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Christian Prisons, Christian Torture?

Christian Prisons, Christian Torture?

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I wonder how many Christians regularly visit prisoners to offer consolation and comfort anymore? I’m not talking about ministers or special group missions, but regular laypeople of the many congregations in all their many denominations all over the country. Somehow I think that the ones who call for punishment and torture and war probably don’t do that.

A prisoner is someone who is held against their will in… a prison! Oh, you can call it a penitentiary, a correctional facility, a camp, a containment center or a detention center, but the thing is what it is: it’s where individuals have been physically confined, deprived of freedom of movement and other freedoms, and are treated as subhumans. Why? Because they have been convicted (it is to be hoped the conviction was established through a through a legal and ethical process) of doing a terrible awful thing, or even several terrible awful things.

Of course, prison may also function as political tool, and that is a sign of a move toward a more authoritarian regime. In such societies, the detention of enemies of state and other political prisoners is common. Prisoners of conscience and religion, people imprisoned because of ethnicity, cultural difference, sexual preference, birth nation, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time – we can all think of examples of this kind of thing. The incarceration and interrogation of prisoners of war – and what we now euphemistically call “detainees” instead of prisoners – is common during times of war and other conflicts. We used to have some laws and standards about that, remember? Many other countries still do.

The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act. – Stanley Milgram, 1974

For a deeper understanding of a few of the social dynamics involved, I recommend taking a look at one of the most famous psychological experiments ever done: Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment. Also take a look at the related Stanford Prison Experiment.

Within the context of the society that has the power to imprison, prisoners are considered to be a danger to others. This is often true enough, although much can be debated about the process – in any country – by which certain people are imprisoned and other people are not. There is also a very strong ideological debate, of course, about the merit and effectiveness of ideas about punishment/vengeance as opposed to rehabilitation.

I find much to loathe in certain kinds of criminality, but I also find much that is detestable about the ways that we choose to deal with prisoners. In some circumstances, cruel treatment – and even torture – has been condoned and approved of by many Americans.

One of every 100 Americans is incarcerated. In the United States of America, there is now a thriving private prison sector. We impose the death penalty, although almost all European nations (not to mention Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and most of Latin America) have abolished it.

Some of the people who are most enthusiastic about the punishment, torture, and killing of prisoners profess to be Christians.

Isn’t that strange?

It seems to me that following Jesus is all about interrupting cycles of violence, not perpetuating them. I don’t understand how someone can say that they are following Jesus and then ignore everything he ever said and did. Doesn’t that miss the whole point – the “good news” part?

There are clear directives not to judge or condemn others. Who can ever forget Jesus confronting the would-be executioners of an adulteress in John 8? Sure, start throwing stones, just as soon as one of you is without sin or fault! Right! Now take a deep breath and chill. Do you know that there are people who call themselves Christians who would like to bring back stoning? And when will they give UP on controlling women? It’s tiresome.

God knows what we need before we even ask, but we should pray for forgiveness for the wrongs we have done, and remind ourselves every day that we must first forgive others. Only insofar as we have forgiven those who have wronged us may we be forgiven our own wrongs. There have been times, I admit, when my prayer has been to be released from that obligation. Sigh.

If you, then, bad as you are, know how to give your children what is good for them, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him!”

But how does that chapter (of Matthew 7) start?

Pass no judgment and you will not be judged. For as you judge others, so you will yourselves be judged, and whatever measure you deal out to others will be dealt back to you.

It’s all about measuring – and that takes a bit of mindfulness and humility. It sounds a lot like conscious karma, and it’s certainly a very wise piece of guidance for the soul’s path.

Yet, for someone who knocks, the door will always, always be opened – that is grace. That is the gift, and it is open to all.

God’s gifts are irrevocable.

One very important way to understand what some of those gifts can be (and how to practice them) is to model the way you’d like to be understood and loved in your relationship with others. When you offer yourself in service to others, even in a kind of “secret service,” you are blessed in turn. It just happens.

Christians are not meant to be vengeful. It only escalates violence into never-ending cycles of death.

Over and over, the biblical Christian texts tell us to leave vengeance to the Lord, to turn the other cheek (to make them think?), to care for the least among us – the poor, the downtrodden, the detested, even to call down blessings on our enemies and persecutors! That last bit is a little over the top, but maybe the writer had an affection for flourish. At least, I hope so.

