In the Footsteps of the Crucified: Torture is Never Justified Participant Packet

Scott Wright, Pax Christi USA representative JustFaith Ministries to The National Religious Campaign Against P.O. Box 221348 Torture (NRCAT) and Torture Abolition and Louisville, KY 40252 Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC) www.justfaith.org [email protected]

This document is intended as a resource for leaders planning a JustMatters module. Please read this document in its entirety. All materials are copyrighted and JustFaith is trademarked, however, this document may be copied and forwarded in its entirety without permission.

JustFaith Ministries works in cooperation with the partner organizations listed on this page and receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates.

September 2010

National Religious Campaign Against Torture

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In the Footsteps of the Crucified: Torture is Never Justified

Contents and Reading Assignments

Topic ______Page

Note From JustFaith Ministries 5

Message from the Author 6-9

General Overview 10-11

Session One: Acknowledging our Guilt: The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib 12 Reading 1 – “What is Human Dignity?” from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 16 Reading 2 – Excerpts from “After September 11” from Pastoral Letter, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 18 Reading 3 – “What is at Stake in Guantanamo” by C. William Michaels, Pax Christi Baltimore 20 Reading 4 – “Ending Lapse into Lawlessness” by Kenneth Roth, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch testimonies online (http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/08/06/ending-lapse-lawlessness) 22

Session Two: Returning to the Catacombs: Torture in Latin America 26 Reading 1 – “Building a Culture of Life” from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 30 Reading 2 – Cry of the People, pp. 3-6, by Penny Lernoux (New York: Penguin Books, 1982) 32 Reading 3 – “Argentine Mothers of the Disappeared” by Patrick Rice, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition 35 Reading 4 – The Blindfold’s Eyes, Preface & Chapters 1-6

Session Three: Listening to the Survivors: The Intrinsic Evil of Torture 39 Meditation – “Stations of the Cross” in the Jesuit Chapel at the University of Central America, San Salvador. Photos by Don Doll, SJ 43 Reading 1 – “The Debate Takes Shape” from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 46 Reading 2 – “What is Torture?” from Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition 48  Copyrighted material 2 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Reading 3 – “Human Rights Watch Country Testimonies” from Human Rights Watch. Read one of the four accounts. 53 Reading 4 – The Blindfold’s Eyes, Chapters 7-10

Session Four: Following Jesus, our Tortured Brother: The Blindfold’s Eyes 63 Reading 1 – “Accounting for Torture” by Maryann Cusimano Love, America Magazine (March 30 – April 6), permission granted by author and America Magazine 65 Reading 2 – “Way of Torture, Way of the Cross” from Churches’ Center for Theology and Public Policy 67 Reading 3 – “Injecting Hope into the Conversation” from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 68 Reading 4 – “Testimonies from Human Rights Defenders, Maria Julia Hernandez and Bishop Gerardi” from Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition. Read one of two accounts. 70 Reading 5 – The Blindfold’s Eyes, Chapters 11-13

Session Five: Coming to Terms With Our Own History 77 Reading 1 – “Love Interrupts the Spiral of Hatred” from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 82 Reading 2 – Book Review, Truth, Torture and the American Way (Jennifer Harbury, Beacon Press, 2005) by Rev. Philip E. Wheaton, 84 Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition Reading 3 – “We Mourn for Our Country” from Washington Religious Campaign Against Torture, October 2006 87 Reading 4 – The Blindfold’s Eyes, Chapters 14-16

Session Six: Walking the Path to Conversion: The Road Ahead 89 Reading 1 – “Becoming a People of the Beatitudes” from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 93 Reading 2 – “Who is Jesus Christ for Us Today” by Rev. George Hunsinger, National Religious Coalition Against Torture 95 Reading 3 – “Guantanamo Prison Put on Trial” from Witness Against Torture, May 2008 99 Reading 4 – The Blindfold’s Eyes, Chapters 17-19

Session Seven: Taking Decisive Moral Action: Torture is a Moral Issue 102 Reading 1 – “Torture Should Never Be Official U.S. Policy” by © Fr. Louie Vitale, OFM, in San Francisco Chronicle, April 21, 2006 106 Reading 2 – “We Need a Truth Commission to Uncover Wrongdoing” by © James Cavallaro, Christian Science Monitor, February 20, 2009 109 Reading 3 – “Letter to President Obama” by Sister Dianna Ortiz and Catherine Grosso, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition 111 Reading 4 – “A Model Resolution; and Five Goals to End Torture” from National Religious Campaign Against Torture, 2009 113 Reading 5 – The Blindfold’s Eyes, Chapters 20-22  Copyrighted material 3 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session Eight: Bearing Witness to the Gospel: A Prophetic Church in the U.S. 116 Reading 1 – “Letter of the US Catholic Bishops to the Congress”, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, December 2007 120 Reading 2 – “Ten Things We Can Do to Respond to Torture” from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 122 Reading 3 – “A Christian Call to Stop Torture” from National Catholic Reporter and Roll Call, Pax Christi, USA. April 2006 134

Appendix – Additional Resources 136

National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), New Video and Discussion project 138 Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC) Truth Speakers Network 139 TASSC Mission Statement 131 Other Resources 140 JustFaith Ministries – A Multilayered Ministry of Formation 141

Link to Online evaluation http://survey.constantcontact.com/survey/a07e37fbcrvghp3oy0d/start

We are grateful for the permission to include photographs throughout this module by Linda Panetta. Linda is a photojournalist whose work focuses on cultural, environmental and human rights, with a particular emphasis on conflict. Linda is the founder of Optical Realities Photography and coordinator of the Jean Donovan Community Peace Center, which hosts the Mariposa Outreach Project, a mentoring program which supports survivors of torture and their families. She can be contacted at [email protected]

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In the Footsteps of the Crucified: Torture is Never Justified

A NOTE FROM JUSTFAITH MINISTRIES

“Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side.’” John 20:26-27

Thank you for your willingness to undertake this difficult journey that investigates the brutality of torture and its implications for people of faith. As Followers of the Way of the Cross, we walk in the footsteps of the tortured founder of our faith.

Despite the fact that our Christian teachings are unequivocal in denouncing this desecration of God’s children, the practice of torture abounds in our all too often violent world. The silence of so many Christian people concerning the practice of torture by governments and insurgent groups around the world implicates us all.

This module seeks to uncover the practice and effects of the cruel abuse of our brothers and sisters. It exposes participants to the realities and effects of torture, and in so doing, informs and challenges each person to raise his/her voice against this inhumanity and to reach out in support of its many victims.

Please note that this module is not for the faint-hearted! The subject matter is difficult and will require reverence, patience and perseverance on the part of everyone. Just as Jesus invited Thomas to reach in and physically touch the wounds of torture, the Gospel message compels us to open our eyes and let ourselves be touched by the wounded that we might cry out with them for the healing that brings an end to this abhorrent practice.

The Staff at JustFaith Ministries

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In the Footsteps of the Crucified: Torture is Never Justified

A MESSAGE FROM THE AUTHOR

In the Footsteps of the Crucified: Torture is Never Justified aims to address a critical issue of our day − torture − to encourage Christians and people of good will to offer a critical response based on human dignity and the teachings of our Judeo-Christian traditions. It is important that people of faith know that torture is a crime against humanity – according to International Human Rights Conventions – and that it is held to be intrinsically evil by the social teachings of the Catholic Church. Under no circumstances is it ever justified. The aim of this module is not only to focus on the reality of torture, but also to emphasize inspiring examples of faithful and prophetic witness against torture by survivors and human rights groups as well as other Christians and concerned citizens.

There is an important debate occurring in our society today, and it concerns not only what was done by officials of our country to justify and practice torture, but even more, who we are as a people. Can we move forward without looking back? That is a crucial question we must answer. More than sixty years ago, in his closing arguments at the Nuremberg Trials, Chief Justice Robert Jackson said: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.”

Catholic Christians are fortunate in having a firm ground on which to stand. As the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church (No. 153) tells us: “The roots of human rights are to be found in the dignity that belongs to each human being.” Human dignity reached its fullest expression in Jesus, who, despite being tortured in the cruelest manner and put to death, offered his life for our sake, so that we might live in the fullness of new life. That new life calls us to hope in times of fear and anxiety, to love our enemies and defend the innocent, to act in solidarity with the vulnerable and excluded, and to heal the wounds that torture and war have inflicted. To do so, we must always use just means and never, under any circumstances, justify or practice torture.

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The U.S. Catholic bishops, in their 2007 statement Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, expressed this conviction very clearly: “Direct assaults on innocent human life and violations of human dignity, such as genocide, torture, racism, and the targeting of noncombatants in acts of terror or war, can never be justified.”

The Content This eight session module, In the Footsteps of the Crucified, follows closely a document developed in mid-2008, Torture is a Moral Issue: A Catholic Study Guide. This document was a collaboration between the Catholic members of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and the Office of International Justice and Peace of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

The module dedicates two sessions to each of the four principle concerns of the Torture is a Moral Issue study guide: • Building a Culture of Life as an antidote to a culture in which human dignity often goes unrecognized is a key element of Part 1 (two sessions). • Bringing the Virtue of Hope back into a society pervaded by fear and anxiety is a key element of Part 2 (two sessions). • Striving to Become a Genuine People of the Beatitudes is a key element of Part 3 (two sessions). • Participating in inter-religious dialogue, fasting for justice and peace, praying for enemies, Overcoming Evil with Goodness, and advocating for the abolition of torture are key elements of Part 4 (two sessions).

Christians enter into public discussion of the great issues our society faces because they hope to contribute—in the light of faith—to resolving these issues. In preparing this module, it was recognized clearly that the times in which we live and the issues we face are tough. Nonetheless, we were led to ask the following question: “In these challenging times, is it still possible—even in the face of serious threats—for a people and a nation to defend and conduct themselves in ways that consistently demonstrate respect for human dignity and that put the Gospel into practice?”

Two basic convictions give shape to this module: • Torture is a moral issue, one that deserves to be understood and addressed by all Christians. • An atmosphere of fear and desperation within society opens the door to the torture and abuse of prisoners, but there is much Christians can do to help create a new atmosphere within society – an atmosphere in which respect for human dignity rules the day.

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The Structure The curriculum is challenging, both in content and in what it asks of participants. It is hoped, however, that at the end of the eight weeks participants will be inspired by examples of moral courage and their own understanding of Catholic social teaching and of the Gospel to respond to this difficult and troubling issue of our times.

Each session lasts approximately two and a half hours and includes a prayer, plenary and small group discussions on the week’s themes and assigned readings, and voluntary sharing of journal reflections. Sessions also include viewing and discussing a film.

Each member in the group will receive a Participant Packet with the assigned readings. There will be three to four short readings each week and these readings will provide a foundation for the following week’s session. Participants also will be asked to keep a journal in which they will reflect on the readings and write down questions that they might be grappling with each week. These reflections and questions will help animate the group discussions as well as provide a rich journaling experience for each participant.

The Method The module is designed for small groups limited in size to ten participants. Facilitators are encouraged to read through all eight sessions and the supplemental readings before the group convenes for the first session. Since facilitators are also participants they will also be using the Participant Packet.

