did not follow the Bible literally enough.

The "gradual drift away" indicates one of two things to me: either a failure of habit, or a gradual change in the community that leaves the former member feeling unmoored. Which, using the life cycle of my last church as an example, seems to make the most sense.

My last church began as a small "farmer's church," founded by German settlers in what was, 150+ years ago, rural Texas. It is now urban/suburban Houston, and as unrecognizable as farm country as any portion of New York City. When it began, it drew it's membership from a homogenous community. As that community became less homogenous, the church faltered. At one point, it closed its doors, and those who wanted to attend had to ride several miles to the nearest German E&R church. It was re-opened with a new pastor who worked vigorously to encourage attendance, and it remained a "local church" and grew through the '60's, when the neighborhood was full of executives and people moving to Houston, and the church environs were on the "edge" of town, where development was booming. In that boom the church built a sanctuary large enough to hold 300 comfortably. Then the boom ended, and the membership trickled away, all but the members who still lived nearby. Their children grew up in the church, too; but they moved further out, or further away, and attendance shrank and shrank, and the church blended into the welter of buildings on the busy street, even though the sanctuary was easily the largest building on the road, for sheer height and breadth, if nothing else.

While I was a pastor of that church, two church members on separate occasions told me they'd driven by the church for years, before someone pointed it out and they realized it was there, and it was a church. Once it had been the center of the community. Today....

Today, the community has moved beyond it, and left it behind. The largest mega-churches in town (with the exception of Lakewood) have even been forced to respond to this. People simply will not drive long distances through urban areas to attend a mega-church; or not enough will, so the latest trend is to follow the development. Churches in the neighborhood of my old church (which is still basically my neighborhood now) are, as they are able, selling their buildings and moving to where "the people are." Young people with time and money, in other words. Selling a church building isn't all that easy to do (how do you repurpose a church building?) so it isn't done much, but when the opportunity arises, the churches take it. Mega-churches are following this trend by setting up "satellite campuses" (when the largest church opened their first one, the rumor among the pastors I know was that the charismatic pastor of that church flew by private helicopter out to the satellite every Sunday morning, to give the sermon that drew the crowds. It wasn't true, but it seemed like it could be.). They go, quite literally, where the people are; or at least the people they are marketing to (I'm cynical enough to put it that way because I've seen too many "mega-churches" put up billboards around town. That's marketing, not "outreach.") Why do people leave churches? Pastor Dan points out it's partly because of the lack of community or, in some evangelical churches, too much community; and it's our complicated feelings in America, about being a member of a community, and about being an individual. Well, yeah, that fits. But 71% don't have a specific reason; they just "drifted away." Given the reality of modern American life, the fractured days and time necessary just to get the necessary done, and soccer games and track events and activities that crowd into Sunday morning, or the 6+ day a week schedules, all the work that has to be crammed into the weekends (house cleaning, grocery shopping, errands, etc.), "drifting away" sounds about right. Why leave? Why go?

What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of God.
Even the anchorite who meditates alone,
For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of God,
Prays for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate.
And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour
Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.
Nor does the family even move about together
But every son would have his motor cycle,
And daughters ride away on casual pillions.

Except for one or two archaic terms, you'd never know that was from the 1930's. The generation gap isn't so new after all, and while it's driven (literally, sometimes) by technology, the problem is less our technology than our devotion to technology as the "cure" for whatever ails us.

And that's a part of the "generation gap" of it all. If I prefer a "traditional" mainstream Protestant church to an evangelical one, or to one with a "modern" worship service and a pastor who thinks he should emulate Joel Osteen or Norman Vincent Peale or tell me how to have sex with my wife, where do I turn? If I seek a church composed of my generational peers, where do I find it? If I seek a church attractive to those of somewhat a like mind to mine, what would it be? Robert Wuthnow has been examining these questions for decades.

This is an interesting repudiation to the argument that failing Protestant churches aren't conservative enough:

Most of those who express concerns about the religion's teachings on the Bible say their former religion interpreted the Bible too literally, with only a few saying their former faith did not follow the Bible literally enough.

Trying to bring the teachings of Dom Crossan or Marcus Borg to a congregation, however, can be a tricky prospect. Only 36% might be inclined to embrace those teachings; perhaps many more would find them interesting and acceptable. A vocal minority, however, can easily override even 50% who are accepting or encouraging of such an approach.

And why do most of the unaffiliated join a church?

When asked whether a series of specific reasons helped lead to their first becoming affiliated with a religious group, most (51%) say they did so because their spiritual needs were not being met.

This is "new" news (check my original link; in internet terms, it's "old") again because ABCNews has picked it up and quoted the man responsible for the poll (or using it, anyway) as saying: "It's a huge change," largely because "the percentage of "nones" has now skyrocketed to between 30 percent and 40 percent among younger Americans."

