Reading notes

Bob Herbert is a hero for continuing to press this extraordinary rendition (torture) issue. For if we do not change this U.S. policy, we are lost. In today’s “Thrown to the Wolves“ —

In the fall of 2002 Mr. [Maher] Arar, a Canadian citizen, suddenly found himself caught up in the cruel mockery of justice that the Bush administration has substituted for the rule of law in the post-Sept. 11 world. While attempting to change planes at Kennedy Airport on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities, interrogated and thrown into jail. He was not charged with anything, and he never would be charged with anything, but his life would be ruined.

Mr. Arar was surreptitiously flown out of the United States to Jordan and then driven to Syria, where he was kept like a nocturnal animal in an unlit, underground, rat-infested cell that was the size of a grave. From time to time he was tortured. …

Among the worst moments, he said, were the times he could hear babies crying in a nearby cell where women were imprisoned. He recalled hearing one woman pleading with a guard for several days for milk for her child.

He could hear other prisoners screaming as they were tortured. …

The Syrians, who tortured him, have concluded that Mr. Arar is not linked in any way to terrorism. …

Nothing can excuse the behavior of the United States in this episode. Mr. Arar was deliberately dispatched by U.S. officials to Syria, a country that — as they knew — practices torture. And if Canadian officials hadn’t intervened, he most likely would not have been heard from again.

Mr. Arar is the most visible victim of the reprehensible U.S. policy known as extraordinary rendition, in which individuals are abducted by American authorities and transferred, without any legal rights whatever, to a regime skilled in the art of torture.

I think commenter Scarpia predicts accurately:

Humanity simply cannot countenance this kind of malevolent incompetence, and when [U.S.] power to intimidate the remainder of the globe is gone, they won’t hesitate to act on their righteous outrage.

U.S. brothers and sisters, do not hitch your wagon to this hellbound star. If already hitched, cut the chain now:

Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me. …

Depart from me, accursed ones.

—Jesus, speaking in Matthew as “the King”

Torture is one thing (turn, turn, turn)
for which there is never a season (turn, turn, turn),
yet the heavenly counsel remains:
Turn, turn, turn.

[via a new lively discussion initiated by Armando]

additional thought a few minutes later …

Most pragmatic reason to change this U.S. policy:
Torture will always return to hurt your babies

either —

• by direct abduction according to the policy (and as Mr. Arar’s example shows, innocence is no protection; there doesn’t have to be a reason) —OR—

• by others who are following our example in torturing prisoners (prisoners who are likely to be U.S. soldiers — IOW, our children and grandchildren)

Paul’s words have never been more appropriate —

Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.

2005-02-28 update:
Bob has more today:

Mr. Arar’s is the case we know about. How many other individuals have disappeared at the hands of the Bush administration? How many have been sent, like the victims of a lynch mob, to overseas torture centers? How many people are being held in the C.I.A.’s highly secret offshore prisons? Who are they and how are they being treated? Have any been wrongly accused? If so, what recourse do they have?

If the U.S. mainstream media’s continuing silence about the Guckert/Gannon scandal demonstrates anything, it’s that the mainstream media can be silenced. If it can be silenced on a salacious story it’d normally spend weeks of round-the-clock headlines on, can it not be silenced on nearly anything else that paints the Administration in a bad light? I assess the answer as Yes; hence I assume we have no idea how many people have been disappeared because that info is not being reported.

Put another way, if you haven’t heard much about Guckert/Gannon, a journalistically irresistable front-page story if ever there was one, you’re certainly not going to hear much about people being extraordinarily rendered. If being informed is important, these days assuming “no news” means “good news” is bad news.

President Bush spent much of last week lecturing other nations about freedom, democracy and the rule of law. It was a breathtaking display of chutzpah. He seemed to me like a judge who starves his children and then sits on the bench to hear child abuse cases.

I can’t watch. I squint and he goes wavy transparent, then I see through the glass, darkly, something like the Mouth of Sauron speaking behind and through him. Now maybe I’ve watched too much sf/fantasy, but I think this image is not so farfetched if it’s true as Jesus says that “by their fruits ye shall know them“ — torture is, after all, an “evil fruit” that stinks to high heaven any way you slice it. It’s impossible not to ask, Where the hell did this come from? What must the tree look like that bore it?

