There was a human being named Jumah at Guantanamo

George Bush's newest "new strategy" on Iraq looks for all the world like the same old strategy that hasn't worked for the last four years. Nothing's changed, not even the soldiers, many of who are being deployed for the third time in a foolish attempt to rescue Bush's failed and reckless war.

Before the beginning of the Iraq war, which was falsely linked to the so-called "War on Terror," we found out that our government had imprisoned hundreds of people at Guantanamo Bay Cuba, and deprived them of the right to counsel, to see the charges against them, and to receive a fair and speedy trial. If this was being done in Iran or Syria, we'd be demanding United Nations sanctions, or threatening war. But, we are the Empire, and no one challenges us.

Our own FBI says that the prisoners have been chained in a fetal position to the floor for at least 18 hours, urinating and defecating on themselves; subjected to extremes of temperature; gagged with duct tape; held in stress positions while shackled; and subjected to loud music and flashing lights. Don't believe it? You can read the FBI's own report, released last week under the Freedom of Information Act. It's gruesome.

And now there's a letter from one of them to me and you. His name is Jumah al-Dossari, he's 33 years old, and from Bahrain. His heart-breaking epistle is reprinted in today's Los Angeles Times. He writes:

During the first few years at Guantanamo, I was interrogated many times. My interrogators told me that they wanted me to admit that I am from Al Qaeda and that I was involved in the terrorist attacks on the United States. I told them that I have no connection to what they described. I am not a member of Al Qaeda. I did not encourage anyone to go fight for Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden have done nothing but kill and denigrate a religion. I never fought, and I never carried a weapon. I like the United States, and I am not an enemy. I have lived in the United States, and I wanted to become a citizen. I know that the soldiers who did bad things to me represent themselves, not the United States. And I have to say that not all American soldiers stationed in Cuba tortured us or mistreated us. There were soldiers who treated us very humanely. Some even cried when they witnessed our dire conditions. Once, in Camp Delta, a soldier apologized to me and offered me hot chocolate and cookies. When I thanked him, he said, "I do not need you to thank me." I include this because I do not want readers to think that I fault all Americans.

Jumah al-Dossari is our responsibility, for he resides on land we claim as our own, under the eye of the government we have elected, and he sends us a word that can only be called a Word from the Lord: "I would rather die than stay here forever, and I have tried to commit suicide many times. The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed. I am hopeless because our voices are not heard from the depths of the detention center. If I die, please remember that there was a human being named Jumah at Guantanamo whose beliefs, dignity and humanity were abused. Please remember that there are hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo suffering the same misfortune."

If he dies, his blood is on us, for we allowed this to happen.

The New Bush Iraq Strategy: A Recipe For Protacting Failure

John, over at A Lie A Day, says that the George Bush's latest attempt to prolong the war in Iraq is "Nixonian." He's right, even though Nixon's tactic was a seven-year long series of troop reductions, rather than Bush's "troop surge." Though opposite in tactic, they are identical in strategy: stall, and try to think of something that might work.

Nixon loved to talk about "secret timetables" for troop withdrawal and "five point peace plans", but it wasn't until 58,226 Americans, thousands of Allied troops, and over one million Vietnamese were dead that the troops came home. When it was clear that he couldn't stall any more. When it was clear that he didn't have a plan, five point or otherwise.

Bush has never had a plan beyond overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Every few months, he comes up with a new Iraqization strategy for victory, and each one fails. The White House website has one from November 30, 2005, which defends the strategies back to 2003. It's called "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq." Among the strategies it laid out:

"Carrying out a campaign to defeat the terrorists and neutralize the insurgency, developing Iraqi security forces, and helping the Iraqi government.

"Clear areas of enemy control by remaining on the offensive, killing and capturing enemy fighters and denying them safe-haven;

"Hold areas freed from enemy influence by ensuring that they remain under the control of the Iraqi government with an adequate Iraqi security force presence; and

"Build Iraqi Security Forces and the capacity of local institutions to deliver services, advance the rule of law, and nurture civil society. "

Guess that didn't go so well.

What will be different this time? Senator Lindsey Graham, South Carolina's own Bush press flack, says: "We’ve got a new team on the ground. We’re going to come up with a new strategy. The strategy is going to be designed to win."

But as George F. Will points out in the Boston Herald, "Based on experience in the Balkans, an assumption among experts is that to maintain order in a context of sectarian strife requires one competent soldier or police officer for every 50 people. For the Baghdad metropolitan area (population: 6.5 million), that means 130,000 security personnel. There are 120,000 now, but 66,000 of them are Iraqi police, many - perhaps most - of whom are worse than incompetent. Because their allegiances are to sectarian factions, they are not responsive to legitimate central authority. They are part of the problem. Therefore even a substantial surge of, say, 30,000 U.S. forces would leave Baghdad that many short, and could be a recipe for protracting failure."