Not really a surprise, though, given that the society which denigrated "free thinkers" in the 19th century is no longer around to enforce social conformity to public religious practice.

In other words, this is probably a good thing. Certainly this is:

However, new poll numbers released today from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life show that Americans are overwhelmingly open-minded about faith. A majority of Americans -- 70 percent -- say that many religions, not just their own, can lead to eternal life.

I'm also left wondering what "no religious affiliation" actually means in a post-denominational world. I know a lot of people who attended church regularly, but might not consider themselves members of the church. Denominationalism is not the social identifier it used to be; hence the rise of non-denominational churches and "mega-churches" which are practically denominations unto themselves. So it could be fewer people are going to church (which would simply be the continuation of a trend begun three decades or more ago), or it could be fewer are identifying themselves with a particular church. Mega-churches in particular are known as places where advertising is essential, because the turnover in attendees is so great. It may be a huge number of people attend a mega-church in any given time period. But how many stay there long enough to consider themselves "affiliated" with it?

We may be, in other words, simply seeing the "Bowling Alone" phenomenon in a different setting. If I learned anything about this subject in seminary (and it was old news then, over a decade ago now), it's that it's a complex one, best handled by sociologists like Robert Wuthnow, and best understood in its complexity, not from the results of one poll or another.

I know you think you understand what I said....

One other observation about the torture memos:

The techniques used were, all agree, "reverse engineered" from SERE techniques, which were themselves taken from experiences of captives in the Korean war. Not that many of these techniques were new, or even original. But the effort was made to involve as many bodies of knowledge as possible, as many disciplines as possible. And all such knowledge was used to engage techne, knowledge for making or doing, as opposed to episteme, knowledge engaged in understanding. The techniques SERE trained soldiers in were used by the Koreans for the reasons torture has always been used: to extract "confessions." But there are at least three different meanings of the word confession. In our allegiance to techne over episteme, we've lost sight of that, too.

Techne is the knowledge we esteem today. Episteme is the knowledge we deride. Distinctions between the two barely exist, for techne is the key to understanding how the world works (if something performs its designed function, that is further evidence of our mastery over the world through knowledge), and episteme is merely "theory" that fails to do anything other than obscure our grasp of techne. Theology was once the "mother" of the sciences, not because it provided the literal grounding for understanding the universe, but because it provided the episteme for our understanding. Now we denigrate theology because it is not empiricism and praise, neither science nor empiricism, but their products, as the highest and best use of human reason.

And the problem with this?

First, we lose sight of the ambiguity of words in our insistence that, like the right tool for technology, words have only one meaning, one usage, and that is the one we value most. "Confession" in theology and religion means a public dedication to a deity and a system of belief. "Confession" in the legal realm means admission of guilt to a crime. But "confession" in the common usage means an admission of truth, an absolute telling of what is. With more episteme, we might understand the complexity of a concept like "confession." Wed to our techne, though, we are quite sure we know how words work, and that they work in only one way, and that "truth" is an object hidden in the human psyche which fear and pain will ferret out. It isn't true, of course; but we fill in our ignorance with whatever knowledge lies at hand; and more often than not, the knowledge is techne, not episteme.

Second, we denigrate our humanity in the process. Is torture wrong because it fails the test of utility? Is it right, because it provides the greatest good for the greatest number? The result of advancing techne over episteme is that we discuss torture, not in terms of its morality, but of its efficacy. The central claim of morality, the one even the 19th century agnostics and existential philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre feared losing, was its position as final arbiter of human behavior in all cases. Even as he argued all ethics are a matter of personal choice because personal choice is all that is possible in an existential universe, Sartre understood the importance of the right choice (he did not champion amorality). But in a society that values technology over all, even over human life, the only moral authority is utilitarianism: does the the outcome provide the greatest good for the greatest number?

Thus are the ends made to justify the means. Thus has technology has made moral relativists of us (almost) all.

The Prime Directive

Al-Jazeera reports:

[T]he chaplains appear to have found a way around the regulation known as General Order Number One.

"Do we know what it means to proselytise?" Captain Emmit Furner, a military chaplain, says to the gathering.

"It is General Order Number One," an unidentified soldier replies.

But Watt says "you can't proselytise but you can give gifts."

Um, no; the rule of law isn't that stupid; loopholes are not that easily made:

"The translated bibles were never distributed as far as we know, because the soldier understood that if he distributed them he would be in violation of general order 1, and he would be subject to punishment."

[U.S. military spokeswoman, Major Jennifer Willis] said she was aware of at least one case of a soldier who had been punished for giving out coins that had biblical inscriptions on them.

