Torture and the Courage to Be Inconvenienced

• The corrupt against the civic minded,
• The empowered over the disenfranchised, and
• The best fed in lands where most are poor and hungry.

Torture is government by intimidation, horror, fear and division. It is antithetical to those who would create societies to flourish by lovingkindness, justice, and inclusion.

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In the still space of our confession, we must speak of our active and acquiescent, personal and collective, complicity with the culture of torture.

• We must acknowledge that torture is a problem for all of us. It has found fertile ground in the lands of Islam, on the Buddhist ground of Cambodia's killing fields, in the fatherland of the Reformation, in the topsoil of communist nations, in the democratic motherlands of Turkey and the United States and in the loam of the Catholic lands of Latin America.

• We must confess that every people seem capable of torture, even the United States - Convener of the Trials at Nuremburg, co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and instigator of the Geneva Conventions for the protection against "torture, or cruel or inhuman or degrading treatment."

• We should note that the National Catholic Reporter of March 24, 2006 reports that Catholics--more than the public at large, more than Protestants, and more than Evangelicals, support interrogational torture. Secular Americans were most likely to reject interrogational torture.

Then, we must turn from confessing complicity with the culture of torture to the abolition of torture and to reconciliation in societies of justice and lovingkindness.

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After the crucifixion, Jesus' community-the real target of His torture--gathered at Olivet.

All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer, Acts 1:12-14

They reaffirmed their faith in the message, the movement, and the kind of civil society that had been entrusted to them.

Whoever is made to suffer as a Christian should not be ashamed,
but should glorify God because of the name. 1 Pt 4:13-16

Reconciliation means accepting our responsibility for building a culture against torture.

We are responsible for knowing the facts. Research by the CIA, the Army, and the National Defense Intelligence University all show that interrogational torture is ineffective. It does not defuse ticking time bombs. The television show "24" lies. Torture:

• Produces bad information that leads to bad policy and needless dangerous battlefield sorties.
• Radicalizes survivors
• Makes it impossible to recruit human intelligence.
• Alienates populations.
• Causes an enemy to fight to the death rather than to surrender.
• Undercuts the possibility of appealing for the humane treatment of our own soldiers who are taken POW.

We are responsible for resisting the culture of torture.

• Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela were freed by our solidarity with their cause.
• Our amens enabled Martin Luther King to beat back the culture of Jim Crow.
• Our complacency allowed Major Roberto D'Aubuisson to assassinate Archbishop Romero and his forces to oversee the defiling and murder of the Maryknoll sisters.
• Our complacency allowed the sadistic guards at Abu Ghraib to go about their business; but our unwillingness to put their photographs aside saved countless lives.

Oona Hathaway, a law professor at Yale University studied 160 nations some of which torture and others of which do not. She found that the witness of the Mothers of the Plaza in Argentina, the honesty of the Chilean Medical Association, or the dignified protests of the lawyers of Pakistan summoned nations towards curbing the scourge of torture.

In such facts and examples, we can discern the path of reconciliation.

We must summon the courage to be inconvenienced by the culture of torture.

We must accept responsibility for rejecting the culture of torture in our personal and collective actions, including our acts of citizenship.

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