So here’s my question: Is torturing people inherently necessary in order to maintain the enormous gap between our relative wealth and the relative poverty of the poorest one billion people? Yesterday U.S. attorney general Michael Mukasey made it pretty much official U.S. policy (as if it weren’t already).
Posted in Torture | 11 Comments »WASHINGTON — Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said Wednesday that while he would consider it torture if he underwent the harsh Central Intelligence Agency interrogation technique known as waterboarding, the practice was not necessarily illegal, and he would not rule out its use in the future.
Under sometimes angry questioning from Democrats at his first oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Mukasey found himself caught in the debate that nearly derailed his confirmation last fall: whether waterboarding is torture.
“Would waterboarding be torture if it were done to you?” asked Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, glowering at Mr. Mukasey.
“I would feel that it was,” Mr. Mukasey acknowledged in the low monotone that he uses in virtually all public settings.
But the attorney general, a retired federal judge, would not be drawn into a larger conversation with Senator Kennedy or other Democrats over whether waterboarding might amount to torture if it was carried out on others, including American citizens held abroad.
Today the Senate Judiciary Committee votes on whether to move along the nomination of Judge Musakey for Attorney General. On Saturday, I read the quote below from George Bush’s weekly radio address, urging the Committee to vote in favor of Musakey’s nomination. Then I went and reread Bush’s 2001 inaugural address. Then I inexplicably started weeping, and had to call Megs to come comfort me. The juxtaposition of the hope with the reality was just too much for me, I guess.
Read the rest of this news item »
Excerpted from Tortured Logic by Jesse Holcomb, in the June 2007 issue of Sojourners magazine
How many of us condemn state-sanctioned torture by day but watch 24 by night? Apart from God, probably only a few marketing firms know the exact answer…
The fact that so many viewers “enjoy” fictionalized representations of torture every Monday - with news of Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay still ringing in the world’s ears - has upset some. Gary Solis, who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point, told The New Yorker that, under both U.S. and international law, “Jack Bauer is a criminal. In real life, he would be prosecuted.” Solis - alarmed by his military academy students repeatedly citing Bauer’s tactics with relish - entreated the show’s creators to ease off on their depictions.
And the dean of West Point, Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan, said he felt the show promoted “unethical and illegal” behavior, according to The New Yorker, and was unrealistic in portraying torture as working. “I’d like them to stop,” Finnegan said of the show’s producers. “They should do a show where the torture backfires.”
This wikinews story from yesterday reminded me of this TED talk by musician Peter Gabriel. Witness works with human rights groups around the world distributing cameras and helping people to document human rights abuses.
From the TED talk:
The thing that really amazed me that I had now idea was that you could suffer in this way and then have your whole experience, your story, denied, buried, or forgotten. And it seemed whenever there was a camera around, a video or film camera, it was a great deal harder to do, for those in power to bury the story
From the Witness website:
WITNESS uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. We empower people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change.
I love this because in a sense witness is about giving away power to the powerless, which is one of my favorite ideas, and really one of the great redemptive ideas that lies behind a lot of the great stories that I find most moving. It makes me want to somehow get more involved in that power transfer, helping to make it happen.
Posted in Activism, Torture, Videos, technology | 3 Comments »We have the right to say that it hurt.
-Alex Mpondo
Red Dust is a movie about apartheid, truth, forgiveness, and reconciliation. It’s a combination of mystery and morality play that kept me riveted from beginning to end.
The movie really helped me cement my new, post-evangelical understanding of forgiveness. It’s a much more demanding forgiveness which requires both victim and perpetrator to fully inventory the exact nature and consequences of harm, and then choose to re enter relationship. It’s a dizzying, overwhelming, intense, gut wrenching type of forgiveness which requires a lot.
As the movie progresses, you can see that these characters, in the process of wrestling through memories they had forgotten, and would rather continue to forget, are becoming more alive, and more human.
Having looked the beast in the eye, having given and received forgiveness, let us shut the door on the past, not to forget it, but to allow it not to imprison us.
-Desmond Tutu
It seems to me that international peace is impossible without this type of forgiveness. What do you think?
*warning: this movie contains graphic depictions of brutal torture
Posted in Forgiveness, Movie Reviews, Peace, Torture | 12 Comments »