Jeremy Schahill notes that Lt. Gen. William Boykin made some very inflammatory remarks about Islam and Christianity. What he doesn't note is that, while this footage Al Jazeera just broadcast was over a year old, Lt. Gen. Boykin retired from the military in August, 2007. Which is not to say Lt. Gen. Boykin can't be a poster child for religious intolerance in the military (he certainly worked hard on his own to attain that dubious honor), but he has nothing at all, at least directly, to do with this case.

Are there religious fanatics in the military? Undoubtedly. Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, would seem to be one such. In the video, he's shown telling soldiers they must "hunt people for Jesus," a clear reference to the Great Commission side of Christian soteriology. But is the chaplain directing the soldiers to proselytize Afghans? Or to proselytize fellow soldiers? Or to display Christ-like behavior, to model Christian ethics and teaching the better to persuade people to join you? Those questions are where Major Willis' response becomes relevant again:

... U.S. military spokeswoman, Major Jennifer Willis, said the comments from the sermon were taken out of context and chaplains were told to make clear to soldiers that they could not proselytize while serving.

Lt. Col. Hensley is telling his listeners to evangelize, but read his remarks carefully, and consider exactly what he says:

In a video obtained by Al Jazeera and broadcast Monday, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility "to be witnesses for him."

"The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down," he says.

"Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business."

Is that directed at Afghans? At soldiers? At US civilian personnel and private contractors? It is simply impossible to know for sure. Does the chaplain make his meaning clear? Not in these excerpts. But does that mean we know what he said?

No.

The chaplain may have been preaching evangelical soteriology, exhorting his listeners to display Christ-like behavior, the better to draw others to their beliefs, and so offer the salvation they see as true and salvific. Or he may have been violating General Order No. 1, and telling his flock to convert the heathen. From news accounts, we simply can't tell.

So what we have here is excerpts from one sermon, which the military says has been taken out of context, and one overly zealous soldier who, the military reports, wasn't allowed to violated General Order No. 1. Conflicting prime directives, if you will, and which one prevailed? The military tells us theirs did. Al Jazeera is less than sanguine, but what the military decrees, and what individual soldiers attempt to do, can be two very different things. This isn't a clash of civilizations, it's a clash of cultures. But even which cultures, and who is clashing, is not even clear.

Morality for thee....

Ultimately, here's the question: is torture a moral absolute, one that cannot be violated, forgiven, excused, or explained away? Or is it just another legal technicality?

Let's ask Alberto Gonzales:

AG: Here’s what I’ll say. I think that the U.S. government provided advice to CIA interrogators based upon the best legal reasoning by the lawyers in the Department of Justice. Was it torture, when that advice was given? No. Were the interrogations harsh? Yes. Did they save lives? Absolutely.

You will note he deftly turns the question from one of legality (it was legal when we said so!) to one of efficacy: "Did they save lives? Absolutely.") Presumably, of course, we have to take his word for that, since to reveal how it saved lives would be to reveal important national security information. But it takes a real Christian to parse the law like a Pharisee.* Here's John Ashcroft on the subject:

Let me follow this. The U.S. military prosecuted our own troops for using waterboarding in the Philippines, tried the Japanese for war crimes for using it against the Allies and the U.S. troops in WWII. And yet, we’re suggesting that it’s not torture. [Applause]

JA: First of all, the word waterboarding can be defined in a lot of ways.

Let’s talk about the definition that was used in these memos—this is a legal document—of the definition of waterboarding. “Lying on a gurney that is inclined with an angle of 10-15 degrees from horizontal, with the detainee on his back. . . head toward the head end of the gurney, cloth pasted over the detainees’ face, and cold water poured on the cloth approximately 16-18 inches—this is the definition. The question is—

AG: Dan, the opinions have been withdrawn. There are no longer binding position of the department…

I understand that, but that doesn’t mean, as lawyers, we can’t sit and discuss whether this was a correct legal assessment. Because it seems to me, in my opinion, that it is impossible to explain how this particular procedure would not be considered torture. [Applause]

JA: Members of the department went and underwent the procedure.

Once or twice, not 266 times.

JA: Many members of our military in training undergo the procedure—

Once or twice.

JA: Were you there?

No, the memos explain it. It’s once or twice.

JA: OK. I don’t know how many times they underwent it. Let me just put it this way. We relied—I relied—on the best judgments of the lawyers in the department. There are 110,000 employees in the department, the lawyers are expert, and they came up with an opinion that became part of a memo. Later, some lawyers came to me and said "We’re not confident that that memo best expresses the law here." And I said to myself, "Well, I’m the attorney general, and if we have stuff out there that’s not the best expression, we ought to amend it. We ought to get the best information we can." You know we’re in a war, you give it to the president, you give information to the other individuals, but you say, you know, they deserve the best judgment. They reworked the memo, and they came a second time, these professionals did, and according to the definition of torture, they came to the conclusion that the procedure as provided along with the advice to our personnel did not amount to legal torture.

