Editor’s Note: This guest viewpoint is a critique of stories and an editorial in the Outlook relating to torture. It originally appeared on Presbynet and is used by permission.
As I read the allegations and accusations of torture and abuse posted by Jack Haberer, editor of The Presbyterian Outlook, Princeton Seminary professor George Hunsinger, and the Moderator of General Assembly Rick Ufford-Chase, I felt weary; a weariness born of reading the same tired arguments repeated endlessly.
Jack Haberer, in “Clichés and truisms,” an editorial appearing in The Presbyterian Outlook, first asks if the United States of America as the world’s “lone superpower” has “sufficient character and courage to contain the corrosive effects of unchecked power in this new world”? He then lauds the US for “withdrawing” after the completion of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. This, according to Haberer, encouraged “the hope of other nations that we would not over-assert our power.”
Mr. Haberer should be aware that the objective of Operation Desert Shield/Storm was to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait, not remove the regime of Saddam Hussein. Effecting regime change subsequently became US policy during the Clinton administration. Furthermore, while the bulk of US ground, air and sea forces were re-deployed, a significant US and Allied presence remained in the Persian Gulf to maintain the “no fly zones” and deter any further aggression by Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, after 1992, the Clinton administration increased the military’s operational tempo by 300-percent with humanitarian and peacekeeping missions to Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans and Rwanda while maintaining an active presence in Europe and South Korea as well as the Persian Gulf. Throughout the 1990s, on any given day, US Army forces were deployed in approximately seventy countries world-wide accomplishing missions as varied as keeping Serbians from murdering Muslim Albanian Kosovars, removing landmines and other explosives from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and helping the Vietnamese identify their missing-in-action from nearly thirty years of war between 1946 and 1975.
Then Haberer asks if a “second invasion of Iraq” was driven by a “complicated mix of incomplete espionage regarding alleged weapons of mass destruction … alongside a hunger for justice (vengeance?) over there.”
Note the use of the pejorative term “espionage” for “intelligence.” Does Haberer think the United States was doing something naughty in gathering intelligence on a regime that used chemical weapons on its neighbors, its own Kurdish populations, and which also had been engaged in nuclear weapons development endeavors since the 1970s? Yes, espionage is spying and all indications were (and remain) that Saddam Hussein had an active weapons of mass destruction program. Given the information at hand, not taking aggressive action against Iraq would have constituted an impeachable offense. As for the “hunger for justice (vengeance?)” assertion, perhaps Mr. Haberer wrote his editorial before Iraqis discovered more mass graves while digging a ditch. Maybe he thinks standing up a provisional democratic government, writing a democratic constitution and conducting three free elections is a matter of “vengeance” rather than the result of spreading justice to a part of the world where justice has meant a bullet in the brain of Afghan women who learn to read, flogging for drunkenness and beheadings for things like adultery.
Then Haberer asks, “Could we extract information from them (detained terrorists) that might avert more terror-caused carnage?” You bet we can … and have! And, by the way, torture is not the way to do it because people being tortured will say whatever it takes to make the pain stop. Haberer then expounds upon a series of straw man arguments.
Scroll down to “Why the torture abuse scandal matters” by Princeton Seminary’s George Hunsinger, appearing as a guest editorial in The Presbyterian Outlook.
Hunsinger begins, “Of all the scandals that beset us as Americans, there is one that history is likely to judge most harshly, namely, the official authorization of torture abuses by the current Bush administration. As the Abu Ghraib photos have shown with unforgettable horror (emphasis added by me) serious violations of international law have followed in its train.”
Hunsinger then asserts that the administration authorizes torture abuses. Maybe that’s why a number of people accused of abuses have been court-martialed and sent to Leavenworth. But it’s the next sentence that truly pegs the weary meter. “As the Abu Ghraib photos have shown WITH UNFORGETTABLE HORROR serious violations of international law have followed in its train.”
Nicholas Berg’s head being severed is “unforgettable horror.” Further unforgettable horror is airliners filled with innocent civilians slamming into the World Trade Center. Watching Americans leaping to their deaths from the Twin Towers in preference to being roasted alive by fires burning a few stories below them is unforgettable horror. Conversely, a guy with panties over his head tied to a bed and naked guys in a pile with sacks over their noggins are fraternity and sorority initiation pranks; out-of-line in an American prisoner of war camp, but hardly “unforgettable horror.” Go to https://beheadings.com if you want to see unforgettable horror and it won’t include one single American soldier or intelligence officer doing anything to anybody! But you will see Iraqi policemen and Russian soldiers being beheaded by Iraqi insurgents and Chechen rebels. That’s the enemy and this nation is leading the world in fighting them.
Not to be outdone, Rick Ufford-Chase, Moderator of the PC(USA), chimes in with the bumper-sticker title, “No2 Torture.” “We are asking Presbyterians to pray, study and take action to assure there will be no unjust and abusive treatment of detainees by the United States and its allies. This statement is an extension of a quickly growing grassroots effort to educate people about the use of torture and the urgent need to call for an immediate end of these practices, wherever they occur.” He then refers to “clear and compelling evidence that the U.S. government has routinely turned to torture as an appropriate tool in the “War on Terror.”
