In Defense of the CIA

To attack the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for torture as part of our nationally self-described ‘War on Terror’ is nonsensical, for one simple reason: as a nation, each and all of us joined the conspiracy of silence (tacit approval) and spoken approval.

We renamed torture ‘enhanced interrogation’, admitting to ‘enhanced interrogation’ and denying torture.  The media (yes, you too, NPR) joined in the renaming farce begun by someone in government at the time, apparently under the Emperor-Has-No-Clothes rubric that if we don’t call it torture, well, it can’t be torture, now can it?

News outlet employees performed ridiculous ‘re-enactments’ of waterboarding to make a joke of it and claim it wasn’t torture to experience forced drowning.

People on social media, ordinary citizens, spoke often and loudly in defense of torture (calling it something else, of course, and denying at the same time that ‘we’ torture); denied it was happening; claimed it was deserved.

Democrats and Republicans alike supported and enacted laws like the Patriot Act and its progeny, granting enormous and sweeping powers to the Executive Branch to wage the so-called War on Terror.

Guantanamo Bay (still housing detainees today) and other sites outside the territorial United States were opened or reopened, under the apparent theory that if you don’t do it (torture) within our national borders, somehow it isn’t torture.

My point is simple: we the people of these United States are not now allowed to have a single ounce of moral outrage for what we knew was happening at the time and did nothing to stop.  Not we the ordinary citizens.  Not we the members of Congress.  Not we the courts.  Not we the Executive Branch.

There is no cover here.  And the Senate’s high dudgeon is ridiculous.

You got exactly what you wanted.  Do not dare to now claim you didn’t know.  You knew.  Maybe not the extent of the torture.  But you knew torture was happening.  To claim you didn’t because you didn’t know every detail is tantamount to the quibbling over price joke* (well, yes, we knew they were forcing water down their throats but never imagined they’d force water up their rectums!).

You knew.  And you and we did nothing.  Nothing.

And to borrow or paraphrase from Senator John McCain, the question of whether it works or not is entirely beside the point.  The point is that it is wrong.   

And none of us need the blow-by-blow of rectal insertions to know that it’s wrong.  Or we shouldn’t.

So if there is a tone, a posture, to be taken in the now of things torture, might I suggest that the posture be confessional.  There is no one to blame but ourselves.  We did this.  We did it together.  And we did it with eyes wide open.

It is who we are.  Because we did it.  We are people who torture.

Admit it.  Claim it.  Take it on board as part of our national identity.

Or Admit it.  Confess it.  Regret it.  Repent of it.  Change it.  Don’t do it again.  Learn from it.

But do not dare act as if some rogue element in the CIA pulled one over on us.  They didn’t.  They did exactly what we wanted them to do.

That doesn’t sit well, does it?

Well, it shouldn’t.

So please, Senator Feinstein, spare me your righteous indignation.  You stand with too many others in your post facto condemnations of something you were actually in a position to stop at the time.  There should be a Hall of Fame for folks like you and Colin Powell, you chagrined people of power who did such great harm and now wish to claim the status of victim for yourself.

Well, this is one citizen who isn’t having it.  

The only problem is that I’m culpable too.  

I confess:

I confess that I did not write enough, protest enough, speak out enough.

I confess that I kept on paying my taxes to support the torture and murder of others.

I confess that I enjoyed the benefits reaped from our torture policies.

I confess that I did nothing to physically interrupt our export of torture around the world.

I confess that out of my own self-interest, I have not once attended the SOA protests.

I confess that I did not do enough.  Not nearly enough.

I confess that their blood is on my hands too.



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* A man asks a woman if she would be willing to sleep with him if he pays her an exorbitant sum. She replies affirmatively. He then names a paltry amount and asks if she would still be willing to sleep with him for the revised fee. The woman is greatly offended and replies as follows:  She: What kind of woman do you think I am?  He: We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over the price.  Variously attributed to Winston Churchill (how I heard it), Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw and others.  Quote Investigator

To My Fellow Christian Sarah Palin: Baptism, Enemies, and Truth – Words That Matter

Governor Sarah Palin recently delivered an address to a gathering of NRA folk in Indianapolis.  I listened to the speech in its entirety and recommend you do the same.

Reasonable people can and do differ on a great many issues, gun use and access among them.  And Governor Palin and I are on different sides of the question.  Fair enough.

What is not so fair, I would suggest, is the appropriation of the language of our shared faith; the clinging to a gospel that is rejected in the same breath; and a disregard of facts (truth) when speaking of one’s enemies.

