Turning from Torture

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

October 19, 2008

READINGS

From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted 1948

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

From the Berry Street Lecture by Rev. William Schulz, 2006

What torture has taught me, what all those brave souls and, yes, even a few of their tormentors, have taught me, is to never give up on the glimmers of grace, for not everything is all that it seems.  If even survivors of torture can reclaim a sense of life’s bounty, then surely you and I and all to whom we minister can too.  If the torturer cannot fully break the human spirit, nobody can.  For we Unitarian Universalists know, out of the depths of our faith and the teachings of our tradition and the succor of our community, that the chess master was right. 

Chancing upon a great painting in a European gallery of a defeated Faust sitting opposite the devil at a chess table with only a knight and a King on the board and the King in check, the master stopped to stare.  The minutes changed to hours and still the master stared.  And then finally, “It’s a lie,” he shouted.  “The King and the knight have another move!  They have another move!”  And that’s finally what torture has taught me--that it is not just the King but the knight, not just the Queen but the rook, not just the Bishop but the pawn, not just the wealthy but the pauper, not just the fortunate but the weary, not just the torturer but the tortured, not just the powerful but every single person, every single blessed person, until the day we die, every single blessed person on this earth, every single blessed person who has another move.  We all have another move.

SERMON

As I was organizing my thoughts for this sermon I reflected on how odd this title would have appeared only a few years ago. “Turning from Torture” likely would have been seen as one of those earnest, do-gooder sermons ministers are sometimes prone to when the well goes dry: righteous indignation over the abuses perpetrated by some shady dictator in a distant land, like Gary Trudeau’s Berzerkistan.

It is a measure of how much the world has changed that what prompted me to choose this topic was offenses perpetrated, not by some distant nation, but by our own government . . . in our name . . . on behalf of freedoms that we cherish. Again, stepping back for a minute, this Alice-in-Wonderland situation is a little hard to fathom. Our schools, after all, still teach that respect for human dignity is a fundamental underpinning of democracy. Our leaders still offer us as a nation as a model, a hope, a “shining city on a hill” for oppressed people around the world because we enshrine human rights – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – as inviolable.

Unfortunately, we have discovered that that is not always the way that we operate. There is rot in our nation that is undermining those assurances, rot that has used the excuse of an attack against us to perpetrate some of the most vile, debased and abusive practices of which humans are capable against others. And what is, perhaps, most troubling is that it is a rot that extends beyond the few rogue actors that have been offered up for prosecution to people at the highest levels of our government who, through lies, bravado and deception, have trampled or ignored centuries of hard-won gains here and across the world for human rights.

It is ironic that this should emerge this year, when we mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, what many people regard as essentially the “Bill of Rights” of the Charter of the United Nations. At this distance, the brave and hopeful words of the declaration appear to some people as somehow naïve, although to those who crafted them in 1948, they were anything but. Having emerged from the most destructive war in the history of humankind with the prospects of nuclear annihilation before them, they saw the very survival of our species centered on devising ways that people of all nations might learn to turn away from the practices that demean and debase us.

These were no cock-eyed optimists. They had experienced the atrocities of war that most of us today have only read about and knew what humans were capable of doing. But they also believed that with common will we have the capacity to change our ways; to redress grievances and resolve disputes in ways that respect human dignity, to find ways for each of us to live freely and enjoy the comfort and protection of society.

What the latest episode in this country has illustrated is how hard this work is, that it will take more than a universal declaration to accomplish, as lofty as that declaration may be. It will require us coming to terms with that human urge to violence that lies within us all, an urge so powerful that it has brought grief in some way to nearly every human endeavor. And still, as Bill Schulz suggests, I believe that as difficult as this work is, as labyrinthine as the path to peace seems we need not resign ourselves to the checkmate of despair; we do, indeed, “have another move.”

Jane Meyer, a reporter for the New Yorker who has diligently followed the scandal that resulted in the atrocities of the Iraqi prison at Abu Ghraib and many other less publicized events, argues that in retrospect, “it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001 (with the series of attacks on prominent American icons), as a battle for America’s security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country’s soul.”

