Waterboarding
FILE PHOTO: Gina Haspel, a veteran CIA clandestine officer. CIA/Handout via Reuters
Haspel played a central role in a past torture program of the agency. In the early days of the Bush administration, she famously ran a black-site secret prison in Thailand where detainees were tortured with waterboarding and other inhumane abuse. As the torture program began to come under fire by members of Congress and even some members of the Bush administration, Haspel was involved in destroying evidence of about 100 videotapes of the torture, ensuring that there would be no accountability or record of the torture.
Image via Wikimedia.
CIA Director John Brennan said that if the next president ordered the CIA to resume waterboarding, he would resign, reports The Week.
Waterboarding was banned by President Obama in a 2009 executive order, but the order could theoretically be reversed.
Sarah Palin in Plano, Texas in 2009, Jennifer A. Walz / Shutterstock.com
Most people in their right minds consider Sarah Palin’s statement about using waterboarding to “baptize” terrorists as insensitive at the very least. It further reinforces the notion that she will say or do nearly anything to grab a headline, even if it is at the expense of her own integrity, and perhaps that of her political cohorts or even her faith.
She’d be doing all of us a favor if she’d simply stop talking publically. But in as much as she continues to be afforded a microphone and speaking pulpit, we get to bear witness to her attempts to improvise a caricature of herself on the fly.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the statement to me is not the brazenness of it, or even the apparent lack of self-awareness or personal filter. It’s that she’s actually speaking on behalf of a significant – albeit shrinking – subset of Christian culture in the United States. It’s the strain that believes that the Prayer of Jabez (a prayer about expanding one’s spiritual territory) is a Manifest Destiny of sorts from Jesus to his followers. We’re to reach to all corners of the earth, emboldened with a “be assimilated or be eliminated” mentality at our backs.
Foot-washing ceremony. Photo courtesy Jarrod McKenna
Oh, Sarah Palin.
So you’ve most likely heard Sarah Palin used baptism as a metaphor for waterboarding terrorists. (I mean I heard and I’m in Australia!) I found out when fellow neo-Anabaptist Tyler Tully sent me his reflections. Many are blogging thoughtful responses. But more and more this is my conviction: the best critique of the bad is the practice of the beautiful. So I want to testify to the beauty of the baptisms I was a part of on Sunday.
I do so knowing that the despondence and darkness I feel when baptism is equated with the diabolical is driven out in the joy of the mystery of what happen when we say yes to the Holy Spirit by wading in the water. Our new sister Natha, brother Ky, and I met separately in the End Poverty movement. Both of them, in quiet different ways, found themselves being found by God while looking for a better world. And in Jesus they found the world they were looking for has started! Without a dry eye in the community that surrounded them on Sunday, they shared their wanderings in the wilderness before following Jesus through the waters.
Christians are people who follow a tortured and murdered God. This fact speaks clearly to what our values should be. One of those values should be a rejection of torture, violence in the name of "law" and the common good, and murder.
Currently, the U.S. government has been accused of torture at Guantanamo Bay and has