The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Salem, Oregon

UUCS Sermons
Sermon by the Reverend Richard R. Davis

Even if you have not studied the history surrounding the passage of the English Bill of Rights in 1689 which included a statement prohibiting that government from inflicting cruel and unusual punishment, it’s not hard to infer what lay behind this.   You just know that those who framed this legal principle didn’t pluck this thought out of thin air as some abstract concern that some future government might resort to extreme punishments or engage in torture to extract confessions from those who ran afoul of the authorities.  No, this statement was enshrined in this Bill of Rights because past English governments often had used cruel and unusual punishments and had brutally tortured its subjects, and the Parliament wanted to put a decisive end to such cruel barbarities.  And this right was not conferred upon the people by benevolent rulers.   No, in 1689, after the Catholic King James II had fled the country King William (of Orange) was prepared to become the constitutional monarch, and the Parliament presented him with a Declaration of Rights (which prohibited cruel and unusual punishment) and told him, only when you sign this declaration will we consent to have you as our king.  He did sign.  This right was won, not bestowed. 

            This idea was not lost on the American colonists who knew a good thing when they saw it – they included this right in their colonial charters, and then, when the colonies broke free of England , made sure they did not lose this precious principle.  It was included as the 8^th Amendment of the United States Constitution – our government was forbidden to inflict “cruel or unusual punishments.”    

            The tendency, I think, is to see this mostly as a significant legal innovation. Yet truly, this was a spiritually luminescent episode in the political evolution of humankind.  Think about it: For the first time in human history - so full of the brutalities and the untold cruelties of kings and tyrants - a loftier principle was realized and enshrined.  No longer would the people have to cower in fear and dread.  No longer could the agents of government resort to unrestrained acts of cruelty and torture.  The great spiritual laws, the laws of justice and compassion, which lie at the foundation of all the great faith traditions, were made manifest in the political realm.

            Of course this hasn’t worked like a charm in American history – there are many instances in which authorities have secretly violated this amendment or stepped aside to let lynch mobs and vigilantes inflict cruel punishments.  But the 8^th amendment has worked.  This basic right has served as a necessary restraint on governmental authority, and it and has protected us.  We live in a country where cruel and unusual punishment is unequivocally prohibited.  To be sure, there is heated disagreement about exactly what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.  Some us believe that capital punishment – the death penalty - is cruel and unusual, as well as certain mandatory sentencing laws.  Aside from such disagreements, the basic ideal is not contested.  No one goes about advocating that the 8^th amendment be rescinded, because we all know that it is a great and enduring principle.   Our nation has been the world leader in affirming this principle.  

            After World War II the world began to learn to full scope and horror of the unspeakably cruel and barbaric treatment of millions of people by the Nazis and the Militaristic government of Japan .  There was widespread recognition that the right to be free from such treatment must be affirmed as a universal human right.  The United Nations set about framing a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was ratified by member nations, including ours, in 1948.  Article five of this declaration stated that no one – NO ONE – shall be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. 

            In order to insure that this principle was indeed universally applicable, it was also expanded upon in the third Geneva Convention which protects not only prisoners of war and every other conceivable category of enemy combatants.  Article three of the third Geneva Convention states that all of these “shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, including prohibition of outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”   Collectively, the nations of the world affirmed that the time had come to relegate the sordid practices of torture to the dustbin of history.  Torture is forbidden, verboten, zero tolerance. 

            Of course we know that such prohibitions against torture have not worked like a charm, either.  State practiced torture has never ceased in the world (after all, as Unitarian Universalist human rights minister Karen Tse (“Cheh”) notes:  “Torture continues to flourish because it is the cheapest form of criminal investigation).  Right this very moment, in some dark and hidden cells in the world, there are poor souls who are facing a fate worse than death – prolonged, physically and psychologically painful torture.  But the right to be free from such abuse is widely recognized as a basic human right, and the day will come when there is no more state sanctioned torture.  Or will it?

            Recently I heard an interview on National Public Radio with a TV critic who says that after Sept. 11, 2001 (9/11) there was a notable shift in the scripts of highly rated crime shows.  Before 9/11 it was the bad guys – gangsters, Nazis, North Korean police, the KGB, who used abusive and coercive techniques to get people to “squeal” (confess, divulge information).   But then, after 9/11 it was the good guys, the ones trying to solve heinous crimes and protect the public, who resorted to such techniques.  And in these shows, these techniques worked.  A tough, but basically good guy cop, plunges a knife into some lowlife’s kneecap during an interrogation, and he finally spills his guts, the crime is solved and lives are saved.  

            Young people watch these TV shows and are influenced by them.  Some of these young people join the armed forces.  Some of them end up as prison guards in places like Iraq .  Now there’s one a hell of a job.  Ever wonder what that’s like?   Back in 1971 a Stanford University sociologist, Philip Zimbardo did wonder, and he conducted a prison experiment to find out.  Students were recruited to role play being guards and prisoners in a mock prison on campus for two weeks.  Prisoners and guards quickly took to their roles and soon went beyond the boundaries of what anyone had anticipated.  One third of the guards began to exhibit sadistic tendencies, and many of the prisoners became depressed, showed signs of extreme stress and were emotionally traumatized.  Seeing the threat of causing lasting psychological damage on the students, the experiment was abruptly terminated after six days.