The best place I have seen this sordid tale illustrated is in a stunning video that only this week has been distributed to public radio stations called “Torturing Democracy.” Most stations have been slow to pick it up, but you can buy it as a DVD or find it online, which is where I watched it, at a site called “torturingdemocracy.org.”

Documents from the Bush Administration and interviews with former officials now show that it was only weeks after 9/11 that the Bush administration made plans to dispense with international diplomacy and law, not to mention military guidelines, in their pursuit of what they regarded as America’s enemies. Justice Department opinions were solicited that absolved the U.S. of following the Geneva Convention and declared the President’s power uncontestable by Congress.

All this came despite strong advice from American allies and experts in the military and intelligence agencies that that direction was a mistake. The Bush administration wouldn’t hear it. The attacks on the U.S. were unprecedented and warranted an unprecedented response, they said, a response in which, to quote one official, “we took our gloves off.”

As U.S forces began rounded up captives, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, they were subjected to an array of interrogation techniques that had their origins in the Spanish Inquisition of the Middle Ages: sensory and sleep deprivation, sexual abuse and humiliation, simulated drowning, beatings and more.

Still, as terrible as these practices were and loud as the professed outrage was at their discovery it is telling that there has been little action by officials from either party to end them. As Jane Meyer puts it, “the fear of appearing ‘soft’ on terrorism still haunts elected officials.” What I fear is that as time goes by without action these practices are becoming ingrained not only in our government, in the military and intelligence agencies, but in less obvious ways in the larger culture as well, that the rot will spread.

Torture has long been part of the human story, supported or endured in one form or another in most cultures across history, and, according to Bill Schultz, is still practiced by close to two-thirds of the world’s nations today.

In the West, it was among the tools regularly used by investigators for the state dating back to the Greeks and Romans, although as a rule it was used for that purpose among slaves or others of the lower classes. The practice continued into the Middle Ages when those accused of crimes could expect to endure “an ordeal” of torture and humiliation if they didn’t fess up right away. It wasn’t until the 1750s that nations began to ban state torture as a tool of investigation.

This change came about at least in part as the result of an observation made two millennia before by Aristotle and many others in the years since: that testimony taken under torture is inherently unreliable. Under the duress of terrible pain one is less concerned about revealing the truth than about ending the pain. Those broken under torture are ready to confess any crime.

As a truth-gathering tool, torture has never been especially effective. Where it has always shone is as a tool of domination, of asserting one’s will over another, and in the case of the perpetrators of torture, that is often good enough. Whether it was the courts of Europe’s monarchies or the cells of the Catholic Church’s Inquisition, it not so much agreement as compulsion that was sought from alleged criminals or dissidents, and as a rule they got it.

The German principalities of the 18th century that banned state-sponsored torture and the other nations that followed were part of a reforming movement that not only recognized the inadequacy of torture as a means of extracting information, but also, with the emergence of the modern state with its doctrine of human rights, that no longer put the body of the accused at the disposal of the accuser.  Instead, something close to due process and what we recognize as a modern trial arose. That’s not to say that torture ended, but it wasn’t something that one did in the open. In the West, at least, it went underground, where it became associated with shadowy criminality and regimes that disregarded human decency.

While torture has long been looked down on, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights – which held that “no one shall be subjected to torture or tor cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of punishment – marked the first time that an international forum had declared that no human being may be tortured for the simple reason that he or she is human. Indeed, it has even been argued that the right not to be tortured is greater even than the right to life, since under international law an enemy combatant may be killed on the battlefield, but it is never legal to torture him.

A United Nations convention against torture ratified by the U.S. in 1994 is even more emphatic: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

These words, of course, only have significance if they are applied. White House officials have insisted that practices they promote that have long recognized as torture are not. And, while public exposure has shut down Abu Ghraib and other torture centers, we know that some prisoners are still being held, and likely still being sent to secret locations in other countries where we have every reason to believe their torture is continuing.

