[THS] !!!!!!!! Ray McGovern: What About the War, Benedict?

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19793.htm

What About the War, Benedict?

By Ray McGovern

23/04/08 "ICH" -- -- Pope Benedict XVI arrived in the United States last
week against a macabre backdrop featuring reports of torture,
execution and war. He chose not to notice.

Torture: Fresh reporting by ABC from inside sources depicted George
W. Bush’s most senior aides (Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rice
and Tenet) meeting dozens of times in the White House during 2002/03
to sort out the most efficient mix of torture techniques for captured
“terrorists.”

When initially ABC attempted to insulate the president from this sordid
activity, Bush abruptly bragged that he knew all about it and approved.
That comment and the action memorandum Bush signed on Feb. 7,
2002, dispelled any lingering doubt regarding his personal responsibility
for authorizing torture.

Execution: Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court, with a majority of
judges calling themselves Catholic, was openly deliberating on whether
one gram, or two, or perhaps three of this or that chemical would be
the preferred way to execute people.

Always colorful prominent Catholic layman Antonin Scalia complained
impatiently, “Where does it say in the Constitution that executions have
to be painless?”

Scalia did not seem at all concerned that the pope might remind him
and his Catholic colleagues about the Church’s teaching on capital
punishment, i.e., the cases in which the execution of the offender is an
absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically non-existent.”
(Evangelium Vitae 56).

It was enough to bring this student of German history (and five-year
resident there) vivid memories of frequenting those places where
precisely these kinds of torture and execution policy reviews were
conducted at similarly high levels by Hitler’s inner circle – yes, including
judges.

War: Can the pope possibly be so suffused with his peculiar brand of
theology that he is oblivious to what happened when he was a young
man during the Third Reich.

Is it possible that papal advisers forgot to tell him that the post-WWII
Nuremberg Tribunal described an unprovoked war of aggression, of the
kind that the Third Reich and George W. Bush launched, as the
“supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in
that it contains the accumulated evil of the whole?”

Could they have failed to tell the pope he would be hobnobbing with
war criminals, torturers and the enabling cowards in Congress who
refuse to remove them from office?

For this Catholic, it was a profoundly sad spectacle – profoundly sad.

Not since WWII, when the Reich’s bishops swore personal oaths of
allegiance to Hitler (as did the German Supreme Court and army
generals) have the papacy and bishops acted in such a fawning, un-
Christ-like way.

With very few exceptions, the bishops (Catholic and Evangelical
Lutheran) collaborated with the Nazis. Meanwhile, Hamlet-like Pius XII
kept trying to make up his mind as to whether he should put the
Catholic Church at some risk, while Jews were being murdered by the
thousands.

Albert Camus

In 1948, in the shadow of that monstrous world war, the French
author/philosopher Albert Camus accepted an invitation from the
Dominican Monastery of Latour-Maubourg.

To their credit, the Dominicans wanted to know what an “unbeliever”
thought about Christians in the light of their behavior during the Thirties
and Forties. Camus’ words seem so terribly relevant today that it is
difficult to trim them:

“For a long time during those frightful years I waited for a great voice to
speak up in Rome. I, an unbeliever? Precisely. For I knew that the spirit
would be lost if it did not utter a cry of condemnation


“It has been explained to me since, that the condemnation was indeed
voiced. But that it was in the style of the encyclicals, which is not all that
clear. The condemnation was voiced and it was not understood. Who
could fail to feel where the true condemnation lies in this case?

“What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak
out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in
such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in
the heart of the simplest man.

“That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-
stained face history has taken on today.

“It may be 
 that Christianity will insist on maintaining a compromise,
or else on giving its condemnations the obscure form of the encyclical.
Possibly it will insist on losing once and for all the virtue of revolt and
indignation that belonged to it long ago.

“What I know – and what sometimes creates a deep longing in me – is
that if Christians made up their mind to it, millions of voices – millions, I
say – throughout the world would be added to the appeal of a handful
of isolated individuals, who, without any sort of affiliation, today
intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and other
people.”
(Excerpted from Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays)

[!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]

Sixty years ago!

Perhaps the Dominican monks took Camus seriously; monks tend to
listen. Vatican functionaries, on the other hand, tend to know it all, and
to urge the pope to be “discrete.”

You saw that this past week with the pope in Washington and New
York, as he forfeited the opportunity to follow the biblical injunction to
speak truth to power – to speak out clearly, as Camus suggested, with
moral authority.

