Today is the ninth anniver­sary of the war in Afghanistan. In recog­ni­tion, here’s my Non​vi​o​lence​.org essay from 10/7/2010. It’s all sadly still top­i­cal. Nine years in and we’re still mak­ing ter­ror and still cre­at­ing enemies.

This past week­end I gave a talk at the Arch Street Meet­ing­house after the Interim Meet­ing ses­sions of Phi­ladle­phia Yearly Meet­ing. Interim Meet­ing is the group that meets sort-of monthly between yearly meet­ing busi­ness sess­sions. In an ear­lier blog post I called it “the estab­lish­ment” and I looked for­ward to shar­ing the new life of the blog­ging world and Con­ver­gent Friends with this group. I had been asked by the most excel­lent Stephen Dot­son to talk about “Find­ing Fel­low­ship Between Friends Thru The Inter­net.”

I was curi­ous to return to Interim Meet­ing, a group I served on about half a decade ago. As I sat in the meet­ing, I kept see­ing glimpses of issues that I planned to address after­wards in my talk: how to talk afresh about faith; how to pub­li­cize our activ­ity and com­mu­ni­cate both among our­selves and with the out­side world; how to engage new and younger mem­bers in our work.

Turns out I didn’t get the chance. Only half a dozen or so mem­bers of Interim Meet­ing stuck around for my pre­sen­ta­tion. No announce­ment was made at the end of ses­sions. None of the senior staff were there and no one from the long table full of clerks, alter­nate clerks and alter­nate alter­nate clerks came. Eleven peo­ple were at the talk (includ­ing some who hadn’t been at Interim Meet­ing). The inti­macy was nice but it was hardly the “take it to the estabish­ment” kind of event I had imagined.

The talk itself went well, despite or maybe because of its inti­macy. I had asked Seth H (aka Chron­i­cler) along for spir­i­tual sup­port and he wrote a nice review on Quak­erQuaker. Steve T, an old friend of mine from Cen­tral Philly days, took some pic­tures which I’ve included here. I videoed the event, though it will need some work to tighten it down to some­thing any­one would want to watch online. The peo­ple who attended wanted to attend and asked great ques­tions. It was good work­ing with Stephen Dot­son again in the plan­ning. I would wish that more Philadel­phia Friends had more inter­est in these issues but as indi­vid­u­als, all we can do is lead a horse to water. In the end, the yearly meet­ing is in God’s hands.

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Below are obser­va­tions from Interim Meet­ing and how the Con­ver­gent Friends move­ment might address some of the issues raised. Let me stress that I offer these in love and in the hope that some hon­est talk might help. I’ve served on Interim Meet­ing and have given a lot of time toward PYM over the last twenty years. This list was for­warded by email to senior staff and I present them here for oth­ers who might be con­cerned about these dynamics.

 

GENERATIONAL FAIL:

There were about seventy-five peo­ple in the room for Interim Meet­ing ses­sions. I was prob­a­bly the third or fourth youngest. By U.S. cen­sus def­i­n­i­tions I’m in my eighth year of mid­dle age, so that’s really sad. That’s two whole gen­er­a­tions that are largely miss­ing from PYM lead­er­ship. I know I shouldn’t be sur­prised; it’s not a new phe­nom­e­non. But if you had told me twenty years ago that I’d be able to walk into Interim Meet­ing in 2010 and still be among the youngest, well… Well, frankly I would have uttered a choice epi­thet and kicked the Quaker dust from my shoes (most of my friends did). I know many Friends bod­ies strug­gle with age diver­sity but this is par­tic­u­larly extreme.

WHAT I WANTED TO TELL INTERIM MEETING: About 33% of QuakerQuaker’s audi­ence is GenX and 22% are Mil­lenials. If Interim Meet­ing were as diverse as Quak­erQuaker there would have been 16 YAFs (18–35 year olds) and 25 Friends 35 and 49 years of age. I would have been about the 29th youngest in the room–middle aged, just where I should be! Quak­erQuaker has an age diver­sity that most East Coast Friends Meet­ings would die for. If you want to know the inter­ests and pas­sions of younger Friends, Quaker blogs are an excel­lent place to learn. There are some very dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tional and style dif­fer­ences at play (my post seven years ago, a post from Micah Bales this past week).