The primary job of the facilitator is to guide the sessions, encourage participation, invite frequent evaluation of the group’s experience, and make adjustments to the module if needed.

Participants will be asked to focus on the subject of torture in light of Catholic social teaching and particular Christian virtues − human dignity, hope, love of enemy, and solidarity − and to reflect on these and other themes in small groups. Each session also includes inspiring examples of Christian responses to torture by survivors and human rights advocates alike. These examples are meant to engage participants in thinking critically about our own history and to move people toward action.

In addition to the readings in the Participant Packet, participants will read all of Sr. Dianna Ortiz’s moving story, The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002). Sections of the book (approximately 80 pages/week) will be read for each session, and time will be allotted during the session for discussion and for participants to share their reflections on their reading.

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Four DVDs (20-40 minutes in length) are also included in the curriculum. They are The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, distributed by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT); Breaking the Silence, distributed by the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC); Soldiers of Conscience, distributed by Soldiers of Conscience; and two selections from the School of the Americas Watch, An Insider’s Testimony and Prisoners of Conscience.

I want to acknowledge the contributions of Virginia Farris and Walter Grazier from the USCCB and Rich Killmer from The National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT). It is my hope that this module will contribute to the fine work that organizations like JustFaith Ministries, NRCAT, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC), Witness Against Torture, and the School of the Americas Watch are doing to educate a Christian audience to the evil that torture represents and that the faith-based resources and inspiring examples move participants to respond in faithful and prophetic ways to end torture.

Scott Wright, November 2009

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Thank you for taking on this difficult subject. The work of this module is that of being able to look squarely into the face of a subject that is, by its very nature, painful. Then, by not looking away, the group will, together, work through a process of trying to understand torture and its variations. You will do so primarily from a moral perspective and the lens of faith, rather than through the perspective of policy, politics or pragmatism.

The module is designed to engage and inform. During your time together for these eight sessions you will use a process of dialog and discussion. Everyone will not always agree and may not be able to arrive at the same places in terms of their feelings about torture. The group will agree, hopefully, that torture is indeed a moral issue which begs both spiritual and practical solutions.

It is important that each person is able to safely speak about his/her own fears and our hopes, and that the group spends this time together with respect for one another and for each person’s own experiences and own “truth.”

The following aspects of the module will help you enter the process.

Role of Facilitators Please do not look to your facilitators to be an experts on this topic any more than you are. The facilitator’s job is to bring the group together, facilitate the group discussions, and keep those discussions moving. All participants are responsible for helping to expand the knowledge of the group and pursuing answers to questions. To this end, the facilitator may ask everyone to agree to the “covenant” provided in the first session below.

Many of the questions the facilitator will pose are values bases and the discussions may be complicated. For some of the questions, you may find yourselves agreeing to disagree. However, given the teachings of the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations, the moral stance of this module is clear: torture is never justified.

The important thing is that each person faithfully and respectfully engage in the conversations.

A Note About Prayer The prayer experiences in this module are designed to compliment this difficult journey and include rituals, symbols, readings, reflection questions and silence. Please be attentive to the rituals and symbols as well as to the direction and the flow of prayers. Pausing in silence is an indication of reverence before the tragic realities you will reflect upon.

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Journaling/Reflection You will be expected to keep a small journal of your reflections on group discussions and the readings. These are private and not for sharing, unless you eagerly want to share something in your journal. During weekly discussions, you may want to comment on any particularly strong feelings or changes occurring in your thinking and/or feelings. In this case, journal entries may be shared voluntarily, but the journals themselves are primarily meant to enhance and clarify your own thinking and values.

Determining Next Steps An important goal of all JustFaith Ministries programs is that each group will take both some action steps following the program and consider staying together for ongoing formation, transformation and collective action. As you go through this In the Footsteps of the Crucified: Torture is Never Justified program, keep a running list of questions, ideas and resources that surface for you individually or the group collectively and bring the list to the final session. This will help you participate in the final session’s discussion of possible next steps.

Participant Packet This packet was given to you in paper and/or electronic format. Using the electronic/ PDF version saves in copying and provides online “links” that can be used directly from this document.

The Packet contains the following material: • All the readings for the module, divided by their related session. • Some of the reflections and meditations that are used in opening or closing prayers. • Questions that will form the basis for various small and large group discussions as well as provide “guideposts” for your own journaling and reflection. • An appendix which includes resources for further study and engagement. • A link for the online evaluation for the module. Note: You should bring your Participant Packet to each of the sessions.

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SESSION ONE: Acknowledging our Guilt – The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib

Note to Participants

The first major section of the module is titled Refusing to Forget: Building a Culture of Life. Building a culture of life means that we must not forget that torture puts life at risk, and assaults the very foundations of what makes life sacred: the image of God in each person. Only by not forgetting the grave evil and crime against God and humanity that torture represents can we truly remember that we are all children of God, worthy of dignity and bearers of God’s image.

The two sessions in this part of the module (Sessions 1 & 2) are devoted primarily to Catholic thought on the dignity of every human person. When we turn our attention to the use of torture of any kind anywhere in the world, we must consistently view it as a violation of the human person’s God-given dignity.

Your reading for this session • Reading 1 – “What is Human Dignity?” from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops • Reading 2 – Excerpts from “After September 11” – Pastoral Letter, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops • Reading 3 – “What is at Stake in Guantanamo” – C. William Michaels, Pax Christi Baltimore • Reading 4 – “Ending Lapse into Lawlessness” – Kenneth Roth, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch testimonies online (www.hrw.org)

Session One Outline and Notes

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Welcome and Opening Meditation Is it True? Is it true that the Grass grows again after the rain? Is it true that the Flowers will rise up in the Spring? Is it true that the Birds will migrate home again? Is it true that the Salmon swim back up the stream? It is true. This is true. These are all miracles. But is it true that one day we’ll leave Guantanamo Bay? Is it true that one day we’ll go back to our homes? I sail in my dreams, I’m dreaming of home. To be with my children, each one part of me; To be with my wife, and the ones that I love; To be with my parents, my world’s tenderest hearts. I dream to be home, to be free from this cage. But do you hear me, O Judge, do you hear me at all? We are innocent, here, we’ve committed no crime. Set me free, set us free, if anywhere still- May justice, compassion remain in this world!

By Usama Abu Kabir (Guantanamo Prisoner) Reprinted with permission from Marc Falkoff, Northern Illinois University. From the book Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, University of Iowa Press, 2007.

Weekly Theme Discussions Theme: Human Dignity

Guidepost questions for discussion, journaling and reflection Recall, for a moment, the images of tortured Iraqi prisoners from Abu Ghraib that appeared on TV. Sit with those pictures for a moment, and pray over them in your mind and heart.

Then spend some time with the following questions: • In the readings for this week, we read what Catholic social teaching has to say about human dignity. What is human dignity? Why is it important to defend human dignity? What happens when human dignity is violated? • In light of our readings and discussion on human dignity, what do you think about our nation’s treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo? How does that reflect on our nation? How does that reflect on our Catholic faith as citizens of this nation? • What do human dignity and respect for life mean when a nation is engaged in a war on terror? • The United States Catholic Bishops state that torture, like abortion and euthanasia, are intrinsically evil. What does that mean? Is torture ever justified? Are there any exceptions to when torture may be used?

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God has created each of us uniquely, and I recognize that everyone comes to this experience with very different backgrounds, experiences and views. I commit to honoring differences, knowing they add to the richness of the group’s experience.

God frequently speaks through the unfamiliar and different. I will listen intently in order to fully understand different points of view, realizing these other views will help with my own evolving journey.

Listening is an act of love and care. I will always listen respectfully and constructively (i.e., no side conversations, no interruptions).

How I treat another person is much more important than my opinions and perspectives. I recognize that we are looking for truthful insights within potentially different views. I will respectfully seek clarification of other perspectives to add to my understanding. If I choose to disagree with a perspective that is different from mine, I will do this respectfully and lovingly.

Because God made us, all persons are of equal importance and value, and all voices are important. I commit to assuring that everyone has an opportunity to speak, and I will encourage others to speak before I speak again.

God has given each of us gifts that are given in the hope and expectation that these gifts will be shared. I will participate fully and share in the responsibility for the group’s process and experience

Trust and respect must be offered as the terms of being together in this journey of faith. I will honor that everything that is shared within this group is to stay within this group.

Role of Facilitator As noted above, facilitators for the module are learners along with the participants. Participants should not expect facilitators to be experts, to have all the answers to questions posed or questions asked. During Session One, the facilitator might ask the group to make the following “covenant” with him/her.

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My role as facilitator is to serve the whole group by thinking about what is best for all of us as we go through this learning experience together. I ask you to share responsibility for the success of our group. A strong group facilitates itself because all the members are thinking about the whole. I ask your permission to be the keeper of the trust, to ensure that our tone stays respectful and generous with one another. I ask your permission to be the keeper of the time, to help us make decisions about how to spend our time and to push us along when appropriate. I ask your permission to sometimes be firm and a little pushy in the interest of time and the whole group. I ask your forgiveness for not being an expert on the content of this session – and for asking you questions that I may not know the answer to. I ask you to share responsibility for tracking down information and answering the many questions that will inevitably arise.

Break During the break, everyone will need to fill in their contact information on a Participant Registration Form.

Video and Video Discussion

Announcements One important announcement will be about the online evaluation to be completed after Session Eight. Since you cannot evaluate the program session by session, participants are encouraged to take a few notes about the books, the DVD, the activities and sessions during the course of the module and to use these notes when it comes time to complete the evaluation at the end of the program.

Closing Prayer and Meditation

What the World Expects of Christians

For a long time during those frightful years I waited for a great voice to speak up in Rome… It seems that that voice did speak. But I assure you that millions of people like me did not hear it and that at that time believers and unbelievers alike shared a solitude that continued to spread as the days went by and the executioners multiplied… 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 person. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today…. resolved to speak out clearly and to pay up personally.

Albert Camus to Dominican Friars of France in 1948

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Acknowledging our Guilt: The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib

Catholic Voices: What They Say About Human Dignity

“The duty to respect the dignity of each human being, in whose nature the image of the Creator is reflected, means in consequence that the person cannot be disposed of at will. Those with greater political, technical, or economic power may not use that power to violate the rights of others who are less fortunate. Peace is based on respect for the rights of all.” (Pope Benedict XVI, in his Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, 1 January 2007)

“No one can be by nature superior to his fellows, since all men [and women] are equally noble in natural dignity.” (Pope John XXIII in his encyclical Peace on Earth [Pacem in Terris], No. 89)

“The roots of human rights are to be found in the dignity that belongs to each human being.” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, No. 153)

“A prime example [of intrinsically evil actions] is the intentional taking of innocent human life, as in abortion and euthanasia… Direct threats to the sanctity and dignity of human life, such as human cloning and destructive research on human embryos, are also intrinsically evil. These must always be opposed. Other direct assaults on innocent human life and violations of human dignity, such as genocide, torture, racism, and the targeting of noncombatants in acts of terror or war, can never be justified.” (Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States, No. 22, 23, November 2007)

Session One - Reading 1: “What is Human Dignity?” From Torture is a Moral Issue: A Catholic Study Guide, United States Catholic Conference of Bishops

When you think of Catholic Social Teaching, what first comes to mind?

a. Maybe you think of serving the poor in some concrete way. b. Maybe you think of protecting human rights—e.g., the right to life, to food, to work; the right of people to participate in society and make their voices heard. c. Perhaps ways that the lives of children, or refugees, or the aged, or the sick, or workers are exploited and demeaned are what first come to mind for you. d. Or is it the need to counteract discrimination against various racial and ethnic groups and to give human equality its due that springs to mind?