Did they get it wrong?

JA: I don’t think they got it wrong. It’s different now.

It’s different in what sense?

JA: Because the law has been changed. [John Ashcroft called me after the event to correct a mistake he made. He wanted to let me know that, in retrospect and after conducting more research on the matter, he realized that no such change in the law was ever enacted.]

The definition of torture?

JA: Yes! The definition of torture.

So the answer then, it sounds like, is the only reason you still believe the legal assessment was correct was because there’s been a change in the law?

JA: I believe that the work of the department by these professionals came to the right conclusion.

That waterboarding is not torture.

JA: That, as described, and as commented on in their memorandum, that it was not torture.

Because if we parse the definition carefully enough, if we twist and turn and mangle the ordinary meanings of words and make superfine distinctions that have no relevance to real-life situations or even to the concept of "interrogation," then what is "medieval" in the worst sense of that word is actually quite legal and American because, after all:

We’re dealing with an enemy that has sworn that they want to destroy us. And they call us the Great Satan, and they have continued to say that they want to fight us and that they want to injure us, and I take them at their word on that.

And, as Condi Rice said, al Qaeda is a greater threat to this country than Nazi Germany, which only overran all of Europe, invaded North Africa, went to war against Russia, and nearly succeeded in invading Britain. But al Qaeda (or somebody) has called us the "Great Satan," so that means torture is a-ok!

What is this all about? Start with the language of Wikipedia on the concept of "Universal Jurisdiction:"

Universal jurisdiction or universality principle is a principle in international law whereby states claim criminal jurisdiction over persons whose alleged crimes were committed outside the boundaries of the prosecuting state, regardless of nationality, country of residence, or any other relation with the prosecuting country. The state backs its claim on the grounds that the crime committed is considered a crime against all, which any state is authorized to punish, as it is too serious to tolerate jurisdictional arbitrage . The concept of universal jurisdiction is therefore closely linked to the idea that certain international norms are erga omnes, or owed to the entire world community, as well as the concept of jus cogens - that certain international law obligations are binding on all states and cannot be modified by treaty.

...

According to Amnesty International, a proponent of universal jurisdiction, certain crimes pose so serious a threat to the international community as a whole, that states have a logical and moral duty to prosecute an individual responsible for it; no place should be a safe haven for those who have committed genocide, crimes against humanity, extrajudicial executions, war crimes, torture and forced disappearances.

It is a concept that has international recognition, even by the British in the Augusto Pinochet case. Its roots are clearly in the Nuremberg trials, and in the concept of a universal morality, or "human rights." Small wonder, then, the Bush Administration, in particular, didn't want to recognize it.

Am I accusing Mr. Ashcroft, who has been very public in espousing his religious beliefs, of being a "bad Christian," or even a hypocrite? No. I am pointing out the paucity of his legal acumen, however, and the weakness of his reasoning. He is hoist on his own words. It is, however, odd that a man uncomfortable with the bare female breast of a statue representing Justice, would be so comfortable with carefully wrought rules delineating precisely which forms of pain inflicted on prisoners, is legally allowed. I am convinced the "Great Commission" overrules "Whatever you did for the least of these" for people like Ashcroft, but that's another argument.

When Reinhold Niebuhr published Moral Man and Immoral Society, his brother Richard chastised him for undermining Christian ethics, and giving a reason for people to profess Christianity without following it. Niebuhr didn't invent this line of excusing religious teachings for expediency's sake, of course; he merely described it more accurately than those who engaged in it ever could.



*I speak in anger, and employ the caricature of the Pharisees present in the New Testament. I do not use that term with any attempt at historical accuracy.

Here is the church, here is the steeple...

Open the doors, and where are all the people?

Pastor Dan faces the hard question: what is church for?

I'm honestly not sure that you could make a firm correlation between church size and fidelity to the gospel. My experience has been generally that small churches are more true to the good news as I understand it, but I'm biased. There's nothing necessary about big churches being faithless or vice versa.

What does seem to hold water is that Evangelical churches have largely succeeded in the past few decades because they've been more willing to engage the popular culture as a form of marketing. That's made them grow, but at what cost? (I say that without judgment.)

Galli doesn't take up the problem of someone like Joel Osteen, but it's worth mentioning. Osteen - and others like him - are theologically heterodox, often sounding more like New Age psychological gurus than traditional Christian preachers. They are also often of dubious moral character, as anyone who's read Sarah Posner's God's Profits will readily agree.