Regarding our “enemies” (by which Gov. Palin is referring to terrorists), she says, “. . . if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.” [huge applause and cheering]  

1. The appropriation of the language of our shared faith Baptism is the rite, the ritual, the sacrament – the holy sign (one of only two for Protestants) – the outward evidence of the inward reality of having been claimed as God’s very own in Christianity.  When Jesus himself is baptized, the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, descends upon him and God proclaims Jesus as God’s own son, in whom God is well pleased.  (Matthew 3.16-17).  Waterboarding shares with baptism only the use of water.  Waterboarding is to baptism as torture is to the doctor’s smack of a new-born baby’s butt.  To call torture baptism in a speech using other language of faith and God ignores Jesus’ own gospel message, a particular affront in this Easter season, when Christians world-wide celebrate the resurrection of the one who was himself tortured to death by state actors.  I want to believe that Gov. Palin is using the language of ‘baptism’ in a secular way (as in being ‘baptized’ by fire, meaning to be introduced to a certain way of being/acting in extremis).  The problem is that the remainder of her speech is peppered with the language of faith in a way that makes such a dismissal virtually impossible, because she weaves faith into her speech in such a way as to suggest that to carry a gun is not merely a constitutional matter, but also a biblical right or even imprimatur.

2. Clinging to a gospel the speaker rejects all in the same breath Use of the language of ‘enshrinement’ – the language of the sacred or holy –  (as in gun-ownership being ‘enshrined’ in our constitution); referring to baptism when speaking of waterboarding; giving the gratuitous shout-out to prayer in school;  and wrapping up with: “Celebrating family, faith and freedom . . . God shed his grace on thee, America, so stand and fight . . .” co-mingles the language of faith and Christianity in particular with the torture of enemies (waterboarding), killing with a gun as a problem-solving technique (my cold, dead hands language and the implied warning to Attorney General Eric Holder, “you don’t want to go there, buddy”); and the very specific link of “enemies” with torture as an indictment of the claimed lack of political will of those who differ with her on this issue (they would coddle the enemies that she, if in charge, would waterboard) – all this leads to a conclusion that for Gov. Palin, Jesus’ gospel is a call to arms.  The problem, of course, is Jesus, who actually happens to be very specific when it comes to enemies:  “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.  For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?  And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? . . .”  (Matthew 5.43-47; also Luke 6.27 & 35).  You simply cannot, with any integrity, wrap yourself in the gospel and advocate the torture of your enemies in the same breath.  Jesus recognizes the human habit of responding to enemies in exactly the way Gov. Palin recommends.  He recognizes it and rejects it out of hand.  Advocate torture if you will.  But you cannot, you may not, you must not, clothe yourself in The Risen One to do it.

3. Disregarding the facts when speaking of one’s (political) enemy It is popular to the point of hardly meriting notice, let alone response, for folks in the political sphere today to make false claims against their opponents.  But it isn’t okay that they do nor that we allow it to pass by.  Truth matters.  Facts matter.  False claims of facts and truth matter because they misshape our perception of reality.  Gov. Palin takes on and carries as a theme in her speech, with references to the various bracelets she is wearing, a claim that Attorney General Eric Holder advocates the wearing of some sort of tracking bracelet by gun owners.  There is only one problem with the claim: it is false, as attested by the presumably liberal TPM and presumably conservative Bearing Arms.  Facts and truth matter to our faith as well as our practical day-to-day lives (if there can even be any separation of the two): we follow the man who self-identified as the way, the truth, the life, who instructed his followers to allow their yes to be yes, their no, no. (Matthew 5.37).  It may well be that Gov. Palin and/or her speechwriters  believed what she said about the Attorney General to be true.  But that doesn’t solve much: when we are speaking, it is our duty to assure that our words are true, that they are accurate.  That is actually part of the job of being a Christian.  Truthfulness is so important that it is actually enshrined (unlike our constitutional provisions) in our holy writ, which we refer to as the Ten Commandments, among which is the provision: Thou shalt not lie (or more accurately, bear false witness – that is, to say something not true about another person).  Before we say it, it is our job to know whether it is true and if we cannot or do not know, we should not say it.  The fact that it took me less than 5 minutes to find two sites online that referenced the Attorney General’s actual remarks indicates that the truth was easily discoverable.  One simply had to wish to find it.  Gov. Palin claimed that the Attorney General wants to track by bracelet those who own guns.  What he actually said was that there was interest in exploring smart guns that can only be used by the actual owner (via a chip in the gun which links electronically to a bracelet worn by the owner).

Truth matters.  Taking care to tell truth matters.  Taking special care not to speak ill of enemies falsely (recognizing our own inner tendency not to give our enemies the benefit of the doubt) matters.  Making claims about the gospel which directly contradict it matters.  Clothing ourselves with the gospel of the Prince of Peace while proclaiming things like torture matters.

As a fellow Christian, Governor Palin, I beseech you: make your case, but please, please, please, stop standing on Jesus’ back to do it if you're not willing to grapple with the ways in which the gospel challenges your views.

Please.