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DECISION-MAKING

 

The first part of the ses­sions was run with what’s called a “Con­sent Agenda,” a leg­isla­tive mea­sure where mul­ti­ple agenda items are approved en masse. It rests on the ide­al­is­tic notion that all seventy-five atten­dees has come to ses­sions hav­ing read every­thing in the quarter-inch packet mailed to them (I’ll wait till you stop laugh­ing). Interim Meet­ing lumped thir­teen items together in this man­ner. I sus­pect most Friends left the meet­ing hav­ing for­got­ten what they had approved. Most edu­ca­tors would say you have to rein­force read­ing with live inter­ac­tion but we bypassed all of that in the name of efficiency.

WHAT I WANTED TO TELL INTERIM MEETING: Quaker blogs are won­der­fully rich sources of dis­cus­sion. Com­ments are often more inter­est­ing than the orig­i­nal posts. Many of us have writ­ten first drafts of pub­lished arti­cles on our blogs and then pol­ished them with feed­back received in the com­ments. This kind of com­mu­ni­ca­tion feed­back is pow­er­ful and doesn’t take away from live meeting-time. There’s a ton of pos­si­bil­i­ties for shar­ing infor­ma­tion in a mean­ing­ful way out­side of meetings.

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MINUTES OF WITNESS

 

Two “min­utes” (a kind of Quaker statement/press release) were brought to ses­sions. Both were vet­ted through a lengthy process where they were approved first by monthly and then quar­terly meet­ings before com­ing before Interim Meet­ing. A minute on Afghanistan was nine months old, a response to a troop level announce­ment made last Decem­ber; one against Mar­cel­lus Shale drilling in Penn­syl­va­nia was undated but it’s a topic that peaked in main­stream media five months ago. I would have more appre­ci­a­tion of this cum­ber­some process if the min­utes were more “sea­soned” (well-written, with care taken in the dis­cern­ment behind them) but there was lit­tle in either that explained how the issue con­nected with Quaker faith and why we were lift­ing it up now as con­cern. A senior staffer in a small group I was part of lamented how the min­utes didn’t give him much guid­ance as to how he might explain our con­cern with the news media. So here we were, approv­ing two out-of-date, hard-to-communicate state­ments that many IM reps prob­a­bly never read.

WHAT I WANTED TO TELL INTERIM MEETING: Blog­ging gives us prac­tice in talk­ing about spir­i­tu­al­ity. Com­menters chal­lenge us when we take rhetor­i­cal short­cuts or make assump­tions or trade on stereo­types. Most Quaker blog­gers would tell you they’re bet­ter writ­ers now than when they started their blog. Spir­i­tual writ­ing is like a mus­cle which needs to be exer­cised. To be bluntly hon­est, two or three blog­gers could have got­ten onto Skype, opened a shared Google Doc and ham­mered out bet­ter state­ments in less than an hour. If we’re going to be approv­ing these kinds of thing we need to prac­tice and increase our spir­i­tual literacy.

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THE ROLE OF COMMITTEES

 

The sec­ond part was Interim Meet­ing look­ing at itself. We broke into small groups and ask­ing three ques­tions: “What is the work of Interim Meet­ing,” “Are we sat­is­fied with how we do this now?” and “If we were to make changes, what would they be?.” I thought to myself that the rea­son I ever go to events like this is to see dear Friends and to see what sparks of life are hap­pen­ing in the yearly meet­ing. As our small group went around, and as small groups shared after­wards, I real­ized that many of the peo­ple in the room seemed to agree: we were hun­gry for the all-to-brief moments where the Spirit broke into the reg­i­mented Quaker process.

One star­tling tes­ti­mo­nial came from a mem­ber of the out­reach com­mit­tee. She explained that her com­mit­tee, like many in PYM, is an admin­is­tra­tive one that’s not sup­posed to do any out­reach itself–it’s all sup­posed to stay very “meta.” They recently decided to have a pic­nic with no busi­ness sched­uled and there found them­selves “going rogue” and talk­ing about out­reach. Her spirit rose and voice quick­ened as she told us how they spent hours dream­ing up out­reach projects. Of course the out­reach com­mit­tee wants to do out­reach! And with state PYM is in, can we really have a dozen peo­ple sequestered away talk­ing about talk­ing about out­reach. Shouldn’t we declare “All hands on deck!” and start doing work? It would have been time well spent to let her share their ideas for the next thirty min­utes but of course we had to keep mov­ing. She fin­ished quickly and the excite­ment leaked back out of the room.