Every good tree bringeth forth good fruit;
but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit,
neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down,
and cast into the fire.

Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

2005-03-28 update:
Bob has still more today:

The Bush administration is desperately trying to keep the full story from emerging. But there is no longer any doubt that prisoners seized by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have been killed, tortured, sexually humiliated and otherwise grotesquely abused. …

The primary aim of the lawsuit [against Rumsfeld] is quite simply to re-establish the rule of law. “It’s that fundamental idea that nobody is above the law,” said Michael Posner, executive director of Human Rights First. “The violations here were created by policies that deliberately undermined the rule of law. That needs to be challenged.”

Lawlessness should never be an option for the United States. Once the rule of law has been extinguished, you’re left with an environment in which moral degeneracy can flourish and a great nation can lose its soul.

[via Melanie]

I don’t know what an “abomination of desolation” (alt wording) would look like exactly, but I’m guessing something like this.

I consider automatic weapons in a house of worship to be a “desecrating obscenity.” But that’s just me.

Then again maybe I’m not the only one who’d interpret the festivities this way:

   “Hide the cross with the flag, boys, we gonna glorify Caesar.”
   “Cel-e-brate vio-lence, cel-e-brate!”

In the proverbial Temple?

<understatement class=”bodacious”>
I just don’t see this going over well on Judgment Day.
</understatement>

[via Markos]

Fr. John Dear writes —

Last September, I spoke to some 2,000 students during their annual lecture at a Baptist college in Pennsylvania. After a short prayer service for peace centered on the Beatitudes, I took the stage and got right to the point. “Now let me get this straight,” I said. “Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ which means he does not say, ‘Blessed are the warmakers,’ which means, the warmakers are not blessed, which means warmakers are cursed, which means, if you want to follow the nonviolent Jesus you have to work for peace, which means, we all have to resist this horrific, evil war on the people of Iraq.”

With that, the place exploded, and 500 students stormed out. The rest of them then started chanting, “Bush! Bush! Bush!”

So much for my speech. Not to mention the Beatitudes.

This is grievously fscked up. Politics trumps red-letter verses. Who’d have thought? “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” comes to mind as relevant. Is this not what idolatry means?

Wow, I didn’t know about this particular O’Connor book; it’s utterly apt —

I am reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s great book, “Wise Blood,” where her outrageous character Hazel Motes is so fed up with Christian hypocrisy that he forms his own church, the “Church of Christ without Christ,” “where the lame don’t walk, the blind don’t see, and the dead don’t rise.” That’s where we are headed today. …

The diagnosis —

We have become a culture of Pharisees. Instead of practicing an authentic spirituality of compassion, nonviolence, love and peace, we as a collective people have become self-righteous, arrogant, powerful, murderous hypocrites who dominate and kill others in the name of God. …

We side with the rulers, the bankers, and the corporate millionaires and billionaires. …

We have become a mean, vicious people, what the bible calls “stiff-necked people.” And we do it all with the mistaken belief that we have the blessing of God. …

In the old days, the early Christians had big words for such behavior, such lies. They were called “blasphemous, idolatrous, heretical, hypocritical and sinful.” … As we Christians go along with the Bush administration and the American empire, we betray Jesus, renounce his teachings, and create a “Church of Christ without Christ,” as Flannery O’Connor foresaw.

The prescription —

The first thing we Christians have to do in this time is not to become good Pharisees. Instead, we have to try all over again to follow the dangerous, nonviolent, troublemaking Jesus. I believe war, weapons, corporate greed and systemic injustice are an abomination in the sight of God. They are the definition of mortal sin. [These things] mock God and threaten to destroy God’s gift of creation. If you want to seek the living God, you have to pit your entire life against war, weapons, greed and injustice — and their perpetrators. It is as simple as that.

Yes. And perhaps the second thing, radiating out from the first thing, is not to get caught up in the ongoing blaming, judging, and dismissing, which is my particular weakness: lots of expletives arise in my throat when I read about and observe people embracing these evils. But the truth is, what’s needed is prophetic truthtelling, which I account Fr. John as doing, and then caring about these afflicted ones.

