Rebekah Sharpe
March 31, 2008
Anti-war activists gathered the first weekend of March for the “Christian Peace Witness for Iraq” events in Washington, DC. Events for the weekend included a Friday morning “Interfaith Mini-Conference on U.S.–Sponsored Torture.” There, vocal former CIA employee and 9-11 conspiracy theorist Ray McGovern called the Iraq struggle a “war of aggression” by the United States and the “context” in which “torture is just one of the accumulating evils of the whole.”
“Can you handle the truth, folks?” McGovern asked. “I think we need to handle the truth.” He asserted: “The purpose of this war is very simple now. The President of the United States has stated in a signing statement on the Defense Authorization Bill, saying, in so many words, that the establishment of permanent military bases and access to Iraqi oil” was the purpose of the Iraq War. “It can’t be disguised,” McGovern adamantly asserted.
McGovern suggested that torture by the U.S. government was used to elicit false information on which the administration founded its reasons for going to war in the Middle East. He contended, “If it gets bad information, why do we torture? . . . Sometimes you want bad information. Sometimes you want to prove ties between Iraq and al Qaeda.”
Accusing the U.S. of “disregarding the Geneva Convention,” McGovern claimed that former CIA Director George Tenant and others have been “shielded from accountability” because of a “timid Congress and an arrogant White House.” He further argued that current laws allow President Bush to “use the CIA as his personal Gestapo,” and presidential memoranda contain “loophole[s] through which Donald Rumsfeld drove the Mack truck of torture.”
Ironically, McGovern’s talk on “The Reality of U.S.-Sponsored Torture” did not cite any specific instances of torture by the United States military. Instead, he cited a counter-terrorism official’s statement before Congress that “after 9-11 the gloves came off.”
McGovern recalled Martin Luther King’s saying, “There is such a thing as being too late,” and insisted that in terms of stopping alleged U.S. torture, “we’re almost there, folks.” No attempt was made by the speaker to define torture, or to identify what would constitute such a point of no return.
Arguing for the need for more radical action, McGovern declared, “The time for speaking and the time for writing is passed. . . . In the tradition of the Hebrew prophets [we] have a duty to make the broken victims go free.” It was not clear whether he was advocating the immediate release of all terrorism suspects who might claim to have been tortured. McGovern also noted that in his theological studies, he learned, “Jesus, Yahweh, the Prophet, all really only cared about one thing: that we do justice.” He told his audience that they needed to fight “the theology of Empire.”
Presbyterian minister Carol Wickersham of No2Torture, Rabbi Sid Schwarz of PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, and Mohamed Elsanousi of the Islamic Society of North America spoke as panelists at the conference. All gave theological arguments for why Christians, Jews, and Muslims should oppose torture and respect human dignity, with the assumption that the U.S. was a deliberate practitioner of routine torture. Like McGovern, none cited specific victims or occasions of torture by the United States.
Wickersham said that conference participants should “tell the truth, because there are obviously being told a lot of [unspecified] lies. We need to be calling on our elected officials . . . we . . . no longer have all the Republicans in charge. We should be able to have a different kind of accountability. It doesn’t seem that we do [have a new atmosphere of accountability].” She stated that “Jesus was tortured to death because he was perceived to be a national security threat” and that this same line of thinking justified the torture of people in modern society.
The Rev. Louise Green, the Minister of Social Justice at a Washington Unitarian Universalist Church, led opening and closing worship. She called on participants to join her in singing a refrain, stating, “As we bless the Source of Life, so we are blessed… The blessing gives us . . . strength… hope . . . life . . . and the courage to dare.” Our ability to act, said Green, “doesn’t come from our own will power . . . [it] comes as a blessing that we receive . . .” from an unnamed entity.
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