The trouble is, they're growing like wildfire, and to many uninformed people inside or outside the church, they appear to be just like any other preacher. It's one thing to give up church members because of something you did. It's quite another to lose them because some charlatan either lured them away or convinced them that all religion really is corrupt.

Purely as a matter of faith, I have no doubt that the Christian church will muddle through. God will keep a faithful and authentic remnant going, despite the best intentions of most of us. That doesn't bother me.

But as a matter of the intersection of faith and politics, I do not know how we can solve this problem. I suppose it begins with denouncing borderline frauds like Joel and Victoria Osteen. What can be done beyond that, I do not know. The fact is that we live in a diverse society, and not everyone cares about definitions of Christianity. That limits what we can say in the public square, and that in turn means we might have more than a little difficulty distinguishing between Evangelicals, Mainliners, and shallower waters.

Terminology in this kind of discussion gets tricky already. Is "success" equal to "church growth"? It's been assumed so since the book of Acts, but is there a necessary correlation? Are we proven true in our kerygma because many people agree with us? Conversely, are we proven true because no one wants to listen to us? Isn't there somewhere in between these two?

Funny thing, I was reading this passage in Proust just last night:

He worried me dreadfully by talking about the Verdurins; I was afraid he might ask me to have him received there, which would have been enough, because of the jealousy I would not have ceased to feel, to mar all the pleasure that I enjoyed there with Albertine. But happily, Robert admitted that, quite to the contrary, he wished above all not to meet them. "No," he said, "I find that type of clerical circle exasperating." I did not at first understand the adjective "clerical" as applied to the Verdurins, but [Robert] Saint-Loup's concluding words enlightened me as to his thought, and to the concessions to linguistic fashion that one is often surprised to find adopted by intelligent men. "They're circles," he said, "where they play at being tribes, where they play be being congregations and chapels. You're not going to tell me it isn't a small sect; they're all sweetness and light to the people who belong, and couldn't be more contemptuous of the ones who don't. The question isn't, as for Hamlet, to be or not to be, but to be one of them or not to be one of them."

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, tr. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005). p. 409-410.

A fair summation of churches, on one side. And certainly "mega-churches" have "succeeded" through marketing such imagery, such ideas. Lakewood Church used to advertise "We Believe In You!", and the largest Baptist church in town used to run TV ads exhorting viewers to "Come Home"; meaning, of course, to come to their church. Joel Osteen especially is a marketing machine, and preaches a gospel of wealth Matt Taibbi pretty well summed up:

Of all the vile, fake, lying-ass, money-grubbing shyster scumbags on the face of this planet, there is perhaps none more loathsome than Osteen, a human haircut with plastic baseball-size teeth who has made a fortune selling the appalling only-in-America idea that terrestrial greed is actually a form of Christian devotion. "God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us," Osteen once wrote. This is the revolting, snake-oil-selling dickhead that John McCain actually chose to pimp as number one on his list of inspirational authors. So much for "go, sell everything you have and give to the poor," and all that other hippie crap from the New Testament.

Rick Warren has made himself into an industry selling the "Purpose Driven" life and church, but at one point made it clear no gaiis need apply to his church. He's since back-pedalled on all of that because he doesn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. But if that really is a moral issue for him, is his morality best described by a weathervane? Is anybody's?

I do have to say, in response to this legitimate concern by Pastor Dan:

The trouble is, they're growing like wildfire, and to many uninformed people inside or outside the church, they appear to be just like any other preacher. It's one thing to give up church members because of something you did. It's quite another to lose them because some charlatan either lured them away or convinced them that all religion really is corrupt.

Welcome to my world. I grew up in Southern Baptist dominated East Texas, where I was made to feel heterodox because I wasn't a bible-thumpin', evangelical, God-fearin' Christian who knew he was saved. (It was the favorite question of my high-school Christian peers: "Are you saved?" I always answered, in good Lutheran fashion, thanks to my Calvinism through the Presbyterian church, and my Lutheranism through Kierkegaard: "I hope so." I'd still answer that way.) Charlatans have always been with us, going back to the battles between Peter and Paul and coming up through the orthodox Catholics who regarded Luther and his ilk as such, and ending...? Well, it hasn't ended. And it never will.

Which puts us back on a darkling plain, where ignorant armies clash by night. Or among little cliques, all congratulating themselves on how special their group is. Or it merely places us in the world, faithfully seeking God and faithfully holding to our confession among others who share our confession. And the all-too human question is always: how many more such people is enough?

