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).)…

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):

Jordon Cooper points us to these conversations between Dr. Martin Assad, Academic Dean of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary and Dr. David Gushee in Christianity Today: Another Point of View: Evangelical Blindness on Lebanon, We Risk Not Just Suffering, But Annihilation, and ‘Who is My Neighbor‘ in the Lebanon-Israel Conflict? Very interesting reading…

A helpful post by Josh Marshall:

All I will say on the final outcome of this is that there won’t be peace on that border or in the region more generally as long as southern Lebanon is controlled by a militia that is not controlled from Beirut, especially one that is supported if not necessarily directed by Iran, and most importantly one that still seeks confrontation with Israel. Our whole state system rests on sovereignty and governments strong enough to exercise it.

There is only one conceiveable way back from the brink here — a multinational force to patrol southern Lebanon, get Hizbullah, or at least its rockets, off the Lebanon-Israeli border and put the region back under the control of the Lebanese central government, first nominally and then, as soon as possible, actually.

Clearly, Beirut is not capable of doing that on her own. Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon would be a disaster for Israel, Lebanon and the entire region. The bad consequences that would flow from that are just too numerous and dire to catalog.

The devil is in the details, of course. How to implement it in a way acceptable to the parties involved? And Marshall has some interesting thoughts about how Bush’s hands off attitude might not be the best one right now…

Why isn’t there more blogging out there about the Israel/Lebanon/Palestine/Hezbollah conflagration?

Maybe because we sense fault on many sides, but speaking that brings nothing but scorn and vitriol? Maybe we can agree that Israel must defend herself, but also that we can say that the roots of this conflict are deep and complex and intractable and that this disproportionate response isn’t likely to do much but make it worse. Maybe because we can agree that Hezbollah attacks and kidnappings are evil, but we also see little good in the civilian deaths which are accompanying this current offensive. I don’t have the answer for what should be done over there. I just don’t. So what is there to say?

Kevin Drum and Glenn Reynolds each comment on why they don’t blog on it more. Its just so disheartening to try to find out a faithful thing to say while finding that any comment short of untarnished approval of Israel’s actions is met with cries of anti-semitism or support of terrorism. Maybe that’s too strong a phrasing of it. It likely is, but it feels that way sometimes.

And its so unbelievably frustrating to be unable to find good information about what is happening over there. Lauro has a good post about this. So I pray for peace. I try to find ways to affirm the right of innocent people not to live their lives in constant fear of death. I try to have courage to speak the truth that I see in love: to say terrorism is evil and yet all use of military might must be proportionate. I try to find the peacemakers over there and offer support to them. And then I pray some more.