The United States is engaged or complicit in a wide range of inhumane and degrading interrogation and detainment practices, including torture, according to a religious left group.
Meeting March 25-26 in Durham, North Carolina, the National Religious Committee against Torture (NRCAT) sponsored an interfaith gathering of students, clergy and activists who shared concerns that the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, prison system, and culture itself were feeding a “national descent into torture” that was a “crisis of faith.”
Entitled “Toward a Moral Consensus Against Torture”, the event was organized by Dr. Amy Laura Hall and Dr. Kara Slade of United Methodism’s Duke Divinity School, which hosted the conference alongside First Presbyterian Church, Durham. The conference focused heavily on forms of coercion such as isolation, forced nudity and sleep deprivation that were deemed unacceptable. Torture itself was described as in a category alongside rape and genocide.
An American Focus
“Our aim is to create moral consensus in our communities that torture is never justified,” announced Dr. George Hunsinger of Princeton Theological Seminary in a keynote address to the conference.
The Princeton Theological Seminary professor said that he began to have doubts about the U.S. government’s practices during the Abu Ghraib scandal, which he said was unconvincingly explained away as “a few bad apples.”
“The time comes when silence is betrayal,” Hunsinger said, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hunsinger was one of several speakers who shaped the conference’s focus almost exclusively on the United States. A founder of NRCAT, Hunsinger spoke either of reported U.S. torture practices, or of countries in which reported torture was the direct consequence of U.S. involvement, such as through programs of “extraordinary rendition” in which foreign nationals suspected of terrorist involvement were repatriated by the U.S. to their country of origin and interrogated. Torture not involving a direct connection with the U.S. was mostly unmentioned in the panel discussions and keynote addresses.
In one case, North Carolina activist and panelist Beth Brockman described a trip to Cuba in which she protested the continued operation of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility from across the no-man’s land that separates the U.S. military base from the Communist nation. The torture practices of the Island’s authoritarian government were unmentioned, and the U.S. facility was the exclusive focus.
The Central Intelligence Agency was portrayed as directly involved in educating foreign intelligence services about torture. Harper’s Magazine Contributing Editor Scott Horton described a “tiny clique” that had “risen to the pinnacle of power” in the CIA due to a rendition program.
“Everything you hear [about Guantanamo Bay], it’s all true,” said Stephen Xenakis, a retired U.S. Army officer who spoke on a panel discussion entitled “The Nature of U.S. Sponsored Torture.”
“If there’s going to be accountability, if there’s going to be responsibility by the U.S. government, then it’s got to come to the kitchen table,” said Xenakis, arguing that the wars had not touched American life as they had in previous generations.
Cultural Culpability
Conference speakers and panelists depicted an America in which acceptance of torture practices – if not their outright promotion – was widespread.
Several speakers described the complicity of a culture that they charged had accepted and even cheered such practices.
“Torture is taught,” argued Dr. Robin Kirk, Director of the Duke Human Rights Center, saying it was part of a methodology and body of knowledge that had been created over time and applied.
In her keynote address, Ingrid Mattson, a past President of the Islamic Society of North America, speculated that American culture had been drawn into a desensitizing propaganda effort through television shows such as “24”. During a visit to the Pentagon, Mattson said she found it “very disturbing and interesting” that a poster from “24” was hanging in a hallway leading to the communications office.
Kirk also alleged that the producers of “24” were deliberately pushing a political agenda.
“It’s the way torture is depicted,” Kirk explained, singling out “Alias”, and “Lost” alongside “24” as offending television programs. “Torture is portrayed as positive, something the good guys do, and something that works.”
“In the past, if you look at scenes from movies, it’s the bad guys torturing,” Kirk said. “But we saw a very different picture of torture post-9/11. “
“These pictures of torture were not confined to shows that had something to do with 9/11,” Kirk said. “You could easily find depictions of torture in shows like CSI, NCIS or NYPD Blue.”
Some speakers, including Dr. David Gushee of the Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, blamed torture on what was termed “the weakness of the American people”.
“Perhaps, as the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve,” Gushee said. “And maybe a people get the media, the church and the academy that they deserve. We are a distracted and superficial people.”
