COMMONWEAL
November 9, 2007
EDITORIAL
Torture’s Enablers
First you are strapped to a plank. Then the
plank is tilted so that your feet are above your head. Next a cloth is
pulled taut across your mouth, and finally water is poured directly
onto the cloth. Breathing becomes nearly impossible. You start to feel
like you’re drowning-because you are. The flow of water ceases just
before you pass out, and if you don’t tell the interrogators what they
want to know, the process begins again.
That technique, once routinely practiced by
the Khmer Rouge, is called waterboarding. It is a serious form of
torture, and as such it is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and by
U.S. law. Yet at his confirmation hearings in October, Attorney
General-nominee Michael Mukasey testified that he did not know what the
process entails. “Is waterboarding constitutional?” Senator Sheldon
Whitehouse (D-R.I.) asked. “I don’t know what’s involved in the
technique,” Mukasey answered. “If waterboarding is torture, torture is
not constitutional.”
Given that the Department of Defense has
authorized waterboarding for use by U.S. personnel, perhaps it
shouldn’t surprise anyone that President George W. Bush’s nominee could
not manage a straight answer. Still, it’s hard to believe that someone
in Mukasey’s position doesn’t know what’s involved in waterboarding. As
retired Rear Admiral John D. Huston explained at the Mukasey hearings:
“Other than perhaps the rack and thumbscrews, waterboarding is the most
iconic example of torture in history. It has been repudiated for
centuries.”
But not by the Bush administration, and not
by Mukasey. His response was doubly perplexing because, the day before,
he had offered testimony of a markedly different sort. Senator Patrick
Leahy (D-Vt.) asked Mukasey for his thoughts on the Justice
Department’s notorious 2002 “torture memo,” which legitimized the
harshest interrogation methods and argued that the president can grant
legal immunity to those who use them. Mukasey unequivocally repudiated
the memo. He called torture “antithetical to what this country stands
for.”
And yet, as the New York Times reported in
October, after having publicly abrogated the “torture memo” in 2004,
the Justice Department issued a secret 2005 opinion broadly endorsing
the harshest interrogation methods ever used by the CIA. These included
face-slapping, exposing prisoners to freezing temperatures, and
waterboarding. Then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales approved the memo
over the objections of his deputy, James B. Comey, who promised his
colleagues that they would be “ashamed” once the public learned of it.
Comey’s protests echoed those made during the
so-called Justice Department mutiny of 2004, in which a small group of
conservative lawyers resisted the arguments of the “torture memo.” They
recognized what the vast majority of interrogation experts have been
saying for years-torture is ineffective, illegal, immoral, and puts
U.S. forces at risk. But those arguments did not carry the day.
So the secret memos remain in effect,
bolstered by President Bush’s July 2007 executive order authorizing
“enhanced interrogation”-despite his constant refrain that “America
does not torture.” That statement is true only if one radically and
unnaturally redefines the word “torture.” That is precisely what the
president has done, largely through agents such as Vice President Dick
Cheney, his counsel David S. Addington, and former Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales.
The campaign to relax the traditional ban on
torture began in the aftermath of 9/11. Desperate to guard Americans
against further attacks, Cheney and others argued that the president
needed more expedient means to extract information from terrorist
suspects. This came to mean warrantless domestic wire taps, secret
offshore prisons for terrorist suspects, sending suspects to other
countries for harsh interrogation, and the authorization of torture,
which has been practiced at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere.
But six years on, the destructive legacy of
this policy could not be clearer, or more shameful: more than one
hundred reported detainee deaths, nearly thirty of which have been
ruled homicides by the Pentagon. The United States, once widely hailed
as a champion of human rights, is now seen as a nation that tortures.
What is perhaps more disturbing is that the president appears
unchastened. After all, his attorney-general nominee endorsed the very
view of executive power that set the country down this calamitous path.
In his testimony Mukasey suggested that the president’s duty to defend
the country overrides his duty to obey the law. That is a perverse,
almost monarchical interpretation of the executive branch’s role. And
if Michael Mukasey is confirmed as attorney general, it is a view the
Senate will have endorsed.
October 30, 2007
Monday, October 29, 2007
This interesting article, which appeared in yesterday's New York Times Sunday Magazine, is getting a lot of play. Some MOJ-readers may be interested.
MAGAZINE
The Evangelical Crackup
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
After the 2004 election, evangelical Christians
looked like one of the most powerful and cohesive voting blocs in
America. Three years later their leadership is split along generational
and theological lines. How did it all come apart?