            But the soldiers who worked in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq did not have the option of bailing out after six days.  There they were, guarding prisoners ethnically and religiously similar to the ones who had flown jetliners into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, killing thousands of Americans.   Add to this mix an implicit permission from above that it was OK to “take the gloves off’ with these prisoners, and what did you get?  You got degrading abuse and torture, much more than we’ve been allowed to see.  Many of the pictures taken at Abu Ghraib have never been released to the public because they are deemed too inflammatory.    

            When the infamous pictures that did get released showing Iraqi prisoners in a variety of humiliating and painful positions the administration was quick to note that it was all the case of a “few bad apples” breaking the rules. Yet the Stanford prison experiment shows us that when you put good people in an evil situation where the usual civilized restraints are gone, everyone’s humanity is at stake – guard and prisoner alike. 

            We have been, however, repeatedly assured by the president, the secretary of state and other officials in no uncertain terms that this sort of abuse is not acceptable, that “this government does not torture people.”  Is that true?

            A great deal has been concealed from the public, but here is what journalists and other investigators have uncovered through interviews with Red Cross officials, ex CIA operatives, State department officials, Amnesty International, representatives from the European Union and former foreign detainees of our government.

            After 9/11 the administration put enormous pressure on the intelligence community to stop any future terrorist attacks.  They were told to do whatever it took to get pertinent information from suspected terrorists.  The CIA wanted to please the administration, yet lacked any training or expertise in this area.  Then they discovered that there had been an earlier program that had trained American soldiers in how to withstand tortures such as water boarding (a simulated drowning torture first used during the Spanish Inquisition), sleep deprivation (another medieval torture aka “tormentum insomniae”), isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, religious and sexual humiliation.   Now, however, they used this knowledge to train CIA operatives on how to inflict these punishments upon detainees, and they did all of these things to detainees in hidden prisons in remote locales like Eastern Europe .  One European official familiar with this program noted that the Americans were “very arrogant, pro-torture.” 

One outside expert familiar with this noted: “The CIA’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. “It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever.  At every stage, there was rigid attention to detail.  Procedure was adhered to almost by the letter.  There was a top down quality of control, and such a set routine – it was almost automated.  People were utterly dehumanized.  People fell apart,  It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process.  It is just chilling.”

A lawyer for a detainee noted that his client told him that “the CIA would “work” people day and night for months. Plenty lost their minds.  I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and door, screaming their heads off.”   Another detainee, Khaled el-Masri, an innocent German citizen who was captured by the CIA and imprisoned in Afghanistan and later released because they belatedly realized they had mistaken him for someone else told of hearing a fellow prisoner in another cell, “psychologically at the end.  I could hear him ramming his head against the wall in despair.  I tried to calm him down.  I asked the doctor, an American, for help, but he refused.”  One shudders to think how many other similar, unknown stories there are.

There are doctors close by at these interrogations, and one of their primary roles is to protect the interrogators themselves who are at great psychological risk.  One former CIA official described a colleague who interrogated detainees:  “(He) had horrible nightmares.  When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back.  You lose your soul.  You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.  He’s a good guy.  It really haunts him.  You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

There is little doubt that our government has crossed over a line into a dark place that our Constitution, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention expressly forbids it to cross.  Our national soul is at risk. The administration has used tortured legal logic to justify their reprehensible practices, claiming that they have used “enhanced interrogation techniques” that are not torture.  Well ask anyone who has ever experienced the sheer terror of water boarding, or prolonged sleep deprivation, or exposure to extreme temperatures with no clothes on, or being put in “stress positions” or small cages for prolonged periods of time and ask them if they think it’s torture.  Of course it is. 

Some say that in “the war on terror,” the “gloves must come off” (i.e., torture is necessary) if we are to protect ourselves.  Yet experts in the field of interrogation say that torture does not produce reliable information, that there are much more sophisticated and humane techniques that do work. 

  Our president is, at best, morally and politically confused.   When he entered this high office he swore upon a sacred text to uphold the constitution of the United States , but he does not appear to understand what that means.  He seems to think more like a sovereign monarch than someone elected by the people.  Yet even monarchs must know their limits.  Over three centuries ago a people set a precious precedent and told their future king “you shall not rule if you believe you have the right to inflict cruel and unusual punishments.”   Today, our president thinks he should have free reign in this regard.  This has undermined the public’s trust in American justice, both here and abroad. 

It is our patriotic and moral duty to stand up and say “NO” to such abusive practices by this administration.  Private protest and griping have no impact.  Inaction and indifference signal assent.  Tomorrow is International Human Rights day, commemorating the signing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on Dec. 10, 1948.  What better way to observe this than by advocating for this.  So, please join me after the service in signing letters to our elected representatives demanding that they do all in their power to ensure that we no longer betray our nation and humankind by implicitly or explicitly condoning torture.