I was knocked sideways a few days ago with the realization that when someone acts this way — say, someone who’d chant “Bush! Bush! Bush!” on being confronted with Jesus’ words in the Beatitudes — against all reason, common sense, and even any partial congruence with what they say they believe, that one is being ravaged by spiritual cancer. Would I condemn and shun a person afflicted by malignant physical cancer? Or would I have compassion and interest in seeing him healed? In seeing him get treatment and make behavioral changes that might save his life? In being present to him?

This is a whopping reframe for me, and a crucial one. Now can I live into it?

[via musing85]

Fascinating lament by David Kuo, former Deputy Director of the Faith-Based Initiative, on “why Bush’s faith-based initiative has floundered” —

[Compassionate conservatism] was a new political philosophy of aggressive, government-encouraged (but not controlled) compassion that simultaneously rejected the dollars-equal-compassion equation of the “War on Poverty” mindset and the laissez-faire social policy of many conservatives. It was political philosophy of the heart as much as the head.

This was a dream come true for me. … When [Bush] became the president, there was every reason to believe he’d be not only pro-life and pro-family, as conservatives tended to be, but also pro-poor, which was daringly radical. After all, there were specific promises he intended to keep. …

Sadly, four years later these promises remain unfulfilled in spirit and in fact. In June 2001, the promised tax incentives for charitable giving were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. …

At the end of the day, both parties played to stereotype — Republicans were indifferent to the poor and the Democrats were allergic to faith. …

[But] Capitol Hill gridlock could have been smashed by minimal West Wing effort. … From tax cuts to Medicare, the White House gets what the White House really wants. It never really wanted the “poor people stuff.”

Of course it didn’t. Compassionate anything, even compassionate conservatism, would be a grand thing if it were real. But in this case it’s never been real AFAICT; it’s just a veneer, mere vote-getting hokum.

Knowing this, I seek to exercise real compassion toward those, like the writer, whose idealism caused them to fall for the deception. (I’m often a bubble-headed idealist myself; I’ve got no business blaming others.) I think it’s never too late to turn from deception toward something better — and turn we must, because each of us, all of us, will eventually be held accountable for the consequences of our actions.

The made-up verb buffolk (rhymes with Norfolk) comes to mind as describing Republican Party treatment of its most unlikely supporters. Which is sadly ironic given the high correlation of said supporters with utter horror at behavior implied by said made-up verb.

I don’t know whether the GOP can change any time soon, given the absolute corruption of power, but I’m sure its unlikely supporters can stop saying, “More, please.”

[via Markos]

Bob Herbert writes powerfully, as usual, on the wrongness of present U.S. torture policy —

Extraordinary rendition is the name that’s been given to the policy of seizing individuals without even the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by regimes known to practice torture. In terms of bad behavior, it stands side by side with contract killings.

Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation — the United States — that just went through a national election in which the issue of moral values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a country in which gays’ getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.? …

Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators.

If refusing to raise voices against torture is enabling evil — and it is — then what is actively endorsing those in power who are ordering the kidnapping and torture? That is what the U.S. Christian Right is doing in effect if not in intent, and we will be held accountable.

(I keep saying “we” in a decreasingly heartfelt intent toward unity and solidarity, Christian Right, Left, and Middle. I’m less and less sure that’s wise. I sense there’s a point at which my disgust will overcome my intent and my use of first-person pronouns will fall away, though I doubt my accountability will. [two days later: I’m reminded that disgust is mostly not helpful. It’s a self-administered poison just as unforgiveness is. Working on cleanup …])

There is a widespread but mistaken notion in the U.S. that everybody seized by the government in its so-called war on terror is in fact somehow connected to terrorist activity. That is just wildly wrong. …

If seizure can so easily encompass anybody, it can too easily encompass you or me.

Jettisoning the rule of law to permit such acts of evil as kidnapping and torture is not a defensible policy for a civilized nation. It’s wrong. And nothing good can come from it.

As Pastordan reminds —

Christ died by torture in order to overcome sin and death. So why would Christians endorse exactly those things? …

God himself took human form and suffered torture and death. Therefore, we ought to look at the prisoners being tortured and see not just human faces, but the face of God.

(Boldface added.)