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FOLLOW-UP THOUGHTS AND THE FUTURE OF THE YEARLY MEETING

 

Now I need to stress some things. I had some great one-on-one con­ver­sa­tions in the breaks. A lot of peo­ple were very nice to me and gave me hugs and asked about fam­ily. These are a com­mit­ted, hope­ful group of peo­ple. There was a lot of faith in that room! Peo­ple work hard and serve faith­fully. But it feels like we’re trapped by the sys­tem we our­selves cre­ated. I wanted to share the excite­ment and direct­ness of the Quaker blog­ging world. I wanted to share the robust­ness of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­niques we’re using and the power of dis­trib­uted pub­lish­ing. I wanted to share the new spirit of ecu­men­ti­cal­ism and cross-branch work that’s happening.

I’ve been vis­it­ing local Friends Meet­ings that have half the atten­dance they did ten years ago. Some have trou­ble break­ing into the double-digits for Sun­day morn­ing wor­ship and I’m often the youngest in the room, bring­ing the only small kids. I know there are a hand­ful of thriv­ing meet­ings, but I’m wor­ried that most are going to have close their doors in the next ten to twenty years.

I had hoped to show how new com­mu­ni­ca­tion struc­tures, the rise of Con­ver­gent Friends and the seek­ers of the Emerg­ing Church move­ment could sig­nal new pos­si­bil­i­ties for Philadel­phia Yearly Meet­ing. Toward the end of Interim Meet­ing, some Friends bemoaned our lack of resources and clerk Thomas Swain reminded them that with God there is no lim­i­ta­tion and noth­ing is impos­si­ble. Some of the things I’m see­ing online are the impos­si­ble come to life. Look at Quak­erQuaker: an unstaffed online mag­a­zine run­ning off of a $50/month bud­get and get­ting 10,000 vis­its a month. It’s not any­thing I’ve done, but this com­mu­nity that God has brought together and the tech­no­log­i­cal infra­struc­ture that has allowed us to coor­di­nate so eas­ily. It’s far from the only neat project out there and there are a lot more on the draw­ing boad. Some yearly meet­ings are engag­ing with these new pos­si­bilites. But mine appar­ently can’t even stay around for a talk.

“We’ll end the war just as soon as…” is the rhetor­i­cal par­ent of empire-crushing quag­mires. The con­di­tional changes as needed, because it needs to stay fresh to stay plau­si­ble. One pres­i­dent will claim that the right enemy leader needs to be killed, another that more troops need to be tem­porar­ily added.

Strate­gic changes can change the tide of a mil­i­tary con­flict but Afghanistan is now an eight-year-old war. We’re not bat­tling some other empire for con­trol of ter­ri­tory. The fight­ers shoot­ing at Amer­i­can sol­diers are Afghani. They will still be there when we leave, when­ever we leave. They are Afghanistan’s future whether we like it or not. The only real ques­tion is whether we’ll leave as friends or as ene­mies. Thirty thou­sand addi­tional U.S. troops will be 30,000 addi­tional U.S. rifles aimed at 30,000 more Afgha­nis who sim­ply don’t want us there. Eigh­teen months will be eigh­teen more months of Afghan seething over the cor­rupt U.S.-backed Karzai government.

I’m no fan of the Tal­iban. But it’s hard to imag­ine being the coun­try being ruled by any­one else when the U.S. troops even­tu­ally do pull out. Ten years of war will have insured another gen­er­a­tion of rad­i­cal­ized Aghani youth. And what about Amer­ica? A whole gen­er­a­tion got inter­ested in pol­i­tics because of a bright young pres­i­dent promis­ing change, yet here we have the same tired quag­mire play­book. It’s a shame.

I occa­sion­ally go back to my blog­ging archives to pick out inter­est­ing arti­cles from one, five and ten years ago.

ONE YEAR AGO: The Not-Quite-So Young Quak­ers

It was five years ago this week that I sat down and wrote about a cool
new move­ment I had been read­ing about. It would have been Jor­dan Cooper’s blog that turned me onto Robert E Web­ber’s The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals, a look at gen­er­a­tional shifts among Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cals. In ret­ro­spect, it’s fair to say that the Quak­erQuaker com­mu­nity gath­ered around this essay (here’s Robin M’s account of first read­ing it) and it’s follow-up We’re All Ranters Now (Wess talk­ing about it).