Can anybody flash me a "V"?

Let Us Now Praise (In)Famous Men: Saddam Hussein and Ted Haggard

We celebrated the festival of All Saints today at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, complete with incense, Russian Orthodox chant (with real Russians!), baptisms and hymns that shook the rafters. And of course we read old Ben Sirach's hagiographa on the righteousness of fame and power, "Let us now praise famous men..." (Ecclesiasticus 44:1).

In the midst of all the liturgical seism, I couldn't help but think of two famous men that were not being praised: Saddam Hussein and Ted Haggard. Each was on the receiving end of guilty verdicts today: Saddam's for murder and Ted's for "sexual immorality." Each had it all, by the standards of those who set those standards: riches, power and influence. Each proved a traitor to the gifts he had been given.

Saddam, once a young reformer, set out to bring his oppressed people into the modern world, but ended as a deposed tyrant, wearing filthy rags, hiding in a hole in the ground. Ted, once a young and idealistic pastor, built a 14,000 member mega-church, and influenced the beliefs of millions of American Christians including the President of the United States. He ended as a defrocked and broken man, bemoaning his own sojourn in "the dirt."

Saddam gets an appeal, but unless the balance of power shifts in Iraq, he will eventually hang, his body twisting in the Chaldean desert wind. Ted will be shuffled off to counseling to try to make him an ex-gay-ex-pastor (and maybe to get him off crank).

What Saddam and Ted have most in common is not the guilty verdicts, it's the debilitating denial that brought them to their end. Saddam just couldn't believe that he wouldn't be the Caliph of Pan-Arabia. Ted just couldn't believe he was gay. They each fought wars to try to maintain their fantastic lies. Saddam killed 300,000 of his own people and maybe another half a million Iranians and Kuwaitis. Ted killed his ministry, his family life, his integrity. He may have helped kill the evangelical ascendancy in American politics as well.

There's another part of old Sirach's work that doesn't make it into the Church lectionary. and it's too bad, because it's a lot closer to the truth of the human condition than the All Saints lection: "Be not a hypocrite in the sight of men, and let not thy lips be a stumbling block to thee. Watch over them, lest thou fall, and bring dishonour upon thy soul, and God discover thy secrets, and cast thee down in the midst of the congregation." (Sirach 1:37-39)

The tragedy of infamy is no less painful to watch when it is self-inflicted.

Welcome to Screwedville

I was sitting in a diner on a Saturday morning in early 2003 with my best friend Doug, the best damn reporter in the South. Even though the AJC has sent him to some godforsaken bureau east of Neptune to cover city council meetings, Doug is still the one I turn to for the wisdom on national issues. He’s a Texan, through and through, and he’s calls it like he’s sees it. I went to a party for him once years ago, and I heard one political leader after another say that he was what reporters should be—somebody who covered the news, not somebody who imposed his own views on the news. That morning, grits dribbling from his beard, he was arguing with me passionately about the impending invasion of Iraq: “Look, I don't like George Bush, but I support this mission.”

My inner commie-pinko-fairy-liberal made me spit out the putrid coffee. (I don’t know why Doug likes these places. Why can’t he eat bagels and drink Starbuck’s like a normal person?) “But, what if they don’t find anything?”

He was quiet for minute. “Of course they’ll find something. We gave all that stuff to him. He used it, he’ll use it again. Look at the guys from the Gulf War who are sick with something that looks suspiciously like nerve gas poisoning.”

“But what if they don’t?”

He stared at something over my shoulder. “Then we’re screwed. Not just now, but forever. America will never recover. We’re just screwed.”

Welcome to Screwedville. Where the Nuclear Club just keeps growing. Where Latin America slides inexorably into the arms of charlatans and dictators. Where the victories are too brief to even be pyrrhic. Where we haplessly foment civil war and call it “together forward.” Where we watch African genocide and beg somebody to stop it, somebody other than us, somebody with the moral authority we once had.

Our leaders are lost, on either side of the aisle. John Kerry, apparently unaware that college draft deferments no long exist, tells college students to study hard or they might get stuck in Iraq. John Boehner, the number 2 House Republican says that the Generals in Iraq are to blame for the mess. And the President, who sits at the desk in the cheerful yellow office where the buck once stopped, says, "I'm pleased with the progress we're making." The Vice-President says that “it’s a no-brainer” that we should torture suspected terrorists and continue to dismantle the Bill of Rights.

Doug and I have often argued about politics. Sometimes one of us has been right, and sometimes the other. Like all passionate debaters, we relish the sweetness of being right. But this time, I wish I had been wrong. Dear Jesus, I wish I had been wrong.