Jesus Wept

CNN

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

Well, not really.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

And dig a bit deeper:

The religious group most likely to say torture is never justified was Protestant denominations -- such as Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians -- categorized as "mainline" Protestants, in contrast to evangelicals. Just over three in 10 of them said torture is never justified. A quarter of the religiously unaffiliated said the same, compared with two in 10 white non-Hispanic Catholics and one in eight evangelicals.

One could say that those who attend church regularly and sit through Protestant worship especially, are inured to pain and endurance and so less concerned with the sufferings of others; but that would be unkind. And, to be fair, looking at these charts, the distinctions between those who attend church weekly, monthly, or never, seem almost statistically insignificant (it goes from 51% with some kind of support down to 42%). What's appalling, to me, is that even 42% of Americans seem to support torture. On the other hand:

The analysis is based on a Pew Research Center survey of 742 American adults conducted April 14-21. It did not include analysis of groups other than white evangelicals, white non-Hispanic Catholics, white mainline Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated, because the sample size was too small.

So the whole thing may be perfectly meaningless. Still, the correlation between evangelicals who still prefer their sinners to be in the hands of an angry God, and mainline Protestants, is interesting. And saddening.*

Sometimes I'm not sure we worship the same God at all.

*Perhaps I should note that Jonathan Edwards was a Congregationalist, a church now largely a part of the United Church of Christ, itself hardly an "evangelical" denomination, as that term is currently used. It's also interesting, despite his fire and brimstone theology (which I reject), that his reading of the Deuteronomist is essentially mine.

So it goes.

Back to Reality

Let us not forget the APA has much to answer for:

According to current and former government officials, the CIA's secret waterboarding program was designed and assured to be safe by two well-paid psychologists now working out of an unmarked office building in Spokane, Washington.

"It's May, it's May! The lusty month of May!"

Don't quite know how Christianity became so associated with sexual repression and sensual asceticism, when its scriptures include the Song of Solomon:

1: The song of songs, which is Solomon's.
2: Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.
3: Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.
4: Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee.
5: I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
6: Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me: my mother's children were angry with me; they made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.
7: Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon: for why should I be as one that turneth aside by the flocks of thy companions?
8: If thou know not, O thou fairest among women, go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock, and feed thy kids beside the shepherds' tents.
9: I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh's chariots.
10: Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold.
11: We will make thee borders of gold with studs of silver.
12: While the king sitteth at his table, my spikenard sendeth forth the smell thereof.
13: A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.
14: My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of En-gedi.
15: Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes.
16: Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green.
17: The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.

1: I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
2: As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
3: As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
4: He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.
5: Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.
6: His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.
7: I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.
8: The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.
9: My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.
10: My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
11: For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
12: The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
13: The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
14: O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
15: Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.
16: My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.
17: Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.

1: Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead.
2: Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.
3: Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely: thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.
4: Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.
5: Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.
6: Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense.
7: Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.
8: Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon: look from the top of Amana, from the top of Shenir and Hermon, from the lions' dens, from the mountains of the leopards.
9: Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.
10: How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!
11: Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.
12: A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
13: Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,
14: Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:
15: A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.
16: Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.

I know it gets explained away as an allegory, but as a friend of mine in seminary said (and she came to seminary as a former fundamentalist), there's no way to read this except as what it is: erotic poetry. And there's nothing wrong with that.

So May Day ain't so pagan, after all!

Don't bother, they're here

What I was getting at here, put more succinctly, is that for every problem, there is always someone to blame as the solution. Now that Americans and CIA agents and the very politicians that D.C. journalists covered for the last 8 years (at least; Rummy and Cheney go back to the Nixon Administration) are accused of committing or directing torture, suddenly torture may not be so evil after all. In fact, we needed to do it because, well...there was this ticking time bomb....and, and, they were terrorists!

Or now that Barack Obama is President, all our problems are due to those politicians (it was the Court, actually) who took prayer out of our schools and the "media" who don't respect our "tea parties." Or it's the fact that some public figure is NOK, and yet he keeps being treated like he is!

And if we could just "fix" them, that, those! then everything would be O.K. again.

Bollocks.

As DAS put it, in comments below (slightly edited for relevance, nothing more):

[Y]ou can't count on people doing the right thing, alas. I know I'm too much aligned with the Deuteronomist for the tastes around this blog on this sort of issue, but the system is supposed to be constructed in such a way that you don't have to count on people doing the right thing. What it counts on (to -- perhaps mis -- quote Madison) is ambition being made to counteract ambition.

The system was broken not because the Gang of Four failed to do the right thing and stop the torture, but because there was no motivation for them to stop the torture and every motivation not to rock the boat.

Democratic Republics work because ambition can be made to counteract ambition. But when that system fails -- either because ambition is made to be sycophantic to other ambition or because of a perhaps deliberate plot to make ambition counteracting ambition seem silly and distracting (c.f. Clintongate) -- the democratic republican system itself fails.