 Copyrighted material 16 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Whatever it is that first comes to mind when you think of Catholic Social Teaching or the pursuit of social justice, it almost certainly in some way reflects a belief about human dignity. For this belief—that everyone possesses a God-given dignity—motivates the activities that Catholic dioceses, parishes, schools, families, individuals, and groups undertake to serve others and to carry out the mandates of Catholic Social Teaching.

If you search for just one rather simple, clear reason why Catholic Social Teaching holds that dignity is a basic characteristic of every human person, you won’t find it. Instead, you’ll find two reasons, both rather simple and clear:

First reason: God is our Creator; we are created in God’s image. A reflection of God is found in all those he created. Pope John Paul II spoke about this in his encyclical, The Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae). He wrote: “Man has been given a sublime dignity, based on the intimate bond which unites him to his Creator: in man there shines forth a reflection of God himself” (EV 34).

Second reason: In the Incarnation, Jesus Christ becomes one with the human family’s members. All human persons are touched by the reality of the Incarnation, and by Christ’s redemptive actions. Christ came for all. In The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II explained this. He said that Jesus’ “self-oblation on the Cross becomes the source of new life for all people” (No. 33). And, the pope said, “Jesus has a unique relationship with every person, which enables us to see in every human face the face of Christ” (No. 81).

As our discussion of human dignity continues, reflect upon the term respect and its meaning. Undoubtedly, you hear frequently in the Church about respect for life. When you hear of this, isn’t it clear that respect is not an abstraction? Isn’t it clear that the call to respect all of life is a call to change ways of thinking and ways of acting?

What does it mean to respect another person or group of people? In other words, how do you define the term “respect”?

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 Copyrighted material 17 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session One - Reading 2: Excerpts from “After September 11: Living with Faith and Hope” From the Pastoral Letter of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

Blessed are they who mourn, For they will be comforted… Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, For they will be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, For they will be shown mercy… Blessed are the peacemakers, For they will be called children of God. (Mt. 5:4,6,7,9)

These words of Jesus nearly 2000 years ago challenge us and offer us hope today as our community of faith responds to the terrible events of September 11 and their aftermath. As Catholic Bishops, we offer words of consolation, criteria for moral discernment, and a call to action and solidarity in these troubling and challenging times.

After September 11, we serve a wounded people. We share their loss and pain, their anger and fear, their shock and determination in the face of these attacks on our nation and all humanity. We also honor the selflessness of firefighters, police, chaplains, and others who lost their lives in the service of others. They are true heroes.

In these difficult days, our faith has lifted us up and sustained us. Our nation turned to God in prayer and in faith with a new intensity. This was evident on cell phones on hijacked airliners, on stairways in doomed towers, in cathedrals and parish churches, at ecumenical and interfaith services, in our homes and hearts. Our faith teaches us about evil, free will and responsibility. Sacred Scriptures and traditional ethical principles define what it means to make peace. They provide moral guidance on how the world should respond justly to terrorism so as to reestablish peace and order.

The events of September 11 were unique in their scale, but they were not isolated. Sadly, our world is losing respect for human life. Those who committed these atrocities do not distinguish between ordinary civilians and military combatants, and there is the threat of possible terrorist use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in the future.

The dreadful deeds of September 11 cannot go unanswered. We continue to urge resolve, restraint and greater attention to the roots of terrorism to protect against further attacks and to advance the global common good. Our nation must continue to pray and to respond in many ways, including through diplomacy, economic measures, effective intelligence, and ever more focus on security at

 Copyrighted material 18 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. home. Most of all we must discern deeply the way of Jesus which was always the way of active love.

In our response to attacks on innocent civilians, we must be sure that we obey God’s command: ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but even beyond that, the command of Jesus who asks us to reach out in forgiveness and reconciliation to our brothers and sisters even before we bring our gifts to the altar.

We believe every life is precious whether a person works at the World Trade Center or lives in Afghanistan. The teachings of Jesus foregoing the use of force apply, even in the face of terrorism on this scale.

No grievance, no matter what the claim, can legitimate what happened on September 11. Without in any way excusing indefensible terrorist acts, we still need to address those conditions of poverty and injustice which are exploited by terrorists. A successful response to terrorism will require a combination of resolve to do what is necessary to see it through, restraint to ensure that we act only with love, and a long term focus on broader issues of justice and peace.

 Copyrighted material 19 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session One - Reading 3: “What is at Stake in Guantanamo?” By C. William Michaels, Attorney-at-Law, Pax Christi Baltimore, January 11, 2008

Six years ago, few average Americans had heard of the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay. Now, the Camp Delta Facility at Guantanamo Bay is a universal symbol of the United States’ war on terrorism. And it is a watchword for just how far this administration, supported by Congress, is willing to go, in a legislative and political crusade of vengeance that knows no end. Camp Delta has now become a deeper symbol of this country’s war with itself as its own core values are under attack, not by terrorists, but by the executive, the Congress, and the courts.

Hundreds of detainees remain confined at Camp Delta, by the Department of Defense, under conditions that should shock every American. Our government calls these people enemy combatants and says they cannot claim protections of the Geneva Convention.

They have been confined, for years, without charge, without readily available access to counsel, without personal visits from family, with strictly controlled access to the outside world. They are subjected to intense methods of interrogation which if not producing physical injury, are limited in type and nature only by the imagination.

When detainees first arrived, the government not only said that they had no Geneva Convention rights, but also had no right of access to our courts. The right of habeas corpus (Latin for “produce the body”) is a core value of our legal system. It goes back to English Common Law. It is mentioned in our Constitution. It allows a person who claims to be unlawfully detained, to ask a court to review the reasons and conditions of that detention. The government said these detainees had no habeas corpus rights because, among other reasons, Guantanamo Bay is not strictly U.S. soil and so was out of the reach of federal courts.

The government claimed it could try these detainees by military commission with little or no court review, and could issue its own regulations for commission trials. The first round of those regulations were a mockery of other core values of right against self-incrimination, right to counsel, right to be confronted with evidence, and right to an impartial trial.

In 2004 and 2006, the Supreme Court upset the apple cart. It ruled that these detainees had the right to habeas corpus, should have a determination of enemy combatant status, and the government cannot invent its own military commission without the consent of Congress and cannot invent commission rules as it saw fit.

The administration was not deterred. With support of Congress, we now have the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act. The Military Commissions Act effectively eliminates the right of habeas corpus for these detainees. The government now says the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act are retroactive - meaning any habeas corpus petition already filed by any Guantanamo Bay detainee must be dismissed permanently. And with  Copyrighted material 20 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. these statutes we redefine other core values including what torture is - that is authority now reserved to the President.

The administration now has exactly what it wanted, from the beginning: legal limbo for detainees while it does what it wants to them, in a total exercise of executive power. The President claims this power as Commander-in-Chief in a time of war. But Congress has not declared war. The authorization for use of military force, passed after September 11, doesn’t cover all acts and pave all roads.

Congress does not seem to care. For it is working on legislation even more troubling. Americans are expected not to care, because after all we are not enemy combatants. The administration is hoping the Supreme Court will not care. We are here today to say that we, Americans, and the rest of the world, must care. Because there is more at stake than even questions of who is an enemy combatant or the right of habeas corpus.

What is at stake is our national future. Do we want to know how it happens, how a society moves farther and farther from core values, until one day we wake up and wonder where we are? This is how it happens. Argument by argument, bit by bit, one detention at a time, one statute at a time, one court decision at a time, one step at a time, until we pass the point of no return, as the population gives over its authority to a supreme executive who then, without accountability, wields supreme power.

What is at stake also, is how fast a lie can move. Because the government has called American citizens enemy combatants. The Supreme Court has said the government can do that. Other federal courts have affirmed it. How long will it be before enemy combatants are treated the same whether they are citizens or not? A government official was once asked how long an enemy combatant can be detained. The answer was, “until the war is over.” if that means, until the war on terrorism is over, then, friends, we are in a new world. And what will habeas corpus mean then?

The real war is not just this war of vengeance. It is the war within ourselves. “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.” That means vengeance is not ours. Many in our officialdom say this is a Christian country. Then we must ask, if enemy combatants are really our enemies, what did Jesus say we must do with our enemies? So this struggle is more than academic legal principles. This is nothing less than a struggle for our national soul.

We cannot falter in this struggle, no matter how long it takes. We can no longer be content with fighting the good fight. Today, we must win the good fight. We have no other choice! Silence is consent. Apathy is complicity. If not us, then who? If not now, then when? The Supreme Court’s decision, whatever it is, will not end this struggle. We must shut down Camp Delta. Repeal the Military Commissions Act. We must bring this country back to its senses. And pray that it happens in time.

 Copyrighted material 21 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session One - Reading 4: “Ending Lapse into Lawlessness” By Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, August 6, 2008

What must the next United States president do to reclaim Washington's standing to promote human rights around the globe? Many aspects of President George Bush's administration's human rights policy have caused American moral authority to plummet, including its penchant for cosying-up to favoured dictators, equating democracy promotion with regime change, and undermining international standards such as the new treaty banning cluster munitions. But probably nothing has done more to tarnish Washington's reputation in this area than the administration's decision to combat terrorism without regard to US obligations under international human rights law.

What concretely will it take for Senators John McCain or Barack Obama to end this ugly state of affairs? Stopping coercive interrogation - the use of torture and other inhumane treatment to squeeze information from suspects - is probably the most important place to begin. Much has already been accomplished in this regard, but crucial steps remain.

For example, President George Bush has always routinely denied that the US government used torture, but initially his Justice Department legal advisors effectively defined torture out of existence. According to their twisted reading, abuse is not torture unless the pain is equivalent to death, or the loss of a major bodily organ - a definition which, for example, would excuse the mere ripping off of fingernails. That definition has now been abandoned, but it is not clear what Washington's new definition is, and whether it accords with the internationally mandated prohibition of the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental.

For several years, the administration also contended that the parallel prohibition of ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment' applied only to US citizens, or to foreigners in the US, but not to non-Americans held overseas. That fabricated loophole was part of the rationale behind Guantánamo Bay and the CIA's secret detention facilities. Legislation today makes clear that the prohibition applies to all people, wherever they are held.

In response, the US military adopted new interrogation rules which effectively reject the use of coercive interrogation - a major step forward. However, when Congress voted to apply the same rules to the CIA, Bush vetoed the bill, and Congress lacked the votes to override the veto.