[To print/read the article, click here.]
Sightings 10/29/07
Religion and Law at
Twenty-Five
-- Martin E. Marty
"When Religion and Law Meet: The
Point of Convergence" was the topic of the twenty-fifth anniversary "look-ahead"
conference at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University
in Atlanta this past weekend. I had participated in a three-year
project there, one of many undertaken and executed at the Center under the
direction of Professors John Witte and Frank Alexander. Rather
than detail the conference papers from which I learned while preparing the final
lecture, I will here focus on what the "convergence" has come to
mean.
Quite a few of those scholars who
had been "present at the creation" returned, to speak of the changes that had
occurred during these twenty-five years. The older-timers
remembered that when the Center was first launched under the inspiration of the
grand guru of the subject, the very senior Hal Berman, the idea of trying to get
professionals in "law" and "religion" to converse and work together was treated
mainly with neglect or suspicion. Long traditions of collaboration
between the two disciplines were forgotten.
Leaders in the spheres of "Law" and
"Religion," like "Medicine" and "Religion," had drifted apart, lost touch with
each other, or treated many of each others' concerns and projects with
indifference or disdain. Why? Such a distancing
seems absurd, given the long history of the common interests and
responsibilities of the "religion" and the "law" people. Leaders
of both act upon millions of people, and citizenries here and abroad are
constantly dealing with both spheres.
Many fault the Enlightenment—the
eighteenth century movement which few in law or religion should despise, given
its (mixed) blessings and gifts—as well as anti-intellectual versions of
nineteenth century religion. The separation paralleled those
which, for good or bad reasons, divorced religion from the academy, the clinic,
the market. The terrors of "law" and "religion" gone wrong led to
mutual mistrust, stereotyping and caricaturing.
But new generations of scholars,
represented by the speakers at Emory, now look ahead to better futures.
And the pioneering Center at Emory is finding ever more company at
other universities and law-and-religion centers, many of which have similarly
impressive records, though they are still too easily overlooked by those who
deal with law and religion without looking at the philosophical or theological
roots and goals of both.
Those gathered at Emory are not
united by ideology so much as by vocation and interest. It was
not a gathering of those who wanted to bash "Islamo-fascists" or to minimize
legal challenges of Muslims who live under shari'ah law, or who wanted to attack
Christian Legal Societies or to defend them. The participants were
constructive, modeling what they hope will be done elsewhere. The
Center's scholars and conferees have published scores of volumes whose contents
enhance and advance the conversations and convergences. As a
late-comer to these encounters, I have catching up to do, but the sightings of
these recent years encourage me to encourage Sightings readers to become
acquainted with these excitements and urgencies.
References
----------
Sightings comes from the
Martin Marty Center at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Rick Garnett has occasionally called our attention to Rob Dreher. Here's what Dreher has to say about Mukasey, according to The Opinionator (New York Times online):
A conservative vote against Mukasey: “I was appalled to hear the judge
say that the president has the right to decide which laws he’s going to
obey, under certain circumstances,” says “Crunchy Con” Rod Dreher at his Beliefnet blog.
He adds, “This country cannot afford an attorney general who believes
that executive power should be expanded so greatly. I don’t care if the
office sits vacant until Bush is out of office. The line has to be
drawn by the Senate.”
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
The Chronicle of Higher Education
October 23, 2007
Archbishop Tutu Calls for U. of St. Thomas to Reinstate Professor
Following an initial refusal to
let Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak at the University of St. Thomas, the Minnesota
institution has now invited him. Archbishop Tutu said he will, but only if the
college agrees to give a professor back her chairmanship.
University officials admitted to demoting Cris Toffolo, an associate
professor of political science, from her position as chair of the institution’s
program in justice and peace studies. They wouldn’t give details but said it had
to do with the situation concerning Archbishop Tutu.
The Rev. Dennis J. Dease, president of the university, announced his
recognition of the university’s mistake and
a formal invitation to the Nobel peace laureate two weeks ago in a letter to
students and members of the faculty and staff.
Meanwhile, faculty and staff members are rallying and gathering signatures
for a petition to reinstate Ms. Toffolo to her administrative job, but the
university seems to be holding firm, according to the Star
Tribune. —Anna Weggel
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Can a Catholic College Exist Today?
Challenges to Religious Identity in the Midst of Pluralism
FRANCESCO C. CESAREO
To read this article, click here.