What a Difference a Decade Makes: Commas--er, Comments from the 90's

From the AP: “Thirteen U.S. soldiers have been killed in Baghdad since Monday, the American military reported, registering the highest three-day death toll for U.S. forces in the capital since the start of the war.”

From CNN: "Admittedly, it seems like a decade ago," Bush went on. "I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma because there is -- my point is, there's a strong will for democracy."

A decade ago he said: "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." Of course, Bill Clinton was President, and the war was in the Balkans.

A decade ago, came this from another famous Republican: "I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today." That was Rep. Tom Delay. Those Texans sure like to cut and run, don’t they?

Why is the Bush war “a comma” and the Clinton war (which we won, if I recall) a “failed foreign policy?" Could it be just politics? Not being given to cynicism, I would never suggest such a Machiavellian approach on the part of our elected leaders. But here are some other, interesting quotes:

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK): “(P)resident [Clinton] has decimated our ability to defend ourselves.” (USA Today, 4/5/99)

Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA): “This is the most inept foreign policy in the history of the United States.” (Washington Times, 4/29/99)

Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN): “This is President Clinton’s war, and when he falls flat on his face, that’s his problem.” (New York Times, 5/4/99)

Representative Tom Campbell(R-CA): “We are presently at war and it is an unconstitutional war.” (R-CA) (New York Times, 4/14/99)

Rep. John Kasich (R-OH): “Escalating this war doesn’t make any sense because starting this war did not make any sense.” (Washington Times, 5/7/99)

But the best one of all is this:

Rep Tom Delay (R-TX) "You can support the troops but not the president."

I’ll grant you that.

Entropy and Abdul Rahman

Nearly fifty years ago an Oxford sociologist named Bryan Wilson wrote the groundbreaking article "An Analysis of Sect Development" in American Sociological Review. He observed:

"It is here hypothesized that sects experience different types of tension which vary according to their own constellation of values, as well as the circumstances of their origin. In response to such tensions, in the attempt at their management, we may expect to find the genesis of processes which cause some sects to develop into denominations, others to wither, some to be exterminated, some to fragment, and some to remain, over several generations, as sects." Wilson's work explained why some sects (like the Assemblies of God) become denominations, and some (like Jehovah's Witnesses) never quite get there.

But Wilson didn't think to ask: can denominations regress? In other words, having arrived in the theological mainstream, can religious groups start sliding back down the evolutionary slope towards sect and cult? Or do they just split, with the "denominationalists" going one way and the sectarians another? When you look at the current state of the Episcopal Church, the Southern Baptists and the Roman Catholic Church, you have to wonder: are these groups turning back to their long ago abandoned sectarian ways?

The National Catholic Reporter, for instance, analyzes a Pew Research Center poll showing that Catholics like torture again. (And you thought that went out with the end of the Inquisition.) And Southern Baptists, who began ordaining women to the ministry in the mid-1960's, no longer do, explaining that "the office of pastor is limited to men." And the Archbishop of Canterbury, spritual leader of the Anglican Communion (the "mother church" of the Episcopal Church) has just defended Nigerian Primate Peter Akinola's decidedly un-Christ-like defense of rioting Christians.

Entropy, it seems, infects even religious movements. Of course, that's nothing new: the Revelation of John issued a scathing indictment of the church at Ephesus for "forsaking" its early fervor for the gospel. (Revelation 2:4)

Political movements are entropic of course. Even democratic governments inevitably drift towards authoritarianism, and thus are ever in need of vigilance to curb their decline. But they usually last a bit longer than they did in Afghanistan. This week the world has watched with fascinated horror as a Kabul court put Abdul Rahman on trial for apostasy, in what could have led to a death sentence. Rahman, who became a Christian 17 years ago, was likely freed today not because the Court ruled in favor of religious freedom, but because of the furor over the case from West, the court citing "gaps" in the evidence, as well as the possibility that the defendant was mentally ill. This, in a nation with a "democratically elected" government, whose constitution was mid-wifed by America, and whose "freedom" was purchased with American blood.

The neo-cons seem genuinely puzzled that the regime of thugs they put in place after the regime of thugs they ousted would act like such thugs. Michelle Malkin cried "Who Will Save Abdul Rahman?" Andrew Sullivan sniffed "that a religious faith contains this kind of fanatical intolerance and violence anywhere is disturbing." And the Unification Church (that bastion of religious tolerance and democratic freedom), pontificated in its Washington Times: "If this manipulation of the law can save the life of a man who is only following his conscience, we must be grateful for that much." The Moonie owned Times also noted that its favorite Christian, George W. Bush, was "deeply troubled" that "a country we helped liberate would hold a person to account because they chose a particular religion over another."

Maybe the Afghans don't really believe in democracy after all. Or maybe they did, but then gave up, like John's Ephesian Church. But, is a democracy imposed by an imperial power in any sense a democracy at all? And if it's not, why not choose entropy instead?