And yet? All of this is still a small demo­graphic scat­tered all around. If I wanted to have a good two-hour caffeine-fueled bull ses­sion about the future of Friends at some local cof­feeshop this after­noon, I can’t think of any­one even vaguely local who I could call up. I’m really sad to say we’re still largely on our own. Accord­ing to actu­ar­ial tables, I’ve recently crossed my life’s halfway point and here I am still ref­er­enc­ing gen­er­a­tional change. How I wish I could hon­estly say that I could get involved with any com­mit­tee in my yearly meet­ing and get to work on the issues raised in “Younger Evan­gel­i­cals and Younger Quak­ers”. Some­one recently sent me an email thread between mem­bers of an out­reach com­mit­tee for another large East Coast yearly meet­ing and they were debat­ing whether the inter­net was an appro­pri­ate place to do out­reach work–in 2008?!?

Pub­lished 9/14/2008.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Van­ity Googling of Causes

A poster to an obscure dis­cus­sion board recently described typ­ing a par­tic­u­lar search phrase into Google and find­ing noth­ing but bad infor­ma­tion. Repro­duc­ing the search I deter­mined two things: 1) that my site topped the list and 2) that the results were actu­ally quite accu­rate. I’ve been hear­ing an increas­ing num­ber of sto­ries like this. “Cause Googling,” a vari­a­tion on “van­ity googling,” is sud­denly becom­ing quite pop­u­lar. But the inter­est­ing thing is that these new searchers don’t actu­ally seem curi­ous about the results. Has Google become our new proof text?

Pub­lished 10/2/2004 in The Quaker Ranter.

TEN’ISH YEARS AGO: War Time Again
This piece is about the NATO bomb­ing cam­paign in Ser­bia (Wikipedia). It’s strange to see I was feel­ing war fatigue even before 9/11 and the “real” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There’s a great dan­ger in all this. A dan­ger to the soul of Amer­ica. This is the fourth coun­try the U.S. has gone to war against in the last six months. War is becom­ing rou­tine. It is sand­wiched between the soap operas and the sit­coms, between the traf­fic and weather reports. Intense cruise mis­sile bom­bard­ments are car­ried out but have no effect on the psy­che or even imag­i­na­tion of the U.S. citizens.

It’s as if war itself has become another con­sumer good. Another event to be pack­aged for com­mer­cial tele­vi­sion. Given a theme song. We’re at war with a coun­try we don’t know over a region we don’t really care about. I’m not be face­tious, I’m sim­ply stat­ing a fact. The United States can and should play an active peace­mak­ing role in the region, but only after we’ve done our home­work and have basic knowl­edge of the play­ers and sit­u­a­tion. Iso­la­tion­ism is dan­ger­ous, yes, but not nearly as dan­ger­ous as the emerg­ing cul­ture of these dilet­tante made-for-TV wars.

Pub­lished March 25, 1999, Non​vi​o​lence​.org

To Amer­i­can eyes the news of the esca­lat­ing war in the Cau­ca­sus nation of Geor­gia almost reads as farce: a break­away region of a break­away region, tanks rolling to main­tain con­trol of… well, not that much really. We won­der how it could be in either Rus­sia or Georgia’s inter­ests to pick a fight over all this? Why does it seem like Russia’s de facto leader-for-life Vladimir Putin is still fight­ing the Cold War? And what must be going through the mind of Georgia’s Pres­i­dent Mikheil Saakashvili to be taunt­ing the giant to its north?
But the farce turns to weari­ness as we real­ize just how famil­iar this all is. Tiny eth­nic enclaves with cen­turies of ani­mosi­ties and well rehearsed sto­ries of atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted by the other set fight­ing by the break­down of an empire that had uneasily united them in repres­sion. Change a few details and we could be talk­ing recent con­flicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Sudan, Palestine/Israel and Iraq. Blood money from the drug trade, from oil bil­lions and human traf­fick­ing add fuel to the fire. We’ve been fight­ing these same wars since at least 1914. Why haven’t we learned how to stop them?
Seri­ously: oth­er­wise strong economies col­lapse under the chaos that these ter­ri­to­r­ial wars bring. Most of the wars seem to be fought in mar­ginal areas and all sides would be bet­ter off if the politi­cians stopped wor­ry­ing about these con­tested ter­ri­to­ries and just focused on build­ing a econ­omy attrac­tive to inter­na­tional trade.
Why hasn’t the world learned the mech­a­nisms to end these con­flicts before they erupt into open war­fare? Where is the polit­i­cal will to end this class of war once and for all? Dis­ease and ter­ror­ism are the invari­able fruits of these con­flicts and strike us all across national bound­aries. The “inter­na­tional com­mu­nity” needs to be mean more than impres­sive chore­og­ra­phy and a few thou­sand ath­letes in Bei­jing. This week’s real gold metal will go to the lead­ers that can tran­scend macho pos­tur­ing and weak-willed apol­o­giz­ing and get those Russ­ian tanks out of Georgia.

