Is there any other way to read this?:

Today the Council of Europe makes it official: Poland and Romania hosted secret detention facilities on behalf of the CIA.

In a just-released inquiry approved by the Council, investigator Dick Marty of Switzerland confirms Dana Priest’s Pulitzer Prize-winning report for the Washington Post that unnamed Eastern European countries allowed the CIA to hold suspected al-Qaeda detainees on their territory, without access to legal protections or the International Committee of the Red Cross. For the first time, the Council on Europe’s report names some of the detainees in the secret facilities: they include 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and former al-Qaeda military committee chief Abu Zubaydah. Both, Marty writes, “were questioned using ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’” making his report the first documentation by any public official to state definitively that such techniques have in fact been employed. In 2005, ABC News reported that such techniques include waterboarding, in which a detainee is forced to believe he is drowning.

Previous inquests by the European Parliament, most recently in February, stopped short of reporting definitively that the prisons existed, thanks mainly to lack of cooperation by U.S. and European intelligence officials, allowing the U.S., Poland and other suspected countries to maintain deniability over the prisons. In April, CIA Director Michael Hayden chastised the Parliament for what he called its “unbounded criticism” of CIA detentions, renditions and interrogations, which he and the CIA have consistently defended as both legal and necessary to combat al-Qaeda.

People of faith have something to say against torture. Let’s say it. Here’s a start by the PCUSA (pdf of Resolution Against Torture: Human Rights in a Time of Terrorism, A Call for a Commission of Inquiry adopted by the 217th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A).)…

I’m glad to read about this today:

The National Association of Evangelicals has endorsed an anti-torture statement saying the United States has crossed “boundaries of what is legally and morally permissible” in its treatment of detainees and war prisoners in the fight against terror.

Human rights violations committed in the name of preventing terrorist attacks have made the country look hypocritical to the Muslim world, the document states. Christians have an obligation rooted in Scripture to help Americans “regain our moral clarity.”

“Our military and intelligence forces have worked diligently to prevent further attacks. But such efforts must not include measures that violate our own core values,” the document says. “The United States historically has been a leader in supporting international human rights efforts, but our moral vision has blurred since 9-11.”

The statement, “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror,” was drafted by 17 evangelical scholars, writers and activists who call themselves Evangelicals for Human Rights. The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group, announced late Sunday that it had endorsed the document.

…

“There is a perception out there in the Middle East that we’re willing to accept any action in order to fight this war against terrorism,” Cizik said. “We are the conservatives — let there be no mistake on that –who wholeheartedly support the war against terror, but that does not mean by any means necessary.”

…

The document says government and outside researchers have documented “acts of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” against U.S. detainees, “especially in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, in Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, in CIA black sites and at the hands of other nations.”

The authors praise the U.S. Army for last year releasing a revised field manual that bans beating, sexually humiliating and threatening prisoners, among other interrogation procedures.

But the evangelical writers criticize the Military Commissions Act, which Bush pushed through Congress last year to set up a Defense Department system for prosecuting terror suspects. The evangelicals condemned provisions of that act that allow indefinite detention for some suspects and does not always hold intelligence officials to the same standards as the military.

Quoting a wide range of sources including the Bible, Pope John Paul II, Elie Wiesel and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the authors say the federal government has a moral obligation to follow international human rights treaties that the U.S. has endorsed.

“As American Christians, we are above all motivated by a desire that our nation’s actions would be consistent with foundational Christian moral norms,” the document says. “We believe that a scrupulous commitment to human rights, among which is the right not to be tortured, is one of
these Christian moral convictions.”

The NAE says it represents 45,000 evangelical churches. However, it does not include some of the best-known conservative Christian bodies, including the Southern Baptist Convention and Focus on the Family.

Go hug an NAE member today! While you’re at it, check out the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

Josh Marshall has some pointed things to say about the trial and, it seems, moments-hence execution of Saddam Hussein. I think it deserves some consideration, so here is his post:

It’s a hornet’s nest.  But I’m game.  So why not jump in.

“Bush administration officials” are telling CNN that Saddam Hussein will be hanged this weekend. Convention dictates that we precede any discussion of this execution with the obligatory nod to Saddam’s treachery, bloodthirsty rule and tyranny. But enough of the cowardly chatter. This thing is a sham, of a piece with the whole corrupt, disastrous sham that the war and occupation has been. Bush administration officials are the ones who leak the news about the time of the execution. One key reason we know Saddam’s about to be executed is that he’s about to be transferred from US to Iraqi custody, which tells you a lot.  And, of course, the verdict in his trial gets timed to coincide with the US elections.