The Mercer University Professor said that arguments against torture “bounce off” unless they are rooted in the national self interest.
“American Christianity has been so deeply acculturated over the centuries … that the capacity to think in densely Christian theological terms about life is general is lost,” Gushee said.
Gushee was joined by fellow Evangelical Partnership official Richard Cizik, who lamented American Evangelicalism’s alleged acceptance of torture practices.
“We know from evidence that Evangelicals are more likely to support torture than other religious groups,” Cizik reported. Describing himself as a “convert” in the last four years to the anti-torture cause, Cizik said Evangelicals were “driving down the road with a false vision” and needed to “behold this issue in a new way.”
The former lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals warned “we can’t trust our own government too much,” citing arguments made before the Iraq War about weapons of mass destruction.
Dissatisfaction with President Obama
Speakers expressed varying degrees of disappointment and frustration with U.S. President Barack Obama during the conference. Some speakers were angry that Obama had not yet fulfilled a campaign promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, while others complained that the President was unwilling to investigate reported instances of torture that had taken place in the Bush and Clinton years.
“President Obama has said ‘we aren’t going to look backward, I’m only going to look forward,’” NRCAT President Linda Gustis noted. “It’s a terrible mistake on his part, and he’s wrong. It was a political decision on his part and it is heartbreaking to have President Obama – whom I really believe disapproves of at his core the use of torture – and yet, for his own political purposes, he has made the decision not to look back.”
Conference speakers called for a commission of inquiry to investigate alleged torture practices and to hold accountable those who they believe approved them.
“We are now over two years into the Obama years, and it is clear that at least in this first term there will be little if anything done to investigate the policies of previous administrations,” lamented Gushee.
“President Obama has turned out to be a disappointment,” said Hunsinger, citing the President’s campaign promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and its “ongoing, permanent existence.”
The Princeton Seminary professor said that Obama’s executive order to close secret detention facilities was limited to the CIA, and did not address Defense Department interrogation centers, such as a facility at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan that Hunsinger said did not allow the Red Cross access.
Hunsinger also pointed to “Appendix M” interrogations, an Army field manual section that provides for solitary confinement of detainees. Lastly, the NRCAT founder claimed that some forms of extraordinary rendition continue under the Obama Administration, although he did not specify which ones.
“The conditions of ‘turning up the volume’ are still there,” Hunsinger assessed.
Pacifist Undercurrents
Many, but not all, of the conference speakers named pacifism as a driving force behind their opposition to coercion in interrogation and detainment of enemy fighters.
“If we really want to get rid of torture, we probably also want to get rid of the death penalty and of the permission to engage in war,” argued Dr. Kalman Bland, a professor of religion at Duke University. “And that means a total revision of our religious teachings that capital punishment is okay and that there are such things as war. Those two paradigms set the stage for torture as a legitimate instrument of state power. And until we put and end to war and put an end to the death penalty, I am afraid that torture will always be with us.”
Prison Offenses
Treatment of those incarcerated within the U.S. prison system was a significant focus during the conference.
The focus of a panel discussion entitled “Torture in U.S. Prisons”; presenters shared their concerns about extended periods of solitary confinement and testified to a lack of adequate mental health evaluation and care for prisoners.
Disturbed by what she referred to as a “serious mercy deficit” regarding prisoners, American Civil Liberties Union Staff Attorney Amy Fettig said that the practice of solitary confinement had under the long term been developed into a correctional tool.
Citing statistics that 10 percent of the California prison system’s population was in isolation, Fettig reported that 70 percent of the suicide attempts in the system were in those isolation units.
“Don’t put young people or the mentally ill in these situations,” Fettig implored in her arguments for shorter stays in solitary confinement, to be very selective with what prisoners were placed in isolation and to use such isolating confinement only as a last resort.
Fettig was echoed by Phil Griffin, and attorney with North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services.
“Most people don’t care,” Griffin assessed while describing solitary confinement as both a means of punishment and control. Comparing prison treatment of the mentally ill to the biblical injunction to care for “the least of these” Griffin said solitary confinement was a threat to mental health and was torture.
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