The bul­lets and bombs have finally found their mark. It is no sur­prise to learn of yet another assas­i­na­tion attempt against Pak­istani oppo­si­tion leader Benazir Bhutto. Details are still sketchy and con­flict­ing but the only thing we really need to know is that this attempt was suc­cess­ful and that Bhutto is dead less than two weeks before Par­lia­men­tary elec­tions that might well have brought her into power for the third time.

Pak­istan is a coun­try who’s top gov­ern­ment sci­en­tist exported atomic bomb-making across the world for decades. It still hosts Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan’s Tal­iban are still more-or-less head­quar­tered in its West­ern provinces. The stand­off with India has spawned war after war over the decade, now nuclear-enabled should either coun­try get so embold­ened. Bil­lions of dol­lars of United States money has left Wash­ing­ton for Islam­abad since 9/11 and a pop­u­lar politi­cian can’t even cam­paign there with­out deadly assas­si­na­tion attempts. Pak­istan is one of the world’s hot spots, a nexus of ter­ror­ism, nuclear pro­lif­er­a­tion, reli­gious extrem­ism. It is a very sad day today indeed.

Poor Cindy Shee­han, the famous anti-war mom who camped out­side Bush’s Craw­ford Texas home fol­low­ing the death of her son in Iraq. News comes today that she’s all but “resigned from the protest movement”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070529/ap_on_re_us/cindy_sheehan. She posted the fol­low­ing “on her Daily Kos blog”:http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/5/28/12530/1525
bq. The first con­clu­sion is that I was the dar­ling of the so-called left as long as I lim­ited my protests to George Bush and the Repub­li­can Party. Of course, I was slan­dered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Demo­c­ra­tic Party… How­ever, when I started to hold the Demo­c­ra­tic Party to the same stan­dards that I held the Repub­li­can Party, sup­port for my cause started to erode and the “left” started label­ing me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid atten­tion to me when I said that the issue of peace and peo­ple dying for no rea­son is not a mat­ter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.“
The sad truth is that she was used. Much of the power and money in the anti-war move­ment comes from Demo­c­ra­tic Party con­nec­tions. Her tragic story, soc­cer mom looks and artic­u­late ide­al­ism made her a nat­ural poster girl for an anti-Bush move­ment that has never really been as anti-war as it’s claimed.
Con­gres­sional Democ­rats had all the infor­ma­tion they needed in 2002 to expose Pres­i­dent Bush’s out­landish claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruc­tion. But they “autho­rized his war of aggres­sion anyway”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution. More recently, Amer­i­cans gave them a land­slide vote of con­fi­dence in last November’s elec­tions but still they step back from insist­ing on an Iraq pull-out. The Non​vi​o​lence​.org archives are full of denun­ci­a­tions of Pres­i­dent Clinton’s repeated mis­sile attacks on places like the Sudan and Afghanistan; before rein­vent­ing him­self as a earth-toned eco can­di­date, Al Gore posi­tioned him­self as the pro-war hawk of the Demo­c­ra­tic Party.
Anti-war activists need to build alliances and real change will need to involve insid­ers of both major Amer­i­can polit­i­cal par­ties. But as long as the move­ment is fueled with polit­i­cal money it will be beholden to those inter­ests and will ulti­mately defer to back-room Cap­i­tal Hill deal-making.
I feel for Cindy. She’s been on a pub­lic­ity roller coaster these past few years. I hope she finds the rest she needs to re-ground her­self. Defeat­ing war is the work of a life­time and it’s the work of a move­ment. Sheehan’s wit­ness has touched peo­ple she’ll never meet. It’s made a dif­fer­ence. She’s a woman of remark­able courage who’s point­ing out the pup­pet strings she’s cut­ting as she steps off the stage. Hats off to you Cindy.