Catholics All Around

Think back to last week and all the prominent Catholics who flocked to
see the pope – many of them officials with considerable influence in the
Judiciary and Legislature, with some important players in the Executive
Branch as well.

There they were, with their families, the five Catholic Supreme Court
justices, fresh from detailed deliberations on how best to implement
state-sponsored killings, executions that are banned by virtually every
civilized country.

Justice Scalia audibly salivated over how much noxious chemical should
be shot into the veins of a “condemned,” and how quickly. (For those
with strong stomachs, C-SPAN captured the proceedings.)

I am embarrassed to acknowledge that, like me, Scalia is the product of
a Jesuit education (Xavier H.S. in Manhattan and Georgetown College).
Despite his advocacy of “soft” torture techniques like driving nails under
fingernails, Scalia continues to be lionized by many Jesuits and bishops
alike.

In the House? Speaker Nancy Pelosi, erstwhile doyenne of the
Archdiocese of Baltimore and now San Francisco, and minority leader
John Boehner, R-Ohio – Catholics both – are about to allocate another
hundred billion dollars to death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan
for the most reprehensibly crass of political purposes – the coming
election.

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Massachusetts, last week tried to guild the lily,
noting that Pelosi now insists that, in McGovern’s words,  “We’re an
equal branch of government; we’re no longer a cheap date.” Right.

Sadly, it appears that Pelosi’s key functionaries on House Appropriations
(both of them Catholics) will cave in once again.

It is not as though they do not know the right thing to do. Just six
months ago, Appropriations chair Dave Obey, D-Wisconsin, declared, “I
have no intention of reporting out of committee anytime in this session
of Congress any such [funding] request that simply serves to continue
the status quo.”

Subcommittee chair John Murtha, D-Pennsylvania, put it even more
strongly a year before Obey did, and came close to calling the
occupation of Iraq a lost cause – which, of course, it is. But it is not
politic to say that before the election. Never mind the troops on the
front lines.

Obey and Murtha caved last time. I will find it particularly devastating if
Obey caves again now, for I have always considered him among the
best legislators in Congress.

And since he is from Wisconsin, Obey recognizes better than others the
McCarthy-ite demagoguery coming from the likes of Texas Republican
Michael Burgess, to the effect that anything short of giving the
president all the war funding he demands is “basically giving aid and
comfort to the enemy.”

Pelosi also has been unusually candid in admitting that it is electoral
politics, pure and simple, that explain her resistance to holding
President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney accountable
for high crimes and misdemeanors via the orderly procedure given us
by the Founders for precisely this purpose – impeachment in the House;
trial in the Senate.

If, as widely expected, the war funding goes through, several hundred
more American troops are likely to die before some common sense can
be injected into U.S. policy next year – not to mention how many Iraqis.

Iraq is a shambles. Two million Iraqis have fled abroad; another two
million are internal refugees. Am I the only one who finds macabre the
raging debate as to whether the attack and occupation of Iraq has
resulted in a million or “only 300,000” Iraqis dead?

Apparently, the pope did not have any opinion on the Iraq War.

But Torture?

Surely the pope would speak out against the kind of torture for which
our country has become famous: Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, CIA “black
sites” – the more so, since Jesus of Nazareth was tortured to death.

The pope chose silence, which presumably came as welcome relief to
four-star torturer’s apprentice, Gen. Michael Hayden, now head of the
CIA.

The White House has made clear that Hayden is ready to instruct his
torturers to waterboard again, upon Caesar’s approval.

Hayden proved his mettle when he was head of the National Security
Agency. He saluted smartly when the president and vice president told
him to disregard the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act and his
oath to defend the Constitution.

One of Hayden’s predecessors as NSA director asserted that Hayden
should have been court-martialed. Pelosi was briefed both on the illegal
surveillance and the torture, but did nothing.

Having demonstrated his allegiance to the president, Hayden was
picked to head the CIA. The general likes to brag about his moral
training and Catholic credentials. At his nomination hearing, he noted
that he was the beneficiary of 18 years of Catholic education.

All the while it was quite clear he was positively lusting to be in charge
of waterboarding and other torture techniques – whatever you say,
boss.

I was somewhat crestfallen after adding up my own years of Catholic
education – only 17. Clearly I missed “Enhanced Interrogation
Techniques 301.”