[via lively discussion initiated by Armando]

2005-02-25 update:
[promoted to its own entry]

Zeke L observes in a comment to advisorjim — and expands on the idea elsewhere — that

The bible is one of the worst offenders in terms of turning people liberal.

I add a confirming data point: My transformation from conservative to liberal happened some years ago while I was plunged into scripture- and Church history study the depths of which I had never engaged before. In the midst of this seminary study an awareness flashed across my internal sky like a bolt of lightning: I can either keep my (so-called) conservative points of view, or I can follow Jesus. I don’t know whether this is the case for everyone, but I was presented a choice. (Put another way, the choice presented itself to me as between conformity and, given what I’d learned, integrity.)

These days, in the aftermath of that revelation, I think that liberal, as it literally means —

liberal. adj 1: showing or characterized by broad-mindedness; “a broad political stance”; “generous and broad sympathies”; “a liberal newspaper”; “tolerant of his opponent’s opinions” [syn: broad, large-minded, tolerant] 2: having political or social views favoring reform and progress 3: tolerant of change; not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or tradition [ant: conservative] 4: given or giving freely; “was a big tipper”; “the bounteous goodness of God”; “bountiful compliments”; “a freehanded host”; “a handsome allowance”; “Saturday’s child is loving and giving”; “a liberal backer of the arts”; “a munificent gift”; “her fond and openhanded grandfather” [syn: big, bighearted, bounteous, bountiful, freehanded, handsome, giving, openhanded] …

[Middle English, generous …]

— is aptly descriptive of the character of the Holy Spirit, and hence connotes a way of being to be aspired to, a pearl of great price, the seeking of which is discernable from that Spirit’s telltale signs:

The fruit of the [Holy] Spirit [the work which His presence within accomplishes] is love, joy (gladness), peace, patience (an even temper, forbearance), kindness, goodness (benevolence), faithfulness, gentleness (meekness, humility), [and] self-control (self-restraint, continence).

Unfortunately, these are not exactly the characteristics one thinks of as describing a people whose international policy is built on vengeance and enacted by war.

Man, Eugene nails our present misunderstanding of freedom in his Message paraphrase of the verse preceding —

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. …

If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God’s kingdom.

(Boldface added.)

2005-02-09 update:
Dale adds his observations, and of particular note that which was a boon to me in coming to grips with the seemingly incompatible Old Testament understanding of God relative to the New — “Barclay’s point was that ‘God has not changed, but man’s conceptions of God have changed’.”

I really do think the bible records humanity’s unfolding understanding of God, from humanity’s point of view, not God’s. From God’s point of view, he’s changeless; from our point of view he’s gotten more and more as presented by Jesus. Not because he’s changed, but because over time we’re seeing him more clearly. (My optometrist visit yesterday, from which I emerged “with new eyes” — that is, stronger contacts — makes seeing a particularly effective analogy for me right now.)

2005-02-12 update:
I think the evolution/creation argument is explained by — and made moot by — a similar difference in perspective: From God’s eternal point of view, everything he’s doing is creating, whereas from our human point of view, bound within time as we are, his creating looks to us like slow-motion evolving.

I imagine when you’re standing outside time, as God does, all your activity happens now — heck, I know even here for us humans when we get lost in creating art or music it feels like time stands still, even as the hours pass. So I think when God in his eternal workshop makes something cool, then steps back and says “Yes! It is good!”, millennia can have passed meanwhile back here at the (time-bound) ranch.

Everything evolves is one of the most bedrock observations I have of this world. I think another name for what I’m seeing is endless creation.

I remember thinking in high school, What if I could step off the timeline, pick it up off the page, and sight down it end to end like a rifle? Wouldn’t everything happening in time look present to me all at once, like how a telephoto lens compresses depth of field, making far-apart things look adjacent to each other, all the same distance away? I think eternity might therefore be like a 3-D+ telephoto hologram. (Except even more real than now, as C.S. Lewis envisions, just as now is more real than a hologram.)

Maybe the God “just a second” joke shaped my thinking, too. Even as we laugh out loud at the joke, I think it’s revealing a significant life truth.

2005-02-21 update:
Advisorjim discusses the Religious Right’s game plan concerning creationism with great skill and humor. He almost always catches behavioral underpinnings and sociological (mis)understandings that have gone right past me, and makes me say, Aha!