February 13, 2013
National Religious Campaign Against Torture
George Hunsinger
Hazel Thompson McCord Professor of Systematic Theology
Princeton Theological Seminary
National Religious Campaign Against Torture
George Hunsinger
Hazel Thompson McCord Professor of Systematic Theology
Princeton Theological Seminary
Minutes of the 17th Meeting of the 71st Year
President Ruth Miller called the meeting to order at 10:15AM.
Julia Coale led the invocation.
Bruno Walmsley described improvements to the Old Guard website, noting that it now features a section devoted to the 70th anniversary including minutes of the celebration, historical commentary, and audio material.
Minutes of the meeting of February 6th were read by Harvey Rothberg.
There were no guests to introduce.
Seventy members were present.
Jock McFarlane introduced our speaker, George Hunsinger, Hazel Thompson McCord Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and founder of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
Taking the lectern immediately after the minutes of last week’s rather hopeful depiction of stem-cell developments in medicine, Professor Hunsinger warned to expect a somewhat less uplifting lecture. He did not mislead us. He extensively portrayed our collective complicity in America’s practice of torture by our wallowing in a pernicious stew of willful ignorance, airy denial, flimsy justification, and false claims for its usefulness.
Having been distressed by the practice of torture since his early days in seminary, he was moved to create the National Religious Campaign Against Torture when the flurry of headlines about Abu Ghraib was followed by a year of silence, indicating to him that this atrocity, too, had been buried in a mudslide of promises, propaganda, and procrastination. Righteous-sounding Presidential Executive Orders gathered dust on the shelves, and a fresh lexicon of euphemisms laundered all the ugliness out of our newspapers and airwaves.
“Enhanced interrogation techniques” might have been the same as good old torture when inflicted on a human being, but they sounded mighty progressive and—or so their proponents insisted—might actually save lives. “Rendition to a black site” doesn’t sound quite the same as outsourcing the torture of our prisoners to foreigners less queasy about doing hideous things to their fellow man than we may be, but that delicate handling would be lost on the poor soul being “interrogated”.
Professor Hunsinger let Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describe the damnable difficulty of our dealing forthrightly with this: “…let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. …It does not always…openly throttle the throat; more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.”
And Professor Hunsinger displayed George Orwell’s prescience (and described our dilemma) in this quote from 1946: "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties— is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
This may account for the fact that torture has never been more popular in our country. Professor Hunsinger regards the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” as scarcely more than “the official narrative” of the CIA’s public relations department, given its misleading suggestion that torture was essential to the tracking and killing Osama bin Laden. Coupled with America’s current fixation on torture as entertainment not only in movies but in other media such as video games, he believes this marinating ourselves in others’ suffering normalizes and legitimizes what we then do in reality in the name of protecting ourselves. Our actual practices proceed undeterred by public outcry because of an unholy combination of this desensitization, obfuscation by euphemism, loopholes in the laws and military manuals, lack of transparency and accountability, and failure of leadership by President Obama and others in authority who have seemingly chosen to look the other way.
Professor Hunsinger proceeded to summarize what he believes torture is all about, and what is required to end it.
What is torture about?
How to end torture?
And, perhaps most importantly, we—the public and communities of worship—must be relentless in telling the truth, raising consciousness, and shaming those who engage in a practice that Professor Hunsinger describes succinctly as “immoral, illegal, and counterproductive.”
Respectfully submitted,
Eliot Daley
Julia Coale led the invocation.
Bruno Walmsley described improvements to the Old Guard website, noting that it now features a section devoted to the 70th anniversary including minutes of the celebration, historical commentary, and audio material.
Minutes of the meeting of February 6th were read by Harvey Rothberg.
There were no guests to introduce.
Seventy members were present.
Jock McFarlane introduced our speaker, George Hunsinger, Hazel Thompson McCord Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and founder of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.
Taking the lectern immediately after the minutes of last week’s rather hopeful depiction of stem-cell developments in medicine, Professor Hunsinger warned to expect a somewhat less uplifting lecture. He did not mislead us. He extensively portrayed our collective complicity in America’s practice of torture by our wallowing in a pernicious stew of willful ignorance, airy denial, flimsy justification, and false claims for its usefulness.
Having been distressed by the practice of torture since his early days in seminary, he was moved to create the National Religious Campaign Against Torture when the flurry of headlines about Abu Ghraib was followed by a year of silence, indicating to him that this atrocity, too, had been buried in a mudslide of promises, propaganda, and procrastination. Righteous-sounding Presidential Executive Orders gathered dust on the shelves, and a fresh lexicon of euphemisms laundered all the ugliness out of our newspapers and airwaves.
“Enhanced interrogation techniques” might have been the same as good old torture when inflicted on a human being, but they sounded mighty progressive and—or so their proponents insisted—might actually save lives. “Rendition to a black site” doesn’t sound quite the same as outsourcing the torture of our prisoners to foreigners less queasy about doing hideous things to their fellow man than we may be, but that delicate handling would be lost on the poor soul being “interrogated”.
Professor Hunsinger let Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describe the damnable difficulty of our dealing forthrightly with this: “…let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. …It does not always…openly throttle the throat; more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.”
And Professor Hunsinger displayed George Orwell’s prescience (and described our dilemma) in this quote from 1946: "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties— is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
This may account for the fact that torture has never been more popular in our country. Professor Hunsinger regards the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” as scarcely more than “the official narrative” of the CIA’s public relations department, given its misleading suggestion that torture was essential to the tracking and killing Osama bin Laden. Coupled with America’s current fixation on torture as entertainment not only in movies but in other media such as video games, he believes this marinating ourselves in others’ suffering normalizes and legitimizes what we then do in reality in the name of protecting ourselves. Our actual practices proceed undeterred by public outcry because of an unholy combination of this desensitization, obfuscation by euphemism, loopholes in the laws and military manuals, lack of transparency and accountability, and failure of leadership by President Obama and others in authority who have seemingly chosen to look the other way.
Professor Hunsinger proceeded to summarize what he believes torture is all about, and what is required to end it.
What is torture about?
- Ostensibly, intelligence gathering. However, in his and others’ estimation, it is notoriously inefficient and/or misleading.
- An act of vengeance.
- A form of racism.
- Our form of terrorism.
- An efficient tool for gathering false confessions which are useful in producing false propaganda.
How to end torture?
- Make the rules of interrogation clear and unambiguous.
- Make the chain of command clear and effective.
- Make visits and oversight by independent parties the norm.
- Provide due process for detainees with grievances.
- Establish and employ structures of accountability.
And, perhaps most importantly, we—the public and communities of worship—must be relentless in telling the truth, raising consciousness, and shaming those who engage in a practice that Professor Hunsinger describes succinctly as “immoral, illegal, and counterproductive.”
Respectfully submitted,
Eliot Daley