What to make of Maher Arar? A Syrian-born computer engineer, now a naturalized citizen of Canada, an ordinary man with a wife and family, Arar was detained by American authorities on September 26, 2002, while changing flights at Kennedy Airport. Arar’s infraction? He had a co-worker, who had a brother, who had connections to people whom officials suspected of having links to al-Qaeda. Based on this thin thread of suspicion and without being charged with any crime, Arar was taken from his family, put in chains, handed over to the government of Syria, and for ten months subjected to acts of extreme physical and mental torture. We now know that Arar was completely innocent.
How could something like this happen? Why America’s resort to torture? Seasoned interrogators have long known that torture is a poor tactic to elicit reliable information. Under torture a person will say whatever his tormentors wish. In fact, a classic military text on interrogation, based on concrete experience gained during World War II, says that the best way to extract useful information is through kindness, not brutality.
Yet in major speeches on September 6 and 15, President George W. Bush vigorously and unapologetically defended what he euphemistically called “the program” as a necessary weapon in the so-called war on terror. In addition to transferring suspected terrorists to foreign countries for interrogation, the “program” includes our own government holding people in secret prisons and doing so indefinitely and without filing charges. It includes, too, the use of torture techniques such as simulating drowning, induced hypothermia, being forced into excruciating positions, and similar things that violate the Geneva Conventions’ Article 3, as recently confirmed by the United States Supreme Court (for background, see George Hunsinger, “Hanging in the balance,” Outlook, Sept. 4). As I write, even the compromise legislation on prisoner treatment that was reached between the White House and Republican members of Congress in September left questions unanswered.
Our resort to torture, I believe, exposes a much deeper malignancy. Even if we abolish torture tomorrow, that alone will not remove the illness of becoming content with violence as a national way of life, or the cancer of ceasing to be outraged when we hear of Maher Arar, of Abu Ghraib, of daily deaths in Iraq, and on and on. I realize that I am speaking what many now regard as unpatriotic heresy. Do I not believe that the threat of terrorism is real? I do. Do I not believe that the deaths of the 2,752 who were killed on September 11, 2001, demand a response? I do. But was launching a war in Iraq a rational and proportional response? This war has produced tens of thousands, some say around a hundred thousand, civilian deaths with no clear end in sight. We know that 6,500 civilians were killed in July and August alone. In a recent poll 54 percent of Americans still support the President’s draconian approach to terrorism. Why?
Christian leaders are divided and, as always when faced with war, have gravitated toward one of several classic responses.
The first is pacifism, which considers war to be illegitimate. Pacifism appeals to the witness of Jesus and reminds us, quite rightly, that a Christian’s ultimate allegiance is to God. One exponent of this view, Duke Divinity School’s Stanley Hauerwas, has argued persuasively that the American church been taken captive by the interests of the American state. He goes even further, claiming that Christians have no ultimate stake in the success of American democracy. On this point I believe the opposite is true. The need for churches to stand up for true democracy has never been greater.
This leads to a second response, the just war tradition. It agrees that our ultimate hope is in God but reminds us of our penultimate responsibility to sustain the institutions that make human flourishing possible. War sometimes may need to be waged as a stopgap in a disordered and sinful world. Reasoning in this way, many Americans argue that we were attacked and so must attack back. Even so, the just war tradition places limits upon war. The tradition places limits upon war’s commencement (i.e. authorization by a competent authority, a just cause, the goal of peace, use of force as a last resort, a reasonable chance of success, and a response in proportion to the aggression); upon its conduct (i.e. discriminating between combatants and noncombatants, and using only such force as is necessary); and upon its consequences (i.e. winners have responsibilities to losers). Moreover, a preemptive war, such as we launched in Iraq, is never justified unless an attack is imminent, which it was not. And now we know, of course, that the weapons of mass destruction rationale was contrived.
Some argue that even though the war was a tragic mistake, since we broke it, we now own it, and must fix it. Yet one does not make something right by compounding prior wrongs. The need to internationalize Iraq by involving the U.N. and the Arab states is clear. The need for a reasonable timetable for U.S. withdrawal is equally clear. That is, of course, unless we have quietly, implicitly adopted the third classic Christian response to war.
This third response to war is one that most Christians long ago repudiated. I speak of the crusade. This is a war carried out against the “infidel” based on a sacred vow to advance the cause of Christendom. With eerie parallels to the present day, crusaders are granted forgiveness for any sins they commit in furtherance of their cause; and they are given legal exemptions from the consequences of their actions. In other words, since the crusader’s cause is a divine one, it stands in a very real sense beyond criticism. Thus, some have argued that after 9/11 we can no longer afford the luxury of following just war principles. Instead, they say, we must do whatever it takes to win–no matter how many persons with names like “Arar” become casualties along the way.
Most believe that 9/11 presented us with a crisis. Who knew that the crisis would turn out to be an internal one? It is about our souls. Far more than the enemy without, we now are tormented by the demon lurking within. One does not need to entertain fantasy conspiracy theories to see that this is so.
What should the church do now? I don’t pretend to know. But I do believe it is time for this crisis to take center stage in our life together. Let me offer a specific suggestion for the PC(USA), one that is linked to the work of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church, on which I was privileged to serve.
This past summer, by nearly a unanimous vote, the 217th General Assembly asked that Presbyterians study the task force’s “theological prologue” and begin engaging in communal worship, study, and discernment across our usual party lines. Since the very first hours the task force’s report was released, however, it was read primarily through the lens of disputes over gays in the church. I do not deny the importance of this issue. But what if the theological prologue were to be read in a different way? What if we read it through the lens of our need to make a Christian response to oppression, warfare, and violence?
The task force did not try to tell the church what it ought to say or do. Instead we chose to remind the church of who we are, of our finest convictions, of our most treasured traditions. At its best, our Reformed tradition has sought to rise above polarizing ideologies and to stand fast against self-justifying idolatries. It has reached out to embrace the other. The task force’s final report says much about that.
As it turns out, the task force actually considered the plight of Maher Arar during its public meeting of March 2-4, 2005. Reporters were present, yet many chose to ignore our discussion of torture and violence. If it wasn’t about gays, people weren’t listening. Even though The New York Times had just run a front-page article on the secret program in which Arar and others had been ensnared, the reports focused on other things. One popular Presbyterian Web site juxtaposed reports of our meeting against four articles on gay sexuality, one on opposition to stem cell research, another on “intelligent design” arguments, and still another on abortion. Abortion is, of course, a serious moral issue. But that day there was even a story on the abortion of sheep, but no discussion of torture.
Let me put it plainly. There is something wrong with a church that can whip itself up into a frenzy arguing about gays but then shrug its shoulders over war and torture. In 1933 Karl Barth said that if one is not preaching against the concentration camps, one is not preaching the gospel. Likewise, a church that is ambivalent or undecided about torture and unjust war is something less than a church of Jesus Christ.
As it turned out, the church at Barmen actually failed to mention concentration camps or to speak up for the Jews. In these days of fear and trembling, for what failures will we too be held accountable?
William Stacy Johnson holds the Arthur M. Adams Chair of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is president of the Presbyterian Outlook Foundation.