Sadly, McCain, the lead sponsor of the first legislation, sided with Bush on the CIA bill. His election-season justification - that the CIA is a more professional body than the military and thus does not need the same detailed restrictions - is an invitation to abuse. The new president should solicit and sign new legislation bringing the CIA under the same strict rules as the military.

Even without that legislation, one might take comfort in the baseline prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, which applies to all interrogators. But the Bush administration

 Copyrighted material 22 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. has eviscerated this standard by interpreting it under a subjective ‘shock the conscience' test in which the method of coercion is weighed against its purpose. If coercion is used for the important goal of fighting terrorism, then under the administration's apparent interpretation, few interrogation techniques shock the conscience.

That, in part, is why the administration refuses to forbid even mock execution by drowning, euphemistically known as water-boarding, an obvious form of torture, let alone cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The new president should abandon this unseemly balancing test and affirm full compliance with the Convention Against Torture.

Detention Ban

Many of the people subjected to interrogation by the CIA have been held in secret detention facilities where the US government refused to acknowledge their detention, and their only contact was with their jailors and interrogators. Under any government, people who have effectively ‘disappeared' in this way are extraordinarily vulnerable to mistreatment. Bush has moved a number of those detainees to acknowledged detention in Guantánamo, but he refuses to close the secret CIA detention facilities permanently. The new president should shut all such detention centres definitively, promise that any detained terrorism suspect will be immediately acknowledged, allowed access to the courts and granted visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and ratify the Convention against Enforced Disappearances to prohibit such abusive detention in future.

When the Bush administration was not mistreating suspects itself, it often used ‘extraordinary rendition' to send them for interrogation by allies such as Egypt or Jordan that are notorious for their own use of torture. To circumvent the international prohibition on sending anyone to a country where there is a serious risk of torture, the administration would ask the recipient government to provide ‘diplomatic assurances' of proper treatment. But those representations are worthless when coming from governments that routinely violate even their legally binding international obligations not to torture. The new president should vow that no suspect will be sent to a country that regularly tortures, regardless of any assurances.

Closing Guantanamo

Perhaps the greatest symbol of Washington's abuse of human rights has been Guantánamo, where hundreds of people have been detained without charge or trial, often for many years. The new president must obviously shut Guantánamo, as both Senators Obama and McCain agree, but the big question is how. While the Bush administration has slowly repatriated many of the inmates, it insists that some one-hundred-and-fifty have committed serious crimes or are too dangerous to be released. What should be done with them?

One proposal is simply to move Guantánamo on-shore - to ask Congress for authority to detain suspects preventively, without criminal charge or trial. That would be a gross deviation from US

 Copyrighted material 23 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. due process traditions which the new president must reject. Instead, any Guantánamo detainee who is to remain in custody should be prosecuted - not before the Bush administration's substandard military commissions, which are designed to facilitate the use of coerced testimony as evidence - but in the regular court system.

Those who argue that retrospective prosecution is inappropriate in light of the need to prevent terrorist acts, fail to understand the modest evidentiary requirements of a prosecution for the crimes of conspiracy or providing material support for terrorism. As the federal courts have demonstrated, these laws can be used against participants in a terrorist plot long before it comes to fruition.

Because no proper judge would admit coerced testimony or evidentiary leads from it, some detainees may not be prosecutable, but even that would not justify preventive detention. It would still be preferable to release some suspects rather than to continue to detain them without trial. Whatever risk is involved in a handful going free, is likely to be far smaller than the risk that the ongoing use of detention without trial will spur the recruitment of new terrorist operatives.

At a more conceptual level, the new president must abandon the war metaphor for the fight against terrorism. Obviously real wars exist in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the laws of armed conflict apply. But the administration has sought to justify detention without trial on the basis of a ‘global war against terrorism', even when suspects are picked up far from any traditional battlefield.

Leaving aside the difficulty of being at war with a tactic, and assuming that the ‘war' against terrorism is directed foremost against Al Qaeda, the concept of applying war rules on a global basis is still too dangerous to our human rights. It would allow the US government, simply on its own say-so, to detain anyone anywhere in the world, declare him or her an ‘enemy combatant', with detention continuing until the elusive end of the war against terrorism. The new president should close that enormous loophole in due process rights and insist that any suspect detained outside a traditional battle zone will be prosecuted through the criminal justice system.

Truth Commission

While ensuring there is no future repeat of the administration's abusive counterterrorism practices, the new president should not simply sweep the past under the rug. Ideally working with Congress, he should push for the establishment of a high-level, bipartisan, professionally staffed independent commission, modeled after the September 11 Commission, to detail what US practices violated international human rights law, who authorized them, why they were allowed, and what steps should be taken to ensure that they are never permitted again. This truth commission would begin the process of exposure and acknowledgment that is a key element of accountability. Where appropriate, it should also recommend reparations and prosecution.

 Copyrighted material 24 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. To signal dramatically the government's renewed commitment to international human rights standards, the new president should also endorse ratification of the International Criminal Court treaty. One lesson of the past seven years has been that, given White House control of the Justice Department, the threat of prosecution is so slight that senior executive officials are not deterred from authorizing the use of unlawful tools such as torture.

There would be no stronger statement of the government's commitment to the rule of law under global standards than to permit US officials to be subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court should a future administration again lapse into such lawlessness.

 Copyrighted material 25 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. In the Footsteps of the Crucified

SESSION TWO: Returning to the Catacombs: Torture in Latin America

Notes to Participants

Your reading for this session • Reading 1 – “Building a Culture of Life” – from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops • Reading 2 – Cry of the People, pp 3-6, by Penny Lernoux (New York: Penguin Books, 1982) • Reading 3 – “Argentine Mothers of the Disappeared” by Patrick Rice, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition • Reading 4 – The Blindfold’s Eyes, Preface & Chapters 1-6

Goals of the Session

• To deepen our convictions that torture is a moral issue, one that deserves to be understood and addressed by Christians. • To reaffirm the dignity of human life rooted in the image of God present in every human person. • To recommit ourselves to building a culture of life as a constructive force for human good in the face of violence and torture.

Session Two Outline and Notes

Welcome and Opening Meditation

Meditative Reading: From Argentina: Prayer and Prison

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The following is an excerpt from a letter written by Patrick Rice, an Irish-born worker priest and superior of the Little Brothers of Charles de Foucauld, to his fraternity. After working among the poor in Argentina for several years, he was arrested in October 1976 as a “subversive.” He was held for some weeks during which time he was repeatedly tortured. Half of the members of his community were disappeared and assassinated by the military dictatorship. In all, 30,000 people were forcibly detained and disappeared in Argentina between 1976 and 1980.

In recent years I have arrived at an understanding of just how much Jesus is present in the most diverse situations; it is a very strong impression. When you remain alone for long periods of time, or with a hood over your head, or with your eyes bandaged shut, or completely surrounded by people who are seeking to annihilate you by whatever means they can dream up… then a friend, whom you don’t really hear, appears to you. I have lived through this in the dreadful Federal Police Coordination Center, where you spend 24 hours out of 24 hours locked up in a small cell (with a tiny window high up, through which the light passes), knowing that anything could happen to you.

At night, when the guards weren’t there, one tried to talk, to sing with the other inmates, and we looked at one another through the small peep-holes in the doors. There was always a strongly contemplative atmosphere, and, when the guard allowed it, everybody looked forward with enthusiasm to having a Eucharistic celebration (of course, that could take place only when a priest was also in detention)…

What characterized our Christian life during this whole time in prison was prayer, and more precisely, prayer of intercession. When you hear the despairing screams of your friends who are in the process of being tortured, and when you experience your total helplessness to do anything, you learn that to pray and to intercede with God is the only worthy human act that one is capable of doing.

You pray that this person may be filled with strength, that the people who are doing the torturing may have mercy or else that some miracle might stop this suffering. You are full of gratitude that “today it’s not me”… And then, “it’s my turn”… and then you are living the whole experience second after second aware only of your own body and of your fight to survive. Much of the time I still think about what is happening there and my prayer is one of intercession, for those people who continue to suffer.

It’s not easy to find yourself back in the normal world, and especially in the normal Christian world. It all seems so shabby, formal, less intense and less calm. For us in prison, the Gospel was our strength, our weapon against evil, against hate, against oppression. In the Church here there is too little awareness of evil; the Gospel does not have the power that it had for us then.

 Copyrighted material 27 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Reprinted from The Catholic Worker, September 1977

Weekly Theme Discussion Theme: Human Dignity, Part 2.

Guidepost questions for discussion, journaling and reflection

The Ticking Time Bomb Scenario Many people today wrestle with the question whether torture is ever justified. A case in point is “the ticking time bomb scenario, one version of which says that terrorists have placed a nuclear bomb or other weapon of mass destruction in a major metropolitan area, one of the terrorists have been captured, and it is a fact that he knows the location of the bomb. Is torture ever justified?

• In The Gospel of Life, John Paul II contrasts a culture of death with a culture of life. What are the characteristics of a culture of death? What are the characteristics of a culture of life? • Comment on this passage: “The best way to overcome and defeat the dangerous culture of death is to give firm foundations and clear content to a culture of life that will vigorously oppose it.” • “The deepest element of God's commandment to protect human life is the requirement to show reverence and love for every person and the life of every person.” Are there exceptions to this commandment?

Torture is an issue in the news of our day, an issue that Christian teaching prompts us to examine. At this point, however, we might continue the discussion of human dignity by posing these questions:

• In light of the reflection from Argentina that we read together, is torture ever justified? What does Catholic Social Teaching say about torture? Is it intrinsically evil? Are there ever any exceptions? • What is at risk when respect does not characterize the relationships of individuals, of cultural and religious groups, or of nations? • Is it possible to condone practices of torture while at the same time affirming every person’s God-given human dignity? Why or Why not?

Discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes Two volunteers will facilitate the session discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes. The following are suggested starting points for these discussions, but the volunteers can decide to go in a different direction based on their own experiences and knowledge of the group. These questions are the focus for participant journaling this week.

Session 2: Chapters 1-6 “In a dark time, the eye begins to see…”

 Copyrighted material 28 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. 1. What word(s) best describe(s) your feelings after you finished reading the first six chapters of The Blindfold’s Eyes? Are there experiences in your life that enable you to identify with Dianna’s story? 2. In the preface to the book, Dianna writes: “Maybe I survived simply because I am a U.S. citizen. But because of that privilege I have a huge responsibility… to be vigilant and to speak out.” (p. x) How does Dianna accept that responsibility? What is our responsibility? 3. On the wall of the office of TASSC International (Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition), the organization that Dianna founded, there is a sign that reads: “Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. But above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.” Who are the victims, perpetrators, bystanders in Dianna’s story? Who are the victims, perpetrators, bystanders in our recent U.S. story?