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur — phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It’s a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

Try to dress this up as an Iraqi trial and it doesn’t come close to cutting it — the Iraqis only take possession of him for the final act, sort of like the Church always left execution itself to the ‘secular arm’. Try pretending it’s a war crimes trial but it’s just more of the pretend mumbojumbo that makes this out to be World War IX or whatever number it is they’re up to now.

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren’t grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing’s a mess and that they’re going to be remembered for it — defined by it — for decades and centuries. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president’s issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off — so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic ‘So There!’

Marx might say that this was not tragedy but farce. But I think we need to get way beyond options one and two even to get close to this one — claptrap justice meted out to the former dictator in some puffed-up act of self-justification as the country itself collapses in the hands of the occupying army.

Marty Peretz, with some sort of projection, calls any attempt to rain on this parade “prissy and finicky.” Myself, I just find it embarrassing. This is what we’re reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do.  Hang Saddam Hussein because there’s nothing else this president can get right.

What do you figure this farce will look like 10, 30 or 50 years down the road?  A signal of American power or weakness?

Rhetorical question, sure, but I’d say weakness. But all of us are responsible for this. It really doesn’t matter if you are a democrat or republican or libertarian or green or anarchist: this is our military; this is our  president; this is our government, whether we like it or not. And we’ll bear the responsibility–for our mess in Iraq, for our new policy of handling (and torturing) detainees and our fudging of Geneva protections, and for failing to pursue a genuine strategy to neutralize a radical Islamist threat through engagement and smart military application–for generations.

William Stacy Johnson, in his October 9th commentary “Our Tortured, War-Torn Conscience” in the Presbyterian Outlook, writes:

Let me put it plainly. There is something wrong with a church that can whip itself up into a frenzy arguing about gays but then shrug its shoulders over war and torture. In 1933 Karl Barth said that if one is not preaching against the concentration camps, one is not preaching the gospel. Likewise, a church that is ambivalent or undecided about torture and unjust war is something less than a church of Jesus Christ.

The commentary has good food for thought (whatever your view about gays, frankly). I’d commend it.

Its frustrating to me when an argument is advanced that, while the republicans might have botched Iraq, the democrats don’t have articulated a viable plan for the struggle against Islamic terrorism. I concede that the dems need to better voice such an alternate vision, but I disagree that there is “no plan.” There are competing alternate plans, and the democratic leadership has been slow to adopt one or the other of them. But there is a competent democratic vision for more than a year now that has articulated re-engaged diplomatic, social, economic and educational efforts in the Muslim world in conjunction with a re-deployed, targeted military application (and a withdrawal of some sort from the debacle that is Iraq). There is internal disagreement about how to handle Iraq, but my view is that we’ve made a mess and have a moral obligation to work to fix it if it can be fixed, and that we might not be the best ones to do the military part of that fixing any more. Our army there, at the moment, is making it worse, not better.

That vision is opposed to in conjunction with a Republican view of ‘stay the course:’ we must win, we in fact are winning, and we don’t need any real change to get the job done. At least, that’s been the vision up to recent days. The frustrating part is how vapid that vision is, and how politically inspired it has been: this is the strategy for optimal political success in the US (since it makes those dems look like weak flip-floppers!), so lets stick with it.

Only now, when huge numbers of the American public are waking up to our inability to sustain our current course in Iraq, to what our military involvement there means for our limited military application elsewhere in a troubled world (read: Korea, Iran, Syria, Sudan, &c), to month after month of “deadliest months for US troops” caught in the middle of a Civil War we can’t stop or adjudicate, only weeks before an election which, polls suggest, might well spell disaster for the Republican party, only then are we told that, no, that vision articulated earlier was not really the vision. In truth, the vision is something different, and actually a bit more like what the democrats have been saying.

John Stewart:

And here is the president’s own backtracking: http://thinkprogress.org/2006/10/22/bush-stay-the-course/

So tell me: what is left of the republican “vision” for the global war on terror? How are we going to succeed in this struggle that we really must succeed in, if those who are leading us are not really leading at all, but are working on keeping their power at home? I’m honestly struggling to give Bush and co. as much benefit of the doubt as I can, but come on, the evidence is right there, in video and in transcript. I just hope that we don’t bite it hook, line, and sinker…

I really feel for our military on the ground, who are on the front lines of this thing. Egads.