Want to educate yourself on torture? Let me refer you to The Al Qaeda Training Manual, lesson 17, “Interrogation and Investigation,” section 3, subsection f, “The brother may have to confess under pressure of torture in the interrogation center. Once in the prosecution center, however, he should say that he was tortured, deny all his prior confessions, and ask that the interrogation be repeated.”1 In the next lesson, “Prison and Detention Centers” item one instructs, “At the beginning of the trial, once more the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by State Security (investigators) before the judge.”2
Did the Moderator consider that al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorists groups assume they will be tortured because they routinely torture, murder and kill innocent people? If they are not tortured, so what, they are going to claim they have been, confident that the “useful idiots” Lenin long ago recognized will believe them.
The Moderator goes on to state that he has asked Presbyterians “to think carefully about the growing level of violence (torture, militarized borders, security checkpoints, and the War (sic) against Iraq) that our government has employed on our behalf …” Does the Moderator object to security checkpoints in airports or at the entrance to public buildings? Does he not understand that suicide bombers are smarter than any munitions guided by lasers or the Global Positioning Satellite? The suicide bomber can change direction to effect the most casualties possible. In all his traveling, might I suggest the Moderator visit Tel Aviv to check out the site where the Dolphinarium disco used to stand. It’s right on the beach. A mosque is located directly across the boulevard. Be sure to check out the photos of twenty-three young people ranging from fifteen to their mid-twenties; kids blown apart while waiting in line on June 1, 2001.
Truth is that in this world where the United States is the lone superpower, there are mean people who hate Americans. They want to kill as many of us as they possibly can and have been doing so successfully since 1983.
For perhaps the most inane offering of all, I direct the reader to the Witherspoon Society Web site and an offering posted just before Christmas titled, “BAGHDAD/AMMAN: Christian Peacemakers in Iraq and Jordon respond to U.S. Presidential address.” Peggy Gish, a Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) activist, commenting on the President’s recent address noted, “Based on my three years of listening to Iraqis who have suffered the pain of war, U.S. and Iraqi forces ‘on the offensive’ means continued mass arrests, house raids and bombing of civilians, continued illegal detentions, torture and abuse.”
Again, a “given” is that Americans are at fault. While figures are incomplete, the overwhelming majority of innocent Iraqis killed in this conflict were murdered by insurgent terrorists who actively targeted civilians 1) out of a desire to elevate sectarian fighting to the level of a civil war, and 2) because civilians constitute an easier target than US or, increasingly, Iraqi Government forces.
CPT member Sheila Provencher adds, “He (President Bush) does not seem to realize that there are thousands of members of a nationalist Iraqi insurgency who will use force to end the American occupation of their country, without using suicide bombers or civilian attacks … they are fighting for the freedom of their country…”
Does Ms. Provencher understand that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are fighting the insurgents? Isn’t she aware Iraqi men are being blown up while waiting in line to join security forces? Indeed there are freedom fighters in Iraq… US forces are training them.
While there undoubtedly are insurgents who are not themselves engaged in acts of terrorism (defined as violence directed at innocent civilians to achieve political purpose) the notion that they are fighting “for the freedom of their country” is truly astounding. They are fighting to return to power a minority regime that ranked among the world’s most corrupt and cruel. Freedom is millions of Iraqis going to the polls to vote, not sadistic jailers raping women while their husbands, sons and brothers are being tossed alive into furnaces, off of buildings onto pavement or cut up with chain saws.
Where did the religious left go so wrong? There is a definitive truth, despite what some seem to believe. There is good and there is evil. While the United States is not perfect, we are essentially a good and selfless nation. And, yes, the US has “sufficient character and courage” to lead the world. Americans are demonstrating that character and courage everyday in this struggle with evil. They are at the tip of the spear bringing freedom and hope to millions in Iraq.
George Washington wrote, “If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it. If we desire to secure peace, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.” It is indeed wearing that much of the “insult” we must repel comes from well-meaning but either woefully or, perhaps, willfully ignorant people.
1 Al Qaeda Training Manual, Government Exhibit 1677-T, Evidence in the Africa Embassy Bombings held by the the Southern District Court, New York City, Attorney General’s Office, p. 126
2 Ibid., p. 137.
Earl H. Tilford Jr., Ph.D., is professor of history at Grove City College. He served more than twenty years as an Air Force intelligence officer. In retirement he was director of research for the US Army’s Strategic Studies Institute. At Grove City College, Tilford teaches courses in military history, national security, and Russian history. He serves as Coordinator of the Terrorism Study Group in the Grove City College Center for Vision and Values and is an Academic Fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. In November the White House appointed him to the Board of Visitors of the US Army War College.