Break

Video and Video Discussion

Announcements

Closing Prayer and Meditation

 Copyrighted material 29 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Readings for Session 2

Return to the Catacombs: Torture in Latin America

Session 2 – Reading 1: “Building a Culture of Life” from Torture is a Moral Issue: A Catholic Study Guide, United States Catholic Conference of Bishops

Where can this conviction regarding the God-given human dignity of every person lead? It can lead toward building what Pope John Paul II called a “culture of life.” According to Pope John Paul’s vision, builders of the culture of life constitute a powerfully constructive force for great good in the society and the world they inhabit.

Pope John Paul discussed the culture of life at length in The Gospel of Life. There is an urgent need for “a general mobilization of consciences and a united ethical effort to activate a great campaign in support of life. All together, we must build a new culture of life,” he wrote (No. 95).

As the outlines of a culture of life unfolded in The Gospel of Life, the pope said that the time has come “to rediscover the ability to revere and honor every person” (No. 83). Many, many persons found a place in the pope’s expansive discussion of the culture of life and what respect for life implies: the unborn child, the newborn child, the sick, the poor and needy, terminally ill people, the aged and those who mourn, those who are marginalized within society, minors, AIDs patients, and even enemies.

The people of the Church are “people of life and for life, and this is how we present ourselves to everyone,” Pope John Paul II said (No. 78). He added, “We are guided and sustained by the law of love” (No. 79).

In the late pope’s vision of a culture of life, “even an enemy ceases to be an enemy for the person who is obliged to love him” and to do good to him; the height of such love, said the pope, “is to pray for one's enemy” (No. 41).

It is impossible in this short space to sum up all that Pope John Paul said about the culture of life in his important encyclical. However, in our context, the following statements should be noted:

“The deepest element of God's commandment to protect human life is the requirement to show reverence and love for every person and the life of every person” (No. 41).

All of society should “respect, defend and promote the dignity of every human person, at every moment and in every condition of that person’s life” (No. 81).

Pope John Paul II went on to discuss the culture of life many times in the years after publishing The Gospel of Life. For him, the call to build a culture of life was a demanding call to take

 Copyrighted material 30 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. responsibility for our world and to enrich it. Just take a look at what he said in March 2001, when he spoke to the Pontifical Academy of Life:

The best way to overcome and defeat the dangerous culture of death is to give firm foundations and clear content to a culture of life that will vigorously oppose it. Although right and necessary, it is not enough merely to expose and denounce the lethal effects of the culture of death. Rather, the inner tissue of contemporary culture must be continually regenerated, culture being understood as a conscious mentality, as convictions and actions, as the social structures that support it.

Pope Benedict XVI also affirmed the need to respect the life and dignity of the human person when he spoke at St. Peter’s Square on February 5, 2006: “It is fundamental to foster a correct attitude towards the other: the culture of life is in fact based on attention to others without any forms of exclusion or discrimination. Every human life, as such, deserves and demands always to be defended and promoted.”

Catholic Social Teaching holds that all people bear a God-given dignity. This conviction makes demands upon us: calls us to action, calls us to respect each person.

It is possible at once to feel personally affirmed by this teaching and disturbed by its most far- reaching demands, especially the demand to recognize human dignity in what may appear to us as difficult cases.

So this teaching leads somewhere: it leads to respect for ourselves and all others, and to action on behalf of justice. It leads to recognizing the face of Jesus in others.

This teaching also may prompt us to take a second look at widely accepted ways our society treats people—to assess whether some ways of treating people reflect respect for human dignity, or whether, in fact, they constitute abuses of human dignity.

Society itself frequently is divided when it comes to judging whether or not an action constitutes an abuse of human dignity. Thus, debates over particular issues get played out in the pages of our daily newspapers and on TV. For example, since 1973, there has been an intense debate over abortion, in which the Church calls for respect for human life from the moment of conception. There are ongoing debates over racism: when it is operative in school systems and when it is not, or how it influences voting choices. Currently, there is an ongoing debate in society over human embryonic stem-cell research, which the Church regards as a failure to recognize the unborn child’s humanity and dignity.

And, of course, there is debate over torture: whether certain practices commonly regarded as torture are legally or morally acceptable in the treatment and interrogation of prisoners accused of terrorist acts.

 Copyrighted material 31 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 2 – Reading 2: Excerpted from Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People: “The Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America – The Catholic Church in Conflict with U.S. Policy” (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 3-6.

One warm spring evening in Villa Soldati, Father Patrick Rice and Fatima Cabrera left the shantytown’s small chapel for her home a few blocks away. The slum was in darkness, with no lights anywhere. As Rice and Fatima picked their way around the piles of garbage, an old Jeep crept out of a side street and followed them. Neither saw the vehicle until it was upon them. “Stop or I’ll shoot,” shouted a man in civilian clothes, leaping from the car and waving a pistol. “We didn’t know what to do,” said Rice. “He fired a shot in the ground. He pointed his gun at us and asked for our identity papers. He seemed nervous. He fired another shot in the air. Another man came around the corner, also carrying a gun. They bundled the two of us into the back of the Jeep. At no time did they identify themselves. We didn’t know who they were or where they were taking us.” The experiences of Father Rice and Fatima Cabrera when the Jeep roared out of the Buenos Aires slum on that night in October 1976 were not uncommon. At least twenty thousand people have suffered the same fate since a police state was imposed on Argentina in 1974. Nor has it been just an Argentine phenomenon. Tens of thousands of Latin Americans living under other military regimes have been similarly abused in a reign of terror unequaled in the continent’s history. Unlike Rice, an Irish priest, many did not live to tell a tale of horror that often surpassed the inhumanity of the Nazi concentration camps. “They took us to Police Station 36,” said Father Rice. “I was taken into a room and my shirt was pulled up over my head and face. They asked my name and where I lived. When I identified myself as a priest, they first demanded that I recite the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, then they told me, ‘Now you’ll find out that the Romans were very civilized toward the early Christians compare with what’s going to happen to you.’ After this, they beat me, although I was not asked any questions. “Later that night I was put in the trunk of a car, my hands were tied behind my back, my head hooded. Fatima was put in the back seat. We were taken to what I thought was a barracks [probably the Guemes Brigade near Buenos Aires’ Ricchieri Freeway]. The hood made of rags was removed and replaced by a yellow canvas hood with string around the neck. The man changing the hood said, ‘Don’t look at me! If you do you’re dead!’ I was beaten again. By this time I was in a bad state.

 Copyrighted material 32 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. “They started with water torture. My nose was held and water was poured in my mouth. You swallow a lot of water and it has a drowning effect. My interrogators told me that they belonged to the AAA [a para-police organization called the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance]. The beatings and drenching with water continued throughout Tuesday, October 12, at three- or four- hour intervals. “On Tuesday night they came and walked me to another room. Electric shocks were applied systematically to various parts of my body. They were also giving electric shock treatment to Fatima in the same room. All day Wednesday, October 13, they tortured Fatima – I could hear her screaming. I was told that I was accused of putting up propaganda slogans against the Army in Villa Soldati, which was a lie. They kept throwing water on us and increasing the shock and demanded that we give them the names of everyone we knew in the villa. They told me that I was stronger than Fatima and because of me they were going to destroy her. While denying their charges, I refused to give names, believing that anyone I knew would probably get the same treatment. This only increased their suspicion, but I think in the end they realized we didn’t know anything. I was told by one of my interrogators, ‘I am also against violence and for that reason I won’t kill you.’ “At one point I was able to lift the hood on my head and see the rest of the room. There were seven other prisoners there, all with yellow hoods, chained to the wall, and two or three torturers were working in a torture chamber nearby. When they saw me moving the hood, they nearly lynched me with a cord around my neck. All day and night they kept torturing Fatima… her desperate screams drove me crazy. “Finally on Thursday, October 14, I was given a little water and allowed to go to the bathroom for the first time. Then I was brought to the person in charge and told, ‘You have been in detention for eight hours.’ I was again bundled into the trunk of a car and taken to the Coordinacion Federal [police headquarters for Buenos Aires, 1550 Moreno Street, Buenos Aires]. When I entered they asked me my name, but I couldn’t answer because I could hardly speak. They beat me in the ribs and I fell down. Eventually I was taken to a small cell, given something to eat, and allowed to take a shower. I was horrified by all the marks on my body. “The following day Fatima was brought in and put in a cell near me. She told me that during the electric shock torture, they had stripped her and applied electric shocks to her mouth to stop her screaming. One of the officials took off the bandage covering her eyes and told her to take a good look at him because it was his life or hers. She said she prayed to God that she would die to end her suffering, and then she fell into a coma.

 Copyrighted material 33 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. “At police headquarters I was told to say that my black eye, a badly cut foot, and other signs of torture had been caused by my falling down some stairs. ‘If you say anything else, you’ll be found in the river,’ they told me. Life at police headquarters is one continuous hell, with Swastika crosses painted on the passages, confinement for months without ever seeing the sun, terrible food, constant threats by the interrogators, and abuse by the guard, particularly of women prisoners. “A week after my arrest I was washed, shaved, and brought before the Irish ambassador. I was quite disoriented and the ambassador realized that it wasn’t in my interests to talk about ill treatment. Later I signed a document that apparently cleared me of the charges. I thought therefore that I would be released in a few days, but I was transferred to Villa Devoto Prison and then to La Plata Prison [in the province of Buenos Aires], where I was held for five weeks until my deportation. I was not tortured anymore.” Rice was taken to the airport on December 3, bound for London and freedom, but those terrible nights and days left a profound mark on the thirty-two-year-old priest, who spent two weeks recovering in a psychiatric ward. “My Christian faith became very real to me,” he said. “In such suffering Christ is almost physically present, and one’s prayer is a despairing plea to God to save one, as indeed Christ’s own cry on the cross was. At times the proximity of death filled me with fear and dread, and my whole being wanted to cling to life, but then it seemed as though I had been rescued by Christ, that I was able to resist this evil, irrespective of my well-being or even life itself.”

 Copyrighted material 34 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 2 – Reading 3: “Argentine Mothers of the Disappeared”

One of the horrendous practices of Latin American military dictatorships of the period between the military coup in Brazil (1964) and the end of the wars in El Salvador (1992) and Guatemala (1996) was the practice of forced disappearances, usually followed by torture in secret detention centers and assassination.

There were many heroic responses to these brutal atrocities, including the protests lodged by organized groups of mothers and relatives of the disappeared, first present in the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. Their heroic struggle culminated with the recognition by the United Nations in December 2007 that the practice of detained-disappearances, a practice that often led to torture and assassination, is a crime against humanity.

The following article was written by Patrick Rice, the first Secretary of FEDEFAM (Association of Families of the Disappeared in Latin America), and a board member of TASSC (Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition). He was disappeared and tortured in Argentina in 1976 when he was a worker-priest and Superior General of the Little Brothers of the Gospel.

On Saturday, April 30, 1977, a group of Argentine women gathered in the Plaza de Mayo (Buenos Aires) with the idea of protesting the enforced disappearance of their loved ones.

For many months they had battled with the red tape of the General Videla’s military dictatorship (1976-83) in a despairing attempt to get news on the whereabouts of their children, most of who were in their late teens or early twenties. They had been taken into clandestine custody by security forces and accused of being “subversive terrorists.”

