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After meeting for worship on October 23, several Friends expressed concern about the participation of US forces in the torture of prisoners. Perhaps the time has come to figure out how to apply our peace testimony to this difficult question. One thing we might do is join our witness to that of others, but we also need to ask ourselves how we, as a country, could have gone down this road. Human Rights Watch has called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate any US officials – no matter how high their rank – who participated in, ordered, or had command responsibility for war crimes or torture. A recent Frontline program on “The Torture Question” documented just how widespread and systematic abuses are at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover the driving force behind the abuses is pressure from the very top to get “actionable intelligence.” We have to confront two remarkably intractable justifications for torture: one having to do with efficacy; the other with revenge.
US forces and agencies seem to have put all their intelligence eggs in one basket: hard interrogation. No wonder our intelligence is so bad! “Taking the gloves off” does not recover good intelligence. But it does sour the world against us. It is sobering to think of all the families in Iraq who have been directly affected – hardly the way to instill respect for American values, especially when revenge is at least as sweet to Iraqis as it seems to be to us. Deuteronomy 32:35 reports the Lord as saying, “Vengeance is mine.” The conclusion all too often is that vengeance is righteous. But Romans 12:19 adds “never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God.” Here the implication is very different: only an omniscient God can be trusted with vengeance; flawed human beings always get it wrong – afflicting the innocent, overdoing it, not knowing when to stop. Any troops on the ground need very clear leadership to steer clear of revenge. Revenge is just too sweet -- especially when you are daily in fear of your lives -- to assume it won’t happen without a clear stand against it. Instead, the door was opened. Memos floated down from the office of the Secretary of Defense; General Miller was dispatched to Guantanamo and then to Abu Graib. After the photos came out nearly two years ago, the only sweeping change was the banning of cameras in detention facilities! It is very difficult to look this moral issue in the face. We would rather not know what evil we are capable of. Mike Brown of the Commercial Appeal reported that on his recent visit to Guantanomo he was shown an interrogation room with a blue plush sofa, rug and television. Highly improbable, of course, but his tour guides at least thought they knew what he wanted to see. The Senate recently voted by 90 to 9 to approve John McCain’s anti-torture amendment to the defense appropriations bill. This action, according to the editors of The Nation magazine, “stands as a singular legislative attempt to corral Bush into compliance with international law and human rights standards.” As a country we have fallen far from our humanitarian ideals. Our Meeting needs to join our voices to the growing crescendo for reaffirming the Geneva Convention at a minimum and more boldly for withdrawing from Iraq altogether. But we also need to think about how the U.S. can redeem its moral standing in the world. |