To be joyful with the joyful and mournful with the mournful, to be humble and caring and moved by love (not by hate) – to me, that’s the heart of a Christian. The whole law, Jesus believed, was completed in Love.

Not only wasn’t he the fully Anointed King of Israel that they were expecting (to usher in a messianic age of war and then a time of peace) but he even forgave the ones who were crucifying him! Nobody was ever expecting that. Seems like lunacy on the face of it. I don’t know. I only wonder how important these things really are that we fight about.

Who are you to say that you know for sure who is and who is not accepted – or acceptable – by God?

Maybe God loves everybody, even if they’re a jerk. You don’t know. Maybe there is no God – maybe it’s all about power after all. Maybe God has God’s own ways of deciding things without consulting your interpretation. Maybe God is that which is greater than anything that you can think, or that can be thought. Maybe God is Love. Maybe God is an abyss with a big eye looking back at you. Maybe God is an alien. Maybe God exceeds our expectations. Maybe God is nothing at all like anything we think.

But America, brought down so low as to forget that we are all human – or to remember but be too complacent to believe it, or to be too busy trying to live to think about it at all.

You so-called Christians that condone or cheer for the abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and other places like them, who turn a blind eye to our prison-for-profit systems and detention centers and extraditions for torture…

You who will not look at photographs because “images are too disturbing” while you let the actions that you have no spine to observe continue … it’s too easy to blame someone else…

You who think that it’s so macho and even sexy to hurt and dehumanize others…

You hypocrites and compartmentalizers, you sociopaths lacking empathy and simple human understanding…

When is the last time you visited someone in prison to console them?

When was the last time you showed kindness to someone that others in your little in-group might find detestable?

Are you so sure that your smug dehumanizing arrogance is pleasing to God? If you really are sure, give us a wee hint – how can we make you less sure? You’re destroying us.

It’s time for Christian assistant shepherds to recall their flocks to the meaning of the message. Cool, clear water of life, ratch ‘ere.

How can torturers and greedy war-mongers and spreaders of lies and fear have become so triumphant that they can brazenly assume that any real Christian could or would be a part of their “base”? How can Christians support such degrading and oppressive corruption as this? It’s a culture of fear and death.

We’ve gotten into ruts in our thinking – it’s all full of ideology and false oppositions and judgments that aren’t based in reality but on dark fantasies and projections.

Don’t dehumanize others – that’s where it all starts. Counter terror with justice, not sadism. Yes, there are reasons for prisons, but there is never a reason to degrade another human being, to invade them, to rape them, to torture them, to kill them.

And yes, I realize that I’m strident. There is an irony here, I know.

I try to understand and even to love those who hate just as much as I can. It’s a major challenge, and so perhaps the board of Benevolent Deities Inc. is having a little laugh watching me here in Georgia. For now, it’s about daily practice, trying – one person at a time – to understand how it happens, and to plant small seeds of its undoing while my imaginary guitar of the spirit gently weeps (the guitar is a permanent installation designed by John Lennon).

My assessment is that American pseudo-christians need to de-familiarize themselves again – to step away from their customary ways of thinking about religion so that they can hear and see and form their own insights again.

Agape love is a powerful way to inspire creative confrontation, restitution, and reconciliation.

Americans also need to remember and uphold the standards that we tell ourselves that we hold dear and which have been sold far too cheaply.

Ok, that’s all rather heavy, isn’t it? It all came out in a rush.

“My mind’s been going places without me lately”…

And after I truly finished the first draft, I went outside to see that the sky was an unearthly yellow.

Calling Armchair Activists for Progressive Actions

Calling Armchair Activists for Progressive Actions

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Here are some more actions that you can take online. Pick a couple, or do them all!

Bush Administration Pronounced Guilty of War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity

Bush Administration Pronounced Guilty of War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity

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The Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration released its final verdict on Wednesday, September 13, 2006. Guilty.

11:00 AM, Press Conference, Camp Democracy (Constitution & 14)
12:00 Noon, Delivery of Verdict to the White House

Full text of the verdict in PDF.

An unprecedented Commission of Inquiry has found the President of the United States and his administration guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The five-member panel of jurists unanimously found the administration’s actions “shock the conscience of humanity” in five areas – wars of aggression, illegal detention and torture, suppression of science and catastrophic policies on global warming, potentially genocidal abstinence-only policies imposed on HIV/AIDS prevention programs in the Third World, and the abandonment of New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina.