Frustrated by the government’s inaction, and desperately awaiting news with other mothers at the pastoral center of military chaplain Father Graselli, Azucena Villaflor de Vicentini began to speak out. She suggested that the mothers consider publicly gathering in the Plaza de Mayo to protest. Azucena, whose son had been disappeared a year previously, argued that the moment had arrived for them to go to that focal space in Argentina political life, outside the Casa Rosada, and demand a public response for their loved ones.

Only fourteen women showed up for that first demonstration on Saturday, April 30, including four from the same family, a disappointing turnout by all accounts. However, the occasion was propitious for organizing, and Azucena took a leading role. Names were exchanged and they quickly realized they had made a wrong choice of day and time. The Argentine government and its offices are closed on Saturdays, so a new day and time was decided on. It would be the following Thursday at 3.30 pm.

That protest took place with many more mothers participating but the women were requested to circle in pairs by the police as public gatherings of more than two were prohibited.  Copyrighted material 35 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. The first reaction of the military regime was to call them the crazy or mad women of the Plaza de Mayo. Pro military media ridiculed them, alleging that they were talking about a problem which did not exist. The disappeared, their sons and daughters, had really gone underground and were enjoying life in Paris or Madrid. The Madres were crazy to say they had been detained by the regime, and if they had reared their children in a patriotic way they would not be behaving in such an insane manner.

Despite the insults, the Madres continued and the movement grew. In consonance with Azucena´s idea of making public the drama of the disappeared they decided to make their presence felt in all public events whenever possible and not only on Thursdays in Plaza de Mayo. One such occasion was the national pilgrimage to the Marian Shrine of Lujan in September, about 30 miles from Buenos Aires.

Many mothers went there, but as they had to publicly identify themselves, they chose a simple white cotton head scarf as their identity. That meant that during the religious ceremony they put on the scarf and the other mothers gathered doing the same. When their protest was over each folded it away back into their hand bags and traveled home as just one of the crowd. If they were stopped by the police they could always say it was a cloth diaper. For the Madres, their symbolic head scarf came to represent their children and many now have their names embroidered on them.

World media first took notice during the visit of US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to Argentina in the fall of 1977. Separately or in pairs they went to San Martin Square where Secretary Vance was honoring national hero Jose de San Martin. There they put on their head scarves and gathered near him to request his intervention. A major media event happened, and the first photos of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo began to circulate throughout the world.

The Mothers were elated that someone was finally taking notice but they could never have imagined of what lay in store for them. The regime began to speak of them as mothers of the “subversives” and enemies of the nation. They were being targeted for a cruel repression campaign. Underground Navy officer Alfredo Artiz, together with a young woman who in fact was living in clandestine detention, began to frequent the Madres alleging the forced disappearance of his brother. He got much information on their activities and won their confidence. He knew they wanted to put an important advertisement into a national newspaper.

On December 8, 1977, Artiz personally led a commando unit in a mass kidnapping of Madres and supporters as they were leaving Holy Cross Church where they had gathered to organize that campaign. Eight were taken, including French sister Alicia Domon. Subsequently, Azucena was captured near her house in another part of the city when going to the local store. And another French sister, Renee Duquet, a companion of Sr. Alicia, was captured in her house.

All were taken to the secret detention center called the Mechanical Navy School. A few weeks later they were put on a death flight and were thrown out alive from the aircraft into the South

 Copyrighted material 36 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Atlantic Ocean. Amazingly this brutal repression campaign did not break the movement. A few weeks later the Madres returned once again to the Plaza de Mayo where they have marched ever since despite other repressive actions taken against them by the dictatorship.

The return to Democracy in 1983 meant that they began to play an increasing role in keeping the issue of disappearances high on the political agenda. They were elated when Junta leaders Generals Videla, Agosti and Massera were condemned in 1986, but were dejected when the impunity laws were approved shortly afterwards, and above all in 1990 when all military perpetrators were pardoned by President Carlos Menem.

Notwithstanding this institutionalization of impunity the Madres continued to demand truth and justice, and finally President Kirchner overruled those measures in 2004 and so the long awaited trials of all perpetrators of the dictatorship could be reinitiated.

In mid 2005 several human remains recovered from the sea in January 1978 were exhumed in an Atlantic Coast cemetery. No one could believe it when forensic experts identified them as belonging to several members of that first group of Madres including Azucena and Sister Rene Duquet. A miracle indeed! Azucena´s ashes are buried in the garden beneath the Pyramid of Mayo around which the mothers march every week, and the others in the grounds of Holy Cross Church.

Many celebratory events have taken place in Argentina to mark their 30th Anniversary: Open air concerts, midnight torch lit marches in the Plaza de Mayo. Most events were multiplied by two as the movement had split into two rival groups of mothers almost 20 years ago.

However, this rivalry has now practically ceased, and even though both the “Association” and the “Founders Line” maintain their own separate space, they march round every Thursday at the same time in the Plaza de Mayo. Most surviving members are now into their eighties and are considered national heroines.

One dimension that it is impossible to measure from within the frontiers of Argentina is the impact the Madres have had in the world human rights movement, especially in the struggle against enforced disappearances. Faithful to a slogan coined at the beginning of their struggle, the Madres said: “Wherever a mother is struggling for her disappeared son or daughter, she thereby becomes a “Madre of Plaza de Mayo.”

Faithful to that conviction, there is a long and largely unknown chronicle of solidarity work that the Argentine “Madres” have dispensed all over the world in the struggle against forced disappearances as this inhumane practice has spread to different continents.

As founding members of the Latin American Federation of Families of the Disappeared (FEDEFAM) in 1981, the Madres travel to all corners of Latin America to express their solidarity with locally organized groups of families of the disappeared, such as the COMADRES in El  Copyrighted material 37 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Salvador, COFADEH in Honduras, GAM in Guatemala, ASFADDES in Colombia, ANFASEP in Ayacucho, Peru, Tortura Nunca Mais in Brazil, the Agrupacion de Familiares in Chile, ASOFAMD of Bolivia and AMAFADESA in Uruguay.

The Madres have even crossed the Oceans to ex-Yugoslavia where the Federation of Families of Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia find inspiration in their movement. In Africa the RADIF network of family and survivor organizations has been established with leading members from South Africa and Western Sahara.

But it is perhaps among Asian victims that their struggle has had most impact: Sri Lanka, Philippines, Indonesia, Kashmir, Pakistan, China, Nepal, and Thailand, all of whom are federated in AFAD (Asian Federation against Involuntary Disappearances).

There is no doubt that today many families in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East who have had their loved ones disappeared into clandestine detention through the extraordinary rendition processes in the post 9/11 war on terrorism must be looking at the example and struggle of the Argentine Madres. Their legacy therefore is vibrant and may have even more global relevance today than in Argentina 30 years ago.

To all appearances, the practice of enforced disappearances, in one form or another, has been incorporated by the Bush Administration as a key tool in the war on terrorism.

On the religious side of things the Argentine Catholic Church still has an enormous debt to pay to the Madres, because of major complicity on the part of several Argentine bishops with the dictatorship.

Despite such an extraordinary testimony of following the Gospel message of peace and justice on the part of the Madres, most Argentine Church authorities have shied away from them, if not directly opposed them. Even progressive Church authorities find it difficult to give space in the Church to such “strong” women. And the Madres certainly are “strong” women, in a Biblical sense, as was Mary of Nazareth.

 Copyrighted material 38 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. In the Footsteps of the Crucified

SESSION THREE: Listening to the Survivors: The Intrinsic Evil of Torture

Note to Participants

Part 2 − Saying No to Torture: Bringing Hope into a Society of Fear

Hope means that the evil of torture must be confronted and named for what it is: an abomination against God and against the image of God in human persons. Hope is born of the conviction: Never Again! and the commitment to eradicate torture from the face of the earth. Only then can the healing grace of justice, forgiveness and reconciliation begin its work.

The focus of Part 2 (Sessions 3 & 4) is on torture itself, and the reasons why it is a source of such concern for the Church – for all Christians − at this point in the third millennium. What forms does torture take? What reasons are given for the torture or abusive treatment of prisoners today? What specific objections are lodged by religious leaders against torture?

Your reading for this session • Meditation – “Stations of the Cross” in the Jesuit Chapel at the University of Central America, San Salvador. Photos by Don Doll, SJ (http://magis.creighton.edu) • Reading 1 – “The Debate Takes Shape”from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops • Reading 2 – “What is Torture?” from Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition • Reading 3 – “Human Rights Watch Country Testimonies” from Human Rights Watch. Read one of the four accounts. • Reading 4 – The Blindfold’s Eyes, Chapters 7-10  Copyrighted material 39 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA.

Goals of the Session

• To overcome the fear and desperation in our world that opens the door to torture and abuse of prisoners. • To listen with open hearts to the testimony of torture survivors and to strengthen our commitment to work against torture. • To deepen our understanding of torture as intrinsically evil and something that debases the victim and victimizer alike.

Session Three Outline and Notes

Welcome and Opening Meditation

Reflect on the Stations of the Cross from the chapel at the University of Central America in El Salvador (in the readings following Session 3). The Stations of the Cross have long been an important tradition in the Catholic Church during Holy Week observances.

Look AT these images… What is happening here?. Look INTO these images… What emotions do these icons evoke? Look THROUGH these images…What message or challenge do these images offer us?

Reflection:

These drawings, by painter Roberto Huezo, currently adorn the UCA Chapel in San Salvador, adjacent to the site were the six Salvadoran Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter are buried after being assassinated November 16, 1989.

The drawings were inspired by the pain and suffering of the Salvadoran people. The years prior to the deepening of the military conflict were characterized by the murdered, tortured, and mutilated bodies which appeared almost everywhere in El Salvador. Seventy-five thousand dead testify to this violence.

The drawings express the pain and suffering which the Salvadoran people carried as their burden, like the cross of Jesus himself, on the road to their redemption.

These harsh artistic expressions of naked violence surprise us deeply and lead some to question their presence in the chapel. Nonetheless, this is precisely how Jesus, incarnate in the flesh of the Salvadoran people, makes his way – the Way of the Cross – in the land of El Salvador.

Weekly Theme Discussion

 Copyrighted material 40 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Theme: Bringing back the virtue of hope

Guidepost questions for discussion, journaling and reflection

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks inside U.S. borders September 11, 2001, Americans experienced an unfamiliar sense of vulnerability. Think back to your own strongest feelings and concerns during the period after the 9-11 attacks:

• Did you experience fear, sadness or anger? Were you less optimistic? • Did you spend more time with those you care about most? Did you take more time to serve others? • Did you pray more? What did you pray for? Did you feel hopeful?

The birth of a new era after 9/11 was accompanied by new questions. Many people undoubtedly felt that, while we had questions, we didn’t have answers.

• What questions do you still have after 9/11?

Some might say that a new era began with 9-11. With the dawn of this new era, many felt shaken. People assessed and reassessed priorities. They shared an interest in knowing how their nation would respond to developments that seemed virtually to have shifted the ground under their feet. As the months and years unfolded, it became clear that people wouldn’t always agree about what was the “right way” to respond to terrorism.