I agree with DAS, especially about the lessons of the Deuteronomists. Those lessons, like the lessons of the prophets, revolve around one central truth: this problem is your doing, not some "other's." It's not the fault of God, or Babylon, or anyone outside the group, or some lesser group within the group. It's your fault. Your responsibility. And your burden. You want it fixed? Fix yourself. No other fix is possible or credible.

Or, to put it even more succinctly:

You check the speck in another's eye.
You cannot see the tree in your own.

John Dominic Crossan, The Essential Jesus.

Send in the Clowns

I was going to tie this:

WE don’t like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a “Trench Coat Mafia,” or, as ABC News maintained at the time, “part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement.” In the new best seller “Columbine,” the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.

On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes II.” Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of “24.” If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values”: promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.

We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: “By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.” When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.

Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to “24”; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.

Together with this, from an e-mail I received recently:

Attached is the Homeland Security Report on "Rightwing Extremism" that has made the news lately. It is intended to discuss radical groups that evoke hatred against certain groups (abortion rights advicates, [sic] immigrants, etc.) using unique current socio-political and socio-economic conditions (our first African American President and the poor global economy) as a foundation for this hatred. On the face of it, I don't have any problem with Homeland Security raising awareness on the rise of the activitiies [sic] of these idiot extremists. White supremist [sic] hate-mongers are as dangerous to our freedoms as the gun-control advocates ever thought about being. However, I can see where the net this report casts implicates any strong "right wing" advocate as a "potential terrorist threat", not just extremist groups. I myself, can identify with these concerns about our government's intrusion into private rights and the potential to undermine capitalism in favor of socialism. The real question in my mind is at what point in time during the evolution of a socialistic or tyrannical government does a true patriot willing to defend the principles of the country he/she loves become a "radical extremist/terrorist"? Where would Thomas Payne have been categorized in this report 233 years ago?

I also worry that the peaceful demonstration of the frustration with the way things are such as last Wednesday's "tea parties" across the country were not worthy of hardly any prime-time media coverage from the "alphabet networks". I guarantee you that if those demonstrations had been focused on the rights of a particular ethnic group, pro-abortionist or other entity, these networks would have been all over it. I would have found it much more gratifying and credible had this Homeland Security Report discussed the potential for the mainstream media's absolute sheltering of any criticism of the current governmental policy changes to also be a factor in promoting extremist actions due to the frustration such biased reporting causes.

Together with this tale from Columbine, a link to Scopes from another e-mail I received the other day. The interesting wrinkle is the preamble to the e-mail included the Snopes link, and even noted this "message" has been around since 1999. But the e-mail still insisted that despite Mr. Scott's "rambling opinion that gun control laws wouldn't have stopped the Columbine High School shootings, and that those shootings were somehow related to a lack of religion in schools," that: "Regardless, seems the statement of Darrell Scott articulately says enough about the real issues!!!!" Which would be, somehow, the lack of religion in schools and how that relates to gun violence. (Even as the Texas Legislature is considering allowing a new exception to its concealed handgun laws, to permit students and faculty and parents to bring guns to college classes, for "safety.")

What ties all of those together? This:

For the most part, we've failed so far. It was more than a little disheartening to learn of the crippling fear inside the newsroom of the New York Times, where editors and reporters were so afraid of offending, so afraid of anyone thinking that the newspaper was taking a side, that the news staffers refused to label globally outlawed practices such as waterboarding as "torture." On the same morning we learned about that wishy-washiness at our most influential newspaper, David Broder of the Washington Post was trying to argue that the torture story isn't about obeying the law, or about our national soul, but "cloaks an unworthy desire for vengeance." I believe what Broder is really saying is that it's impossible for him to believe that someone who lunches across from him at the Palm or the Capitol Grille is capable of what Frank Rich described as "the banality of evil," that someone who wears a nice tie or has a kid in Little League could condone or encourage unlawful, violent and sometimes even lethal acts -- acts which we are now learning were carried out to achieve the dubious political ends of our leaders.

Or even this. The idea that somebody somewhere is NOK, and so can be excluded from the discussion, cast out of the sacred circle, exorcised from the inner sanctum, purged from the holy of holies. The idea that purification will make us all better, that "those people" do "those things," but not "our people." The idea that we could ever meet the enemy, and he could ever be us.

Gobsmacked

Porter Goss:

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

-- The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate
intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA
was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.

-- We understood what the CIA was doing.

-- We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.

-- We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.