THE VERDICT

In their summary, the Commission jurists found that: “Each of these constitutes a shocking crime in itself, and taken together the full horrors are all the more unconscionable. It is also clear that this is an administration that demonstrates an utter disregard for truth and flagrantly lies about the reasons for its actions.

“In arriving at this decision the jurists were particularly alarmed by the degree to which the Bush Administration’s actions in all five indictments were informed by the extreme right. …. although the specific conduct differs among the indictments, the result is the same: human life was debased and devalued by gratuitous acts of violence, torture, narrow self interest, indifference, and disregard.”

In arriving at their verdict, the Commission’s panel of jurists examined a wealth of evidence with care and rigor. Consistent standards were employed, with well-established international law referenced where applicable.

The panel of jurists consisted of Adjoa A. Aiyetoro, William H. Bowen School of Law, Little Rock; former executive director, National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL). Dennis Brutus, former prisoner, Robben Island (South Africa), poet, professor emeritus, University of Pittsburgh. Abdeen Jabara, former president, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Ajamu Sankofa, former executive director, Physicians for Social Responsibility-NY. Ann Wright, former US diplomat and retired US Army Reserve Colonel.

THE HEARINGS

The Commission’s year-long investigation included five days of public hearings in October 2005 and January 2006 in New York City. The 45 expert and first-hand witnesses included former commander of Abu Ghraib prison Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, former UN official Denis Halliday, former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, Guantanamo prisoners’ lawyer Barbara Olshansky, and Katrina survivors.

The verdict’s release comes with war crimes again on front pages following President Bush’s defense of secret prisons, rendition, and practices constituting torture under existing law, his demand that the War Crimes Act be fundamentally weakened, and his threats against Iran.

In a preface to the printed verdict, historian Howard Zinn writes: “The Bush Administration has been following a course, which can only now be described as a series of crimes against humanity. . . . What could be a higher crime than sending the young people of the country into a war against a small country on the other side of the world, which is no danger to the United States, and in fact a war which is condemned by people all over the world and a war which results in, not only the loss of American lives and the crippling of young Americans, but results in the loss of huge numbers of people in Iraq? These are high crimes.”

Not Just a Few Bad Apples

Not Just a Few Bad Apples

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ACLU Reveals New Evidence that Government Knew Abuse was Widespread Before Abu Ghraib Photos –

OK, we knew that just by following the tracks of Bush’s legal team…

Still, here’s some more proof for you.

Torture is UnAmerican. Sign the petition.

Army Documents Show Senior Official Reportedly Pushed Limits on Detainee Interrogations (5/2/2006)

NEW YORK — New Army documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union today reveal that Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez ordered interrogators to “go to the outer limits” to get information from detainees. The documents also show that senior government officials were aware of abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.

“When our leaders allow and even encourage abuse at the ‘outer limits’, America suffers,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director. “A nation that works to bring freedom and liberty to other parts of the world shouldn’t stomach brutality and inhumanity within its ranks. This abuse of power was engineered and accepted at the highest levels of our government.”

Among the documents released today by the ACLU is a May 19, 2004 Defense Intelligence Agency document implicating Sanchez in potentially abusive interrogation techniques. In the document, an officer in charge of a team of interrogators stated that there was a 35-page order spelling out the rules of engagement that interrogators were supposed to follow, and that they were encouraged to “go to the outer limits to get information from the detainees by people who wanted the information.” When asked to whom the officer was referring, the officer answered “LTG Sanchez.” The officer stated that the expectation coming from “Headquarters” was to break the detainees.

The ACLU also released an Information Paper entitled “Allegations of Detainee Abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan” dated April 2, 2004, two weeks before the world saw the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib prison. The paper outlined the status of 62 investigations of detainee abuse and detainee deaths. Cases include assaults, punching, kicking and beatings, mock executions, sexual assault of a female detainee, threatening to kill an Iraqi child to “send a message to other Iraqis,” stripping detainees, beating them and shocking them with a blasting device, throwing rocks at handcuffed Iraqi children, choking detainees with knots of their scarves and interrogations at gunpoint.

The ACLU said the document makes clear that while President Bush and other officials assured the world that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was the work of “a few bad apples,” the government knew that abuse was happening in numerous facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 62 cases being investigated at the time, at least 26 involved detainee deaths. Some of the cases had already gone through a court-martial proceeding. The abuses went beyond Abu Ghraib, and touched Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca and other detention centers in Mosul, Samarra, Baghdad, Tikrit, as well as Orgun-E in Afghanistan.