• Is there a right way to respond to terrorism? • What gives rise to terrorism? • Are there effective, moral means of self-defense against potential terrorist attacks? • Is torture ever justified? What does Catholic Social Teaching say? What does the Gospel say?

Discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes Two volunteers will facilitate the session discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes. The following are suggested starting points for these discussions, but the volunteers can decide to go in a different direction based on their own experiences and knowledge of the group. These questions are also the focus for your journaling this week.

Session 3: Chapters 7-10 “Speak, bear witness…” 1. “My way of coping with this… struggle often leaves me feeling drained and hopeless and gazing at an unknown destination with so many unanswered questions: Will the pain ever subside? How does one gather courage to once again face life with confidence?” (p. 103) Where does Dianna find strength to go on? Where do you find strength in moments of darkness?  Copyrighted material 41 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. 2. “I know my old God had died, the God who was strong, powerful, a protector… If I were to see God in a new way, based on my experiences, God would have to be helpless, broken, tortured, but still alive and able to love.” (p. 127) Reflect on your faith experience in light of Dianna’s. 3. A survivor once said: “At TASSC I learned that I am not a victim, I am a survivor.” What is the difference between victim and survivor, and why is that difference important?

Break

Video and Video Discussion

Announcements

Closing Prayer and Meditation

Archbishop Oscar Romero: Lenten Words, March 16, 1980

Nothing is so important to the church as human life, as the human person, above all, the person of the poor and the oppressed. Besides being human beings, they are also divine beings, since Jesus said that whatever is done to them he takes as done to him. That bloodshed, those deaths, are beyond all politics. They touch the very heart of God….

If we could see that Christ is the needy one, the torture victim, the prisoner, the murder victim, and in each human figure so shamefully thrown by our roadsides could see Christ himself cast aside, we would pick him up like a medal of gold to be kissed lovingly. We would never be ashamed of him….

How far people are today-especially those who torture and kill and value their investments more than human beings-from realizing that all the earth’s millions are good for nothing, are worthless, compared to a human being. The person is Christ, and in the person viewed and treated with faith we look on Christ the Lord.

 Copyrighted material 42 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Readings for Session Three

Listening to the Survivors: The Intrinsic Evil of Torture

The Stations of the Cross in the Jesuit Chapel at the University of Central America, San Salvador. A faith-filled reflection upon the suffering of Christ in the unjust tortures of the people of El Salvador Photos by Don Doll, S.J.

 Copyrighted material 43 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA.

Collaborative Ministry Office CREIGHTON UNIVERSITY Photos by Don Doll, S.J. http://magis.creighton.edu/

Catholic Social Teaching on Torture

In carrying out investigations, the regulation against the use of torture, even in the case of serious crimes, must be strictly observed: “Christ’s disciple refuses every recourse to such methods, which nothing could justify and in which the dignity of man is as much debased in his torturer as in the torturer’s victim.”* International juridical instruments concerning human rights correctly indicate a prohibition against torture as a principle which cannot be contravened under any circumstances. (*John Paul II’s Address to the International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva, June 15, 1982, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, No. 404)

Kidnapping and hostage taking bring on a reign of terror. By means of threats they subject their victims to intolerable pressures. They are morally wrong. Terrorism which threatens, wounds, and kills indiscriminately is gravely against justice and charity. Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 2297)

In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law

 Copyrighted material 44 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. and order, often without protest from the pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture. Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy. She forbade clerics to shed blood. In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person. On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading. It is necessary to work for the abolition. We must pray for the victims and their tormenters. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 2298)

 Copyrighted material 45 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 3 – Reading 1: “The Debate Takes Shape” From Torture is a Moral Issue: A Catholic Study Guide, United States Catholic Conference of Bishops

There are many means of intelligence-gathering, and it is pursued in many settings. Among them are detention centers where prisoners, especially those of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are questioned about their activities or that of other terrorist cells around the world. What methods of obtaining information from these prisoners were to be permitted?

Society’s current debate over torture relates directly to how detainees are interrogated. What forms does the debate take? Here are a few positions on torture:

Some argue that the painful treatment of a few extracts information that saves the lives of many.

Some counter that torture doesn’t work, that tortured individuals say whatever they think their captors want to hear.

Attention sometimes shifts to a specific approach to interrogation; a debate ensues about whether a particular practice indeed constitutes torture. The practice called “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning, is an example of this.

Some find torture unfortunate but believe that desperate times call for desperate measures.

Others believe torture is counterproductive—that for every insurgent tortured, 100 new insurgents rise up.

Some call attention to how torture affects those who impose it, asking: Doesn’t this practice degrade our own personnel?

Some say that torture raises the risk that our own forces will be tortured if captured.

What constitutes torture? Here’s the full definition written in the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in December 1984:

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.  Copyrighted material 46 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. The U.N. Convention said that “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

This U.N. Convention, known as CAT, took effect in June 1987 after ratification by twenty nations. The United States signed it in April 1988, and ratified it in October 1994.

Of course, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights also says that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” And the Geneva Conventions of 1949 prohibited “physical or mental torture” and “any other form of coercion” against prisoners of war.

Torture assumes many guises, from electric shocks and burning with cigarettes, to sexual humiliation in various forms, even rape. Detainees may be threatened by attack dogs, or told that unless they cooperate their family members will be harmed. Detainees may be beaten, deprived of sleep, hooded for long periods. The list goes on of ways that pain is caused or that detainees are terrorized. And some parties to the debate argue, as we said, that some practices under discussion do not actually constitute torture. Or they may argue that when torture has occurred, it was inflicted by misguided individuals whose actions were unauthorized.

Is torture an acceptable means of gathering information sought for our own self-defense in the age of terrorism? In a June 2006 letter to then – U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando, Florida cautioned that the “nation must not embrace a morality based on an attitude that ‘desperate times call for desperate measures.’” Bishop Wenski, writing in his capacity as chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on International Policy, said, “In a time of terrorism and great fear, our individual and collective obligations to respect the dignity and human rights even of our worst enemies gains added importance.… Our nation must treat its prisoners as we would expect our enemies to treat our own military personnel.”

If you had the opportunity to participate in a meeting of national leaders discussing national security, what would you say about torture?

 Copyrighted material 47 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 3 – Reading 2: “What is Torture?”

As members of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), we have been asked repeatedly for assistance in formulating a current and comprehensive definition of politically motivated mental and physical torture, as well as cruel and degrading treatment. In response, we are offering the following definitions. We are aware, however, of the tendency of many governments to "re-interpret" the clear language of human rights law and treaties so as to evade international censure or legal consequences.

For the same reasons, certain techniques are described in deceptive and sanitized language. Our TASSC definitions are therefore accompanied by a description of certain modern day interrogation methods.

We wish to state, at the outset, that we consider any techniques, or combinations of techniques, intended to break the will of another human being, to be torture. We reject any such treatment as barbaric.

Moreover, there is plenty of evidence that in the end, torture does not provide greater national security, but rather threatens it. Violence indeed begets violence. We therefore stand firm in our position that there can be zero tolerance for torture.

DEFINITIONS

Physical Torture

Physical Torture is any action or technique, or combination that would result in severe physical pain when inflicted upon a human being. Severe physical pain means a level of pain that a person would not voluntarily accept for himself or herself. Physical torture includes but is not limited to the following:

• Electric shock • Near asphyxiation • Rape or sexual abuse • Burning • Beatings • Stress positions • Dog attacks

Note: According to this definition, for example, receiving an injection or other medical treatment not requiring pain killers, or being tackled in a game of football, would obviously not be torture. On the other hand, a severe beating with a bat, or the infliction of electrical shocks would certainly constitute torture under this definition. Mental Torture  Copyrighted material 48 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Mental torture is any action or technique, or any combination thereof, which might result in severe mental trauma or harm when inflicted upon a human being. This includes but is not limited to the following:

• Death threat or threats of immediate and severe physical pain • Mock executions • Rape or sexual abuse • Extended disruption of food and sleep • Extended solitary confinement • Extended sensory deprivation • Extended sensory disruption or overload • Use of hallucinogenic or other mentally disruptive drugs • Threats against family members • Secret detention or "disappearances" of a loved one • Forced observance, by hearing or watching, of the mental and/or physical torture or murder of another • Forcible participation in the mental or physical torture of others

Severe mental trauma or harm means a level of fear or trauma that a person would not voluntarily accept for himself or herself, or which results in prolonged mental suffering afterwards.

Note: There are countless ways to inflict mental trauma or harm. Some methods may appear innocuous, but are in fact devastating. Under this definition, an action that causes only a momentary "startle" effect, such as a person jumping from behind a door and saying "boo" would not alone constitute mental torture. It might, however, if done in connection with threats of serious physical harm or extended sleep deprivation.

Cruel and Degrading Treatment

Cruel and degrading treatment is any action or technique, or combination thereof, that would degrade or humiliate a human being, or result in personal misery. This category may include mental and physical abuse that would not quite amount to torture as defined above.

Note: The original intent of the international community in formulating this category after World War II was to prevent a repetition of certain abuses that had occurred during and following the war. It was intended, for example, to prevent a prisoner from being dragged through the streets in front of jeering, spitting mobs, or from shaving a woman's head in public punishment. Today this category should include forcing a devout Muslim man to wear a woman's underpants on his head, or depriving a prisoner of bathing and toilet privileges. Many of these actions, if repeated or prolonged, or combined with other actions could constitute mental or physical torture.

Evaluating Specific Techniques

 Copyrighted material 49 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Water-Boarding: This technique is described by the CIA as immersing the prisoner in water until "he thinks he is going to drown." The reality is far worse. The person is held under water, or has water poured onto his or her face, until he or she, in fact, begins to drown and eventually loses consciousness. In short, this is a slow motion and prolonged mock execution. It is terrifying and physically painful in the extreme. Clearly, it constitutes both mental and physical torture.

Short Shackling: This technique was reported by FBI agents based in Guantánamo. It consists of shackling a prisoner's hands and feet to a bolt in the floor so that he or she is left in this painful position for long periods of time. Such prisoners are denied food, water, and toilet privileges. Blasting and irregular music and other sounds are played for long periods of time, and blinding strobe lights may be used. Temperatures rise and fall. The FBI agents found prisoners unconscious in a pool of their own filth. One had pulled out his hair. This is clearly mental and physical torture combined. The United Nations long ago ruled that precisely this combination of techniques constituted torture in the case of a prisoner held in Israel.

Dog Attacks: This technique was documented in the notorious photographs from Abu Ghraib, but is not new. The dog handler is called in, allows his ferocious dog to try to attack the prisoner. In most cases the dog is pulled back at the last minute. In some cases, the prisoner has been badly bitten. This clearly constitutes mental torture and often physical torture as well.

Stress Positions: This technique consists of holding a person in a very difficult position for an extended length of time. It may be an immediately painful position, such as hanging the person by the arms or legs from a hook in the ceiling, or it may at first glance, seem innocuous, such as making the person stand still with the knees slightly bent, for hours on end. The positions inflicting immediate and severe pain are physical torture. So is the standing for hours. Although many people are on their feet all day long, they are constantly moving. Standing immobilized for extended periods of time causes the person's feet to swell enormously and there is great pain. All of these techniques are physical torture.