-- On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from
Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

And I'm whomper jawed to hear that Congress is collectively refusing to take responsibility for something it didn't do. It is clear to me that if Congress knew CIA agents were engaging in torture, then 18 U.S. C 2340 can't possibly apply! It must have all been legal! Everybody knows Congressional silence is consent! If you tell Congress you're going to torture, and Congress doesn't say "Oh, no you're not!", then it's double super-secret King's X, and it makes torture legal!

I'm pretty sure that's in the U.S. Code somewhere....

And I'm guessing this:

We must not forget: Our intelligence allies overseas view our inability to maintain secrecy as a reason to question our worthiness as a partner. These allies have been vital in almost every capture of a terrorist.

means the "black prisons" should have stayed "black!" It was really embarrassing when European nations found out we'd violated their laws by transporting"detainees" via their airports to secret prisons! It was even more embarrassing when they found out we consider all non-U.S. citizens (and certain U.S citizens, like anyone in the continental U.S. immediately after 9/11 who "looked Muslim") as persons not protected by habeas corpus or due process of law or any of the other standards we claimed to represent and model to a lawless world. I mean, how can they trust us as partners if we idly toss aside our most cherished ideals, and then lie about it? Oh, wait, I mean: how can they trust us if we reveal our lies?

Above all, Mr. Goss is right about this:

Trading security for partisan political popularity will ensure that our secrets are not secret and that our intelligence is destined to fail us.

If we learned nothing from the past 8 years, at least we learned that.

As Much As You Can

And even if you cannot make your life the way you want it,
this much, at least, try to do
as much as you can; don't cheapen it
with too much intercourse with society,
with too much movement and conversation.

Don't cheapen it by taking it about,
making the rounds with it, exposing it
to the everyday inanity
of relations and connections,
so it becomes like a stranger, burdensome.

C.P. Cavafy, tr. Daniel Mendelssohn

"Torture"

Title 16, Part 1, Chapter 113C, U.S. Code

§ 2340. Definitions

As used in this chapter—
(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;
(2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from—
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and
(3) “United States” means the several States of the United States, the District of Columbia, and the commonwealths, territories, and possessions of the United States.

§ 2340A. Torture

(a) Offense.— Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.
(b) Jurisdiction.— There is jurisdiction over the activity prohibited in subsection (a) if—
(1) the alleged offender is a national of the United States; or
(2) the alleged offender is present in the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or alleged offender.
(c) Conspiracy.— A person who conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties (other than the penalty of death) as the penalties prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

The Real Evil that Men Do

Christopher Hitchens, on being waterboarded:

As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured.

The Levin report argues that torture began in an attempt to establish evidence that would connect 9/11 and al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein. I think this is entirely too kind.

It was ordered by Cheney and Rumsfeld, and approved by Bush Cabinet members and Bush himself, because they could do it. There is a relationship between torturer and tortured, even at a remove: and they wanted that relationship. How many of them, after all, had ever been to war, and yet they wanted war desperately. How many of them had ever interrogated a suspect? And yet they affirmed that torture was Administration policy.

Yes, there is a depth of evil here that is very, very difficult to fathom.

"AMERICA DOES NOT *&@! TORTURE!"

It's almost a pity the FBI had the sense to get out of the "enhanced interrogation" business the moment they saw it (this per the Levin report). Had they stayed in, journalists might be interviewing former FBI agents and end up, quite accidentally, talking to real experts in interrogation, rather than "former CIA operatives" who obviously think "torture works!"

Apparently "Matthew Alexander," a former CIA officer with real interrogation experience, and a book to prove it, wasn't available to NPR.

Thankfully, he was available to Keith Olbermann:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

NPR also mentioned a Pew Research poll showing almost 50% of Americans support the torture. Actually, what the poll found was 16% supported the torture of "suspected terrorists" often, and 28% supported it "sometimes," and that was in February of this year. Before, in other words, the "torture memos" came out, detailing with painful clarity exactly what torture is allowed and how often it was done. And before Shepard Smith blew up, twice, on camera, about America and how America doesn't torture. Funny how details like those memos can change opinions.

Mr. Gerecht tries to make much the same point in the interview, arguing that the question of prosecution will turn on the question of public support, or not, for "enhanced interrogation" techniques. Well, that might be a defense raised by a lawyer: "Do you think it's okay to interrogate a suspect rigorously if he's a terrorist and a Muslim and a brown person and not an American?" But criminal prosecutions are not subject to plebiscite; and polls on American support for torture of "terrorists" is not a legal defense to a crime. And as Mr. Arnold points out, and the Levin report makes clear, all the useful information was gathered by regular interrogation; torture yielded nothing.

Even Robert Mueller has said so.

As Mr. "Alexander" said last night: if you have to do it 183 times, it's not working. Surely even Mr. Gerecht can understand that.