“These documents are further proof that the abuse of detainees was widespread and systemic, and not aberrational,” said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “We know that senior officials endorsed this abuse, but these officials have yet to be held accountable.”

Last week, the government authenticated that two videos released by the Palm Beach Post in March 2005 were videos that the government was withholding from the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request. The videos are part of a set that has come to be known as the “Ramadi Madness” videos and were made by members of the West Palm Beach-based Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 124th Infantry Regiment. The two scenes the government authenticated are called “See Haj Run” and “Blood Clot.” They depict scenes of urban battle and persons being captured and detained by U.S. forces.

Among the more than 9,000 pages of Defense Department documents made public by the ACLU today are several investigations detailing cruel and degrading treatment and killings. The investigations include:

  • An investigation into the death of a detainee at Forward Operating Base Rifles near Al Asad, Iraq established probable cause to believe that several soldiers assaulted a detainee and committed negligent homicide, and conspired to cover up the death. The detainee died when a soldier lifted him up from the floor by placing a baton under his chin, fracturing his hyoid bone. It appears that the soldiers received written letters of reprimand and counseling. The full document is online at www.aclu.org/projects/foiasearch/pdf/DOD049269.pdf
  • A heavily redacted e-mail dated May 25, 2004 shows that a presumed officer or civilian government official was told of three reports of abuse of detainees described as “probably true/valid.” One detainee was “in such poor physical shape from obvious beatings that [name redacted] asked the MP’s to note his condition before he proceeded with interrogation.” Another detainee was “in such bad shape … that he was laying down in his own feces.” These cases seem to have occurred in Abu Ghraib and Camp Cropper. The full document is online at www.aclu.org/projects/foiasearch/pdf/DODDIA000208.pdf
  • An investigation shows a doctor cleared a detainee for further interrogations, despite claims he had been beaten and shocked with a taser. The medic confirmed that the detainee’s injuries were consistent with his allegations, stating, “Everything he described he had on his body.” Yet, the medic cleared him for further interrogation, giving him Tylenol for the pain. There is no indication that the medic reported this abuse. The full document is online at www.aclu.org/projects/foiasearch/pdf/DOD052120.pdf

Today’s documents come in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the case.

To date, more than 100,000 pages of government documents have been released detailing the torture and abuse of detainees. The ACLU recently launched a new powerful search engine for the public to access the documents at www.aclu.org/torturefoiasearch. The search engine allows people to uncover details about abuse that may not have been reported in the media, said the ACLU.

The FOIA lawsuit is being handled by Lawrence Lustberg and Megan Lewis of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C. Other attorneys in the case are Amrit Singh, Jameel Jaffer and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Arthur Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the NYCLU; and Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The documents released today are available online at: action.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/050206/

Nechvatal Contaminations

Nechvatal Contaminations

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Joseph Nechvatal, my friend and intellectual compadre in viral realms, has his latest exhibition in Ohio. “Contaminations” has been extended to run through June 25th at the Butler Institute of American Art’s Beecher Center. The show includes a selection of computer-robotic assisted paintings starting in the mid-1980’s and concludes with a recent electronic viral installation.

Go see!
Joseph Nechvatal: Contaminations

Or if you happen to be in Youngstown, Ohio:
The Beecher Center for Technology in the Arts
Butler Institute of American Arts
524 Wick Ave. Youngstown, Ohio 44502
tel# 330-743-1711

While you’re visiting his website, be sure to see the new nOOlOgy : guilt of a nation. Here is his introduction:

In art, pleasure is a most legitimate aspiration. Still one may not ignore that people all over the world today bend-over painfully and act in accordance with seemingly normal systems of control: noological systems (*) that may seem at the time logically inevitable.

My current chain of history paintings called “the new nOOlOlogy” are based on a fraction of the infamous digital photos from the Abu Graib abuse scandal. As such, they present embedded images of American torture. Here American detainees are punished and humiliated and then adorned through an a-life process of viral attack laden with the latent content of ambiguous bioterror. These digital (computer-robotic) acrylic paintings link together systems of exposed nerves with the torture at Abu Graib – now festooned with miniature hermaphrodites infected by viral attacks that undermine them.

For me they are an attempt at expressing America’s deep demoralization. They are moral acts then, free with the truth of our penchant for desire. As such, these paintings contribute slightly to the downfall of the present reality in that they bury visual memory at the outset.