Many observers have remarked how all of this has damaged America’s standing in the world, how it gives the lie to the image of this nation as a bastion of human rights. But even more, I worry about what it says, in Jane Meyer’s words, about our “soul.”

A culture of permission around violence, that views violence as simply an effective way of getting things done is inherently corrosive. This practice eats away at that gentle heart within each of us, that spark of hope, and leaves us hardened, closed and cold. It is a rot that infects us with the view that the world is dangerous, that we must protect ourselves and strike out at those we view as threats.

Discussing the factors that can lead to torture, Bill Schultz wrote, “we underestimate the extent to which feelings of powerlessness and lack of control over our lives may lead to violence – not just in individuals but societies as well. It is no coincidence that the torture scandals most recently associated with the United States come at a time when this nation feels itself most vulnerable to threats beyond its control.”

None of us is likely to turn into a torturer, and yet we know that violence is epidemic today, from schoolyard bullying to domestic abuse. It fills us with uneasiness and fear, and our fear acquaints us with that source of potential violence within each of us, that frantic, grasping impulse that seeks our personal safety and our will’s way in the world, that “fight or flight” response that, in the words of Jennifer Harbury, who directs the Stop Torture Permanently campaign at the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, “goes back to the caves.”

Our fear, she says, has left us reactive, and as a result “we are not thinking. Instead, we are allowing our ancient survival instincts and corrupt national leaders to drag us to a true apocalypse.”

I had my own reminder of how easily this can happen last week. I discovered that video I mentioned earlier, “Torturing Democracy,” only at the last minute, and so I quickly called it up on line. The video impressed me with its depth of reporting and I took extensive notes on it. But it wasn’t until some time later when I took a break and went out on a brief errand that I realized how deeply it had affected me.

It was a beautiful day and I was in no rush, but suddenly I realized that my blood was racing, and I was feeling fretful and irritated. It took me a few minutes essentially to “talk myself down” from this heightened state, to realize that I was still carrying the anxiety that those powerful images had generated in me.

And so let me say that part of me wants to apologize for even raising this troubling subject in this sanctuary. Here, after all, we gather to affirm love, hope and justice. And yet none of us lives with the luxury of walling ourselves off from the ugliness in the world, ugliness that unfortunately touches each of us in some way. And so I urge you, too, to monitor what all of this raises in you. For I believe that as disturbing as all of this is, each of us has the capacity to hold that fearful impulse in check, to give place instead to another impulse, that brave urge deep in our hearts toward compassion and love. But we need support.

Sixty years ago leaders from around the world who had endured terrible loss and depravity gathered to affirm that we are capable of better, that, in the declaration’s words, “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”

Supporting each other we might find the courage to deny the craven claim of expediency that supports the call to violence, to look past the reactivity of fear and anxiety that fuels the urge to strike out. It is arguably the most difficult task that humankind faces and yet it is the only path to our survival.

It is the hard work, one day at a time, with each interaction of our days, of, as Thich Nhat Hanh urges, letting us be at peace with our bodies and our minds, of returning to ourselves and becoming aware of the source of being common to us all and to all things, of opening our hearts to compassion, and with humility, aware of the diversity of life and the sufferings around us, nonetheless putting peace in our hearts.

And in time the words of Judy Chicago will not be merely apocryphal: that all that divides us will merge, and compassion, not fear, will be wedded to power; that we will know a softness that today we only dismiss as weakness; that we will learn the folly of subjugation and the corrosion of greed, where we might share equally in mutual care and concern and live in peace.

It is, I must admit, hard to imagine how we get there, the twists and turns on the path are mind-boggling. Like on the chessboard in Bill Schulz’s analogy, each of us chess pieces, from the bishop to the rook, from the pawn to the queen, has only a certain number of moves available to us. Finding a way out of our muddle will require enormous work, and we might be inclined to simply walk away. But with Bill’s chess master I am inclined instead to stay with it, believing that hope still remains, that there truly is another move.