Keep It General; Focus on Others’ Sins

Saturday at the UN, the pontiff pontificated on “God-given human
rights” and “massive human rights abuses,” but pretty much left it at
that. The Washington Post reported that the pope was “short on
specifics and long on broad themes.”

But there was one specific. Here in the U.S., the pope seemed to prefer
to dwell on the pedophilia scandal – to the exclusion of much else. He is
to be applauded for meeting with victims of clergy sexual abuse and
expressing deep shame, but he got a free pass from the media in
disguising his own role in trying to cover the whole thing up.

While still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he headed The Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith – the Vatican office that once ran the
Inquisition. In that capacity he sent a letter in May 2001 to all Catholic
bishops throwing a curtain of secrecy over the widespread sexual abuse
by clergy, warning the bishops of severe penalties, including
excommunication for breaching “pontifical secrets.”

Lawyers acting for the sexually abused accused Ratzinger of “clear
obstruction of justice.”

Very few American bishops have been disciplined. And when Bernard
Cardinal Law was run out of Boston for failing to protect children from
predator priests, he was given a cushy sinecure in Rome; many believe
he should be behind bars.

In an interview with the Catholic News Service in 2002, Ratzinger
branded media coverage of the pedophilia scandal “a planned
campaign 
 intentional, manipulated, a desire to discredit the Church.”

It is nice that the pope has now changed his tune. Nicer still for him, he
found himself mostly in the congenial atmosphere of Washington,
where very few powerful miscreants are held accountable.

So What Did You Expect?

I do wish my friends would stop asking me that.

While it was good that the pope addressed the pedophilia issue head
on, it seemed as though he made a decision to devote time and energy
to the issue.

The side-benefit, of course, was being able to speak in glorious
generality on other major issues – war, torture, capital punishment – in
all of which, as we have seen, many of “the faithful” are deeply
engaged – embarrassingly engaged.

I had hoped – naively, it turned out – that the pope might encourage
his brother bishops to find the courage to state plainly what 88 bishops
of the Methodist faith, George W. Bush’s tradition, declared on Nov. 8,
2005:

“We repent of our complicity in what we believe to be the unjust and
immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the face of the United
States Administration’s rush toward military action based on misleading
information, too many of us were silent.

“We confess our preoccupation with institutional enhancement and
limited agendas while American men and women are sent to Iraq to kill
and be killed, while thousands of Iraqi people needlessly suffer and
die.”


I thought that perhaps the U.S. Catholic bishops could adopt the kind of
resolution that 125 Methodist bishops signed on Nov. 9, 2007. It called
for an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the reversal of any
plans to establish permanent military bases there.

The Methodist bishops’ resolution noted: “Every day that the war
continues, more soldiers and innocent civilians are killed with no end in
sight to the violence, bloodshed, and carnage.” And Bishop Jack
Meadors summed up the situation nicely:

“The Iraq War is not just a political issue or a military issue. It is a moral
issue.”


Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem

Visiting Yad VaShem, the Holocaust museum in West Jerusalem last
summer, I experienced painful reminders of what happens when the
church allows itself to be captured by Empire. An acquiescent church, it
is clear, loses whatever residual moral authority it may have had.

At the entrance to the museum, a quotation by German essayist Kurt
Tucholsky set a universally applicable tone:

“A country is not just what it does – it is also what it tolerates.”

Still more compelling words came from Imre Bathory, a Hungarian who
put his own life at grave risk by helping to save Jews from the
concentration camps:

“I know that when I stand before God on Judgment Day, I shall not be
asked the question posed to Cain: ‘Where were you when your brother’s
blood was crying out to God?’”


According to former President George H. W. Bush, George W. has “read
the Bible straight through – twice.” Perhaps he skipped by that passage
too quickly; or maybe he is highly selective as to whom he considers his
brothers.

No excuse for Benedict, though; he knows better. And yet he opted to
squander his glorious chance to speak out and make a difference.

Methodist Bishop Meadors is right; the war is a moral issue. But
President Bush has refused, time and time again, to meet with his
Methodist bishops. And now he has the imprimatur of the pope.

The bottom line is challenging: to the degree that right and wrong,
moral and immoral considerations are to be injected into discussions
about war, executions, torture – well, let’s face it. There is only us.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington, DC.  He is
on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).

This article first appeared on Consortiumnews.com