(…Note: edited Tuesday PM to add an extra hyperlink.)

The damage to our international reputation, and our moral standing, will be irrevocable after Bush signs into law the detainee trial bill, blurring the line on what interrogations are permitted under US law and condoning the “alternate procedures” of the CIA. Its a sad day, mainly because we (us citizens) now are all accomplices in what the government is doing on our behalf. Lord have mercy.

As a final thought on the matter, Sullivan posts pictures of an actual waterboarding table. Go take a look. .Here’s the CIA description of waterboarding:

You can see how the CIA’s official description makes sense now. Here it is:

“The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the
treatment to a halt.”

That can now be legal in our America, friends, should a president allow it under an executive order. FWIW, none of my representatives (two Republican Senators and a Democratic Representative) listened to my concerns: all three voted for this bill. And, for what its worth, I’m not a huge Hillary Clinton fan, but she came down on the right side on this one (here’s a blog entry of her full speech as prepared):

Granted, I’ve been banging this torture drum a bit hard these past two weeks. For those that are getting tired, wait me out. I’m sure our government will act (by passing or not passing some legislation) on the matter soon, and we’ll get onto other matters in time.

My colleague here handed me the most recent issue of Theology Today, which is dedicated to the subject of Torture. The links lead to abstracts, which in this issue include:

An Augustinian Look at Empire
CHARLES T. MATHEWES

Making Enemies: The Imagination of Torture in Chile and the United States
WILLIAM T. CAVANAUGH

Developing a Jewish Theology Regarding Torture
EDWARD FELD

What Can Christian Teaching Add to the Debate about Torture?
JEREMY WALDRON

Theology, International Law, and Torture: A Survivor’s View
DIANNA ORTIZ, OSU

Against Torture: An Evangelical Perspective
DAVID P. GUSHEE

I’ve not read through these yet, but I wanted to commend them to anyone interested…

…Craig also has written against torture on Broken Bonds Loosed Chains.

Sullivan gets an email from a Presbyterian pastor:

As a Presbyterian pastor, I continue to be stunned by the unthinking support of many evangelicals for a policy that permits torture. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when the so-called “Traditional Values Coalition” decided that torture was among the traditional values that they feel compelled to support.When Jesus was put on trial and handed over to Pontius Pilate, he rejected violence and said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” He was then tortured and brutally murdered (three hours in a “stress position” on the cross, as one of your readers aptly noted). “Caesar”, of course, went on to torture and brutally murder innocent Christians who were “threats to the state.” Now, 2,000 years later, in their wordly lust for power, Christians are hopping into bed with Caesar and signing off on anything Caesar wants, especially if Caesar takes care of the Christian “base”.

In my Presbyterian tradition, we are called to stand outside the halls of power and speak truth to those in power, no matter what party is in control. We are not called to become that power ourselves; Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world; his values are not Caesar’s values.

Last year on Good Friday, my church had our traditional worship service at which we read the story of Jesus’ torture and execution. To make the story more than just a past event, we read three contemporary accounts of innocent individuals who had been tortured. If we were going to shed tears for our innocent Lord Jesus, we also needed to shed tears for other innocent victims of torture. One story we read was about Christians in China – “threats to the state” – including a mother who was brutally interrogated while hearing the cries of her son being tortured in the next room. Interestingly enough, the Christian Right would join me in expressing outrage against innocent Christians.

Another story was of a man who described these conditions:

“I saw a cell almost the size of a grave. 3 feet wide, 6 feet deep, and 7 feet high. The cell had no light in it; it only had two thin mattresses (two thin blankets) on the ground … I was kept in that dark and filthy cell for about 10 months. The worst beating happened on the third day … they were asking the same set of questions and they would beat me 3-4 times. They would sometimes take me to another room where I could hear other people being tortured … at the end of the day I could not take the pain anymore and I falsely confessed of having been to Afghanistan.”

We read that story last Good Friday. The man’s name? Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, who was
arrested at JFK airport in New York. He was then deported by the American government via Jordan to Syria, where he was detained in the cell described above. Just last week Arar and his claims of innocence were completely vindicated by the Canadian government. The Traditional
Values Coalition would probably respond: an unfortunate mistake, but torture is still a necessary policy.

And What Would Jesus Do?

Jesus wept.

For the record, I know many evangelicals who are aghast at this torture mess. But I too am disturbed by any Christian voice that would try to rationalize sin…