The company we keep

Lent I - Sunday March 5th, 2006
(by Rev. Glenn Brown)

I’m sure that all of us as Christians, try to be careful about the company we keep. We have certain rules and codes of conduct, a strong sense of morality and right and wrong. Jesus instructs us to be the salt of the earth, to be the first to cast the stone only if we are altogether without sin, to be as wise as a serpent but as innocent as a dove, and so on. We want to be able to end each day thanking God not only for what God has done, but also for our being able to get through the day with our character and moral integrity in tact. 

But probably we all have times when we realize that we are dealing with people who do not look at life this way, and who sometimes seek our endorsement for less moral or outright wrong actions. The co-worker who steals computer equipment from the office; the co-worker who shows for work while under the influence of alcohol or recreational drugs; the parent who hasn’t given appropriate attention to sleep deprivation, and is not fit to drive her kids and yours to the game. The supervisor whose comments to you make it clear that an applicant is about to be turned down for a job because of his ethnic background. These are classic examples of things going on around us of which we cannot approve. Perhaps we are likelier to avoid having to do with them, rather than stopping them. But we face then the age-old question: if we do not cooperate, but do not oppose, are we being moral? Are we being faithful to God? 

We realize that these questions face us personally/professionally every day. But they face us as a people/nation, as well. All of us are familiar with the challenge that Amnesty International poses to us: any time we are aware of injustices in the world, people being jailed for political purposes, for example, as opposed to matters of criminal behaviour, we realize that they, sitting in their jails, must ponder: how can this be happening if there is a God? How can this be happening without any opposition from fair-minded people? How can people all over the world claim to be moral, and not pay attention to this? Do you ever wonder what such people think about us? 

It is important to be careful about the company you keep. It is important to be careful about that to which you consent by acquiesence. It is important to know the things in which we are complicit. So long as we stand as an ally in the war on terrorism without criticizing torture, so long as our troops will turn over to the U.S. enemy combatants captured by our soldiers, we are complicit in torture. 

You may remember in the months between the destruction of the World Trade towers and the campaign to invade Iraq, I said in sermons that we would soon have to face the issue of torture. I, probably like you, assumed that first would come the question, and the answer would be “no.” I never dreamed, even while distrusting the campaign for war whose drumbeats were growing increasingly every week, that torture would be implemented as a state policy of the U.S., and carried out by untrained civilian contractors and outsourced to other countries. Never did I suspect that Canada would actually participate, as reported by the Globe and Mail, in facilitating the “renditions,” as they are called. And even had I anticipated this, it still would never have occurred to me that torture would be carried out by people who did not know what they were doing and who might do it just for the sake of cruelty. It would never have occurred to me that torture would be carried out as a matter of policy, carefully considered, and authorized secretly even while public statements are issued assuring the world that torture is not allowed. 

It is this last which has caused the Marine Corps Interrogator Translator Teams Association to post critiques of all this on their web site. These are people who have interrogated prisoners of war and intelligence specialists. The have many criticisms of what is going on. 

First, they point out that the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions included this proscription:

No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.

Second, they point out that when the question arose after 9/11 about who was protected by these conventions, the U.S. president directed on 7 February 2002, in the memorandum

“Humane treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees,”, that Our values as a nation, values that we share with many nations in the world, call for us to treat detainees humanely, including those who are not legally entitled to such treatment. As a matter of policy, the U.S. armed forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely, and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.
Third, they demonstrate that torture is ineffective as a source of reliable information, and that whatever information is the detainee’s will be divulged under proper interrogation within forty-eight hours. The four years’ detention of prisoners at Guantanamo has been shown to have no intelligence value, and only a few hundred have even been charged with crimes. Yet the imprisonments and the tortures continue, increasingly legitimated by legal opinions rendered from within the U.S. administration. 

Even with all this from the professionals, we probably still want to believe that there may indeed be some circumstances under which torture must be used because the stakes are so high and immediate, and we want to be able to say to ourselves, “Well, we don’t know what is happening; we are not in a position to evaluate it all. We must trust that sometimes terrible things must be done in order to save us from terrorism. Surely these are terrible things, but therefore we can trust the appropriate officials to do them only under the direst necessity.” As the evidence accumulates that the U.S. administration has been deceitful about the war in Iraq and about the use of torture from the very beginning, we have lost the right and freedom to take this attitude. We are now in a position where we must a) be careful about the company we keep, and b) demand that our government actively oppose the use of torture by anyone, especially those with whom we are allied. Our troops in Kandahar are going into combat situations, not just peace-keeping. During the original operations in Afghanistan, they routinely turned over prisoners to U.S. forces. Shall they do so again?