To those that persist in the amorality of Abu Graib, I shit on you. You have discredited me by creating a rotting nation. Although I have opposed you at every turn, never-the-less, you have made me feel guilty and dirty too, as only a single officer has been reprimanded for this disgraceful display thus far.

This artistic activity, in tribute to Leon Golub, is a conscious response to the world of irrational conventions in which I can find even myself.

Joseph Nechvatal

(*) Noology is the science of intellectual phenomena. n. study of intuition and reason. nooscopic, a. pertaining to examination of mind.

And as if all that weren’t enough, he has a brilliant article (“Jean Baudrillard and a Counter-Mannerist Art of Latent Excess“) in the latest issue of the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (Volume 3, Number 2 – July 2006).

Intellectual acumen, creative artistry, ethics and tech – this guy stuns me, always. Keep it going Joseph! You are an oasis in the desert.

Tracing Torture

Tracing Torture

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Here is a brief excerpt from testimony that claims the authorization to use torture in Iraq came from pretty high up. Read the whole article at TomDispatch.com and Truthout.org.

“Tracing the Trail of Torture: Embedding Torture as Policy From Guantanamo to Iraq,” by Dahr Jamail

While President Bush has regularly claimed – as with reporters in Panama last November – that “we do not torture,” Janis Karpinski, the U.S. Brigadier General whose 800th Military Police Brigade was in charge of 17 prison facilities in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib back in 2003, begs to differ. She knows that we do torture and she believes that the President himself is most likely implicated in the decision to embed torture in basic war-on-terror policy.

While testifying this January 21 in New York City at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration, Karpinski told us: “General [Ricardo] Sanchez [commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq] himself signed the eight-page memorandum authorizing literally a laundry list of harsher techniques in interrogations to include specific use of dogs and muzzled dogs with his specific permission.”

All this, as she reminded us, came after Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had been “specifically selected by the Secretary of Defense to go to Guantanamo Bay and run the interrogations operation,” was dispatched to Iraq by the Bush administration to “work with the military intelligence personnel to teach them new and improved interrogation techniques.”

Karpinski met Miller on his tour of American prison facilities in Iraq in the fall of 2003. Miller, as she related in her testimony, told her, “It is my opinion that you are treating the prisoners too well. At Guantanamo Bay, the prisoners know that we are in charge and they know that from the very beginning. You have to treat the prisoners like dogs. And if they think or feel any differently you have effectively lost control of the interrogation.”

Miller went on to tell Karpinksi in reference to Abu Ghraib, “We’re going to Gitmo-ize the operation.”

When she later asked for an explanation, Karpinski was told that the military police guarding the prisons were following the orders in a memorandum approving “harsher interrogation techniques,” and, according to Karpinski, “signed by the Secretary of Defense, Don Rumsfeld.”

That one-page memorandum “authorized sleep deprivation, stress positions, meal disruption -serving their meals late, not serving a meal. Leaving the lights on all night while playing loud music, issuing insults or criticism of their religion, their culture, their beliefs.” In the left-hand margin, alongside the list of interrogation techniques to be applied, Rumsfeld had personally written, “Make sure this happens!!” Karpinski emphasized the fact that Rumsfeld had used two exclamation points.

When asked how far up the chain of command responsibility for the torture orders for Abu Ghraib went, Karpinski said, “The Secretary of Defense would not have authorized without the approval of the Vice President.”

Karpinski does not believe that the many investigations into Abu Ghraib have gotten to the truth about who is responsible for the torture and abuse because “they have all been directed and kept under the control of the Department of Defense. Secretary Rumsfeld was directing the course of each one of those separate investigations. There was no impartiality whatsoever.”

Does she believe the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib has stopped?

“I have no reason to believe that it has. I believe that cameras are no longer allowed anywhere near a cellblock. But why should I believe it’s stopped? We still have the captain from the 82nd airborne division [who] returned and had a diary, a log of when he was instructed, what he was instructed, where he was instructed, and who instructed him. To go out and treat the prisoners harshly, to set them up for effective interrogation, and that was recently as May of 2005.”

Karpinski was referring to Captain Ian Fishback, one of three American soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division at Forward Operating Base Mercury near Fallujah who personally witnessed the torture of Iraqi prisoners and came forward to give testimony to human rights organizations about the crimes committed.