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Nonviolence.org’s fundrais­ing cam­paign ends in a few hours. In four months we’ve raised $150 which doesn’t even cover that period’s server costs. This project cel­e­brates its twelfth year this fall and accu­rately “exposed the weapons of mass destruc­tion hoaxes”:http://www.nonviolence.org/weapons_of_mass_destruction/ in real time as they were being thrust on a gullible Con­gress. Cindy signed off:
bq. Good-bye Amer­ica …you are not the coun­try that I love and I finally real­ized no mat­ter how much I sac­ri­fice, I can’t make you be that coun­try unless you want it. It’s up to you now.
Some­times I really have to unite with that sentiment.

While the images of U.S. solid­ers tor­tur­ing iraqi pris­on­ers at Al Grahib Prison in Badg­dad have been broad­cast around the world, US offi­cials have fre­quently reas­sured us that con­di­tions at the U.S. deten­tion camp in Guan­ta­mano Bay, Cuba, were accept­able and in accord with the Geneva Convention’s rules for treat­ment of pris­on­ers. As proof the Pen­ta­gon and Bush Admin­is­tra­tion have fre­quently cited the fact that the Inter­na­tional Red Cross reg­u­larly inspects prison con­di­tions at Guan­ta­mano. They for­got to tell us what they’ve seen.
A con­fi­den­tial report pre­pared by the Inter­na­tional Red Cross this sum­mer found that con­di­tions at Guan­ta­mano Bay were “tan­ta­mount to tor­ture.” Strong words from a cau­tious inter­na­tional body. Because of the way the IRC works, its reports are not made avail­able to the pub­lic but instead pre­sented to the accused gov­ern­ment, in the hope that they will cor­rect their prac­tices. In pred­i­ca­ble fash­ion, the Bush Admin­stra­tion pri­vately denied any wrong­do­ing and kept the IRC find­ings secret. In a dis­play of incred­i­ble audac­ity it then defended itself _from other accu­sa­tions of torture_ by cit­ing the IRC’s pres­ence at Guan­tanamo, con­ve­niently omit­ting the IRC’s strongly-worded crit­i­cisms. Amaz­ing really.
The IRC report is still secret. We only know of it second-hand, from a memo obtained by the _Times_ that quotes from some of its find­ings (“Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantanamo“http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/politics/30gitmo.html, Nov 29). What kind of stuff is going on there? The _Times_ recently inter­viewed British pris­on­ers who had been detained in Afghanistan and iraq and sent to Guan­tanamo Bay. Here’s one story:
bq. One one reg­u­lar pro­ce­dure was mak­ing unco­op­er­a­tive pris­on­ers strip to their under­wear, hav­ing them sit in a chair while shack­led hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forc­ing them to endure strobe lights and loud rock and rap music played through two close loud­speak­ers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to max­i­mum lev­els.
It’s not nee­dles under fin­ger­nails or elec­trodes to the pri­vates, but it is indeed “tan­ta­mount to tor­ture.” While it was hard to believe these pris­on­ers’ sto­ries when they were first pub­lished a few months ago, they become much more cred­i­ble in light of the IRC con­clu­sions.
We still don’t know about what’s hap­pen­ing in the camp. The Bush Admin­is­tra­tion has the power, not to men­tion the duty, to imme­di­ately release Inter­na­tional Red Cross reports. But the United States has cho­sen to sup­press the report. No tor­tur­ing gov­ern­ment has ever admit­ted to its actions. Sad­dam Hus­sein him­self denied wrong­do­ing when _he_ ran the Al Grahib prison and used it for tor­ture. We rely on bod­ies like the Inter­na­tional Red Cross to keep us hon­est.
There are those who defend tor­ture by appeal­ing to our fears, many of which are indeed grounded in real­ity. We’re at war, the enemy insur­gents are play­ing dirty, Osama bin Laden broke any sort of inter­na­tional con­ven­tions when he sent air­lin­ers into the World Trade Cen­ter. Very true. But the United States has a mis­sion. I believe in the ide­al­is­tic notion that we should be a bea­con to the world. We should always strive for the moral high ground and invite the world com­mu­nity to join us. We haven’t been doing that lately. Yes it’s eas­ier to fol­low the lead of some­one like Sad­dam Hus­sein and just tor­ture any­one we sus­pect of plot­ting against us. But do we really want him as our role model?