"Taps": U.S. soldiers have been taught to give a powerful blow with their knees, or a "tap," to uncooperative prisoners. Again, while this might appear to be a minor disciplinary measure, it is, in fact, physical torture. Mr. Dilawar, (link) a young Afghan who was cleared of any wrongdoing, was given repeated "taps" to the leg that eventually resulted in his death. The American forensic physician reported that his leg was "pulpified" and looked as if it had been hit by a bus. This is physical torture.

Water Pit: The water pit technique consists of placing a prisoner in a pit of water so deep that he or she must hold onto overhead bars to keep from drowning. This is clearly mental and physical torture.

Sensory Deprivation: Many of the prisoners have had their eyes covered with goggles and have literally been swaddled in duct tape, blindfolded and/or placed in tiny, darkened empty cells for

 Copyrighted material 50 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. long periods of time. Medical research has long established that intensive sensory deprivation is devastating to the human psyche and leaves long-term harmful effects. Again, this is clearly mental torture.

Solitary Confinement: TASSC considers solitary confinement of more than three days to constitute mental torture. Less than three days may constitute torture for many people, if combined with other techniques.

Disruption of Sleep and Meals: This always constitutes, at a minimum, cruel and degrading treatment. Depending on the age and health of the prisoner, the duration of the disruption, and the other techniques being used in this combination, in most cases this will also constitute mental and/or physical torture.

Sexual Abuse and Humiliation: Rape, of course, will always constitute physical and mental torture. Other sexual abuse, such as unwanted touching, forced nudity, and forced masturbation is always, at the very least, cruel and degrading. Sexual abuse and humiliation fall within the definition of mental torture.

Disappearances and "Ghost Prisoners": Holding any person prisoner in secret detention without access to families, lawyers or the International Red Cross (Link) constitutes mental torture both for the prisoners, their families and loved ones. Under such conditions, other forms of mental and physical torture become almost inevitable. Secrecy always results in the abuse of power.

UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION AGAINST TORTURE, 1984

Article I: For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

THE WORLD MEDICAL ASSOCIATION

The World Medical Association, an international organization that governs professional standards and ethics for physicians, defines torture as: "the deliberate, systematic or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons acting alone or on the orders of any authority, to force another person to yield information, to make a confession, or for any other reason."

 Copyrighted material 51 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. INTER-AMERICAN CONVENTION TO PREVENT AND PUNISH TORTURE (Adopted at Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, on December 9, 1985, at the fifteenth regular session of the General Assembly)

Article 2: For the purposes of this Convention, torture shall be understood to be any act intentionally performed whereby physical or mental pain or suffering is inflicted on a person for purposes of criminal investigation, as a means of intimidation, as personal punishment, as a preventive measure, as a penalty, or for any other purpose. Torture shall also be understood to be the use of methods upon a person intended to obliterate the personality of the victim or to diminish his physical or mental capacities, even if they do not cause physical pain or mental anguish. The concept of torture shall not include physical or mental pain or suffering that is inherent in or solely the consequence of lawful measures, provided that they do not include the performance of the acts or use of the methods referred to in this article.

INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW (IHL)

International Humanitarian Law (IHL) differs somewhat from this definition in not requiring the involvement of a person acting in an official capacity as a condition for an act intended to inflict severe pain or suffering to be defined as torture. The ICRC uses the broad term "ill-treatment" to cover both torture and other methods of abuse prohibited by international law, including inhuman, cruel, humiliating, and degrading treatment, outrages upon personal dignity and physical or moral coercion. The legal difference between torture and other forms of ill treatment lies in the level of severity of pain or suffering imposed. In addition, torture requires the existence of a specific purpose behind the act--to obtain information, for example. The various terms used to refer to different forms of ill treatment or infliction of pain can be explained as follows:

• Torture: existence of a specific purpose plus intentional infliction of severe suffering or pain;

• Cruel or inhuman treatment: no specific purpose, significant level of suffering or pain inflicted;

• Outrages upon personal dignity: no specific purpose, significant level of humiliation or degradation.

Methods of ill treatment may be both physical and/or psychological in nature and both methods may have physical and psychological effects.

 Copyrighted material 52 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 3 – Reading 3: Human Rights Watch Country Testimonies Torture is widespread. Estimates for 2009 place the number of countries that practice torture at 138. Read at least one of the following four accounts of torture in India, Jordan, DR Congo or Iran. These are available online at www.hrw.org.

India: Hold Torturers Accountable Compensation to Victims Only a Partial Solution, November 17, 2008

(New York, November 17, 2008) – The Andhra Pradesh state government should prosecute police officials responsible for the torture of 21 Muslims after a series of bomb blasts in Hyderabad in May and August 2007, Human Rights Watch said today.

After the blasts, the authorities detained approximately 100 Muslims for questioning. Of those later charged, 21 were released. On November 13, the Andhra Pradesh government admitted that the 21 had been tortured and announced compensation of US$600 each. It also promised additional financial assistance through government loans. But the state government has not initiated criminal proceedings against any police officers who ordered or carried out the torture.

“Acknowledging torture and providing compensation is a good first step,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, senior South Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “But the government has to prosecute those responsible so that those who use torture will not get away with it.”

On May 18, 2007, at least nine people were killed when a bomb exploded outside Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid, where thousands had gathered for Friday prayers. On August 25, 2007, nearly 50 people died and scores were injured in two separate blasts in Hyderabad. There were arrests after each bombing.

The Hyderabad police initially suspected Islamist extremists of carrying out the attacks. Of those detained for questioning, most were released after a few days or weeks in custody.

Many of those picked up on suspicion of being linked to the blasts were illegally detained. The Criminal Procedure Code and the Indian Constitution require that detainees be produced in court within 24 hours. Some of those detained said they were brought before the magistrate only after five to 10 days.

Families were not notified of the detention, and were not informed of the whereabouts of their relatives even when they made inquiries at police stations or lodged missing person complaints. In some cases, detainees said, they were taken for interrogation to unknown locations instead of a police station.

“For a period of time, these detainees were effectively ‘disappeared’ persons,” said Ganguly. “No one knew if they were dead or alive.”

 Copyrighted material 53 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Some detainees said they were beaten during interrogation, and others said they were subjected to so-called “third degree” methods that amounted to torture. The detainees were stripped, hung upside down, severely beaten, subjected to electric shocks, and otherwise ill-treated. They were also threatened with the torture of their relatives, particularly female relatives.

In 2007, the Andhra Pradesh Minorities Commission investigated the allegations. After interviewing those charged while they were still in jail awaiting trial, it reported that their injuries were “not self inflicted, these obviously arose during police custody – custodial atrocities on young detainees all minority persons stand proved,” and added that the fact that the detainees were not brought before magistrates within 24 hours “shows how the system has failed to protect the rights of detainees.” The commission said that the detainees bore scars from violence, including some who showed signs of electric shocks.

In February 2008, relatives of victims and human rights defenders told a visiting team of investigators from the National Commission for Minorities about the illegal detention and torture of the young Muslims during the bomb blast investigations. In its report, the commission noted that it had received complaints that some were detained illegally and subjected to physical and mental torture, and that no lawyers were present during interrogation.

The team also noted that suspects said that they were not brought before a magistrate within the required 24 hours, and instead that the arrest dates were altered to indicate that officials had complied with the law. In its report, the commission expressed concern that police denied all accusations of torture, and noted that “action should be taken against those who failed to carry out their responsibilities within the framework of law and established procedures.”

To date, no member of the state police involved in the cases has been charged with committing human rights violations. The Andhra Pradesh minister for minorities’ welfare, Mohammad Shabbir Ali, who announced the compensation awards to the victims, told the Indian Express on November 13 that he does not want to blame the police because they “do their work based on information, and sometimes information can be wrong.”

“Over and over again, the police response to terrible bombings has been to round up people, simply because they happen to be Muslim, and to torture them in the hope of securing information or confessions,” said Ganguly. “This stigmatizes and alienates an entire community and makes counterterrorism efforts even more difficult. The police have a long way to go before they can build public trust that they are capable of addressing the scourge of terrorism.”

Jordan: Torture in Prisons Routine and Widespread Reforms Fail to Tackle Abuse, Impunity Persists, October 8, 2008

(Amman, October 8, 2008) - Jordan should end routine and widespread torture in its prisons, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. Human Rights Watch called on the government to overhaul mechanisms for investigating, disciplining and prosecuting abusers, and

 Copyrighted material 54 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. in particular to transfer prosecutor's investigations into prison abuse from police to civilian prosecutors.

The 95-page report, "Torture and Impunity in Jordan's Prisons: Reforms Fail to Tackle Widespread Abuse," documents credible allegations of ill-treatment, often amounting to torture, from 66 out of 110 prisoners interviewed at random in 2007 and 2008, and in each of the seven of Jordan's 10 prisons visited. Human Rights Watch's evidence suggests that five prison directors personally participated in torturing detainees.

"Torture in Jordan's prison system is widespread even two years after King Abdullah called for reforms to stop it once and for all," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "The mechanisms for preventing torture by holding torturers accountable are simply not working."

The most common forms of torture include beatings with cables and sticks and the suspension by the wrists from metal grates for hours at a time, during which guards flog a defenseless prisoner. Prison guards also torture prisoners for perceived infractions of prison rules. Human Rights Watch found evidence that at times Islamists accused or convicted of crimes against national security (Tanzimat) were punished en masse.

Prison officials say beatings and other ill-treatment are isolated incidents and that a prison reform program initiated in 2006 is improving prison conditions and accountability for abuse. Human Rights Watch's research shows that while the reform program may well be improving the chief areas of its focus - health services, overcrowding, visitation, and recreation facilities - impunity for physical abuse remains the norm.

In October 2007, an amendment to the Penal Code made torture a crime for the first time, and in early 2008, the Public Security Directorate (PSD) assigned prosecutors to investigate abuses at seven prisons. But to date there have been no prosecutions under that law.

In February 2008, the PSD allowed the National Center for Human Rights to set up an office inside Swaqa prison. However, critical reporting about a prison riot there in April 2008 led the PSD to stop its cooperation with the center.

"Jordan has made some attempts to address the problem of torture in prison, but the bottom line is that the measures have been insufficient, and torture persists as a consequence," Whitson said.

Two separate incidents involving the torture and abuse of large groups of detainees highlight failures in accountability. Despite extensive evidence that guards in Juwaida and Swaqa prisons tortured Islamist prisoners following a successful escape by two Islamist prisoners from Juwaida in June 2007, the Jordanian authorities failed to launch any investigation. In a third incident, the PSD, which directs security agencies including the prison service, did launch an extensive

 Copyrighted material 55 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. investigation into events surrounding the prison riot and fire on April 14, 2008 at Muwaqqar prison that left three prisoners dead. The investigators did not prosecute a guard who prisoners alleged had tortured some of them just prior to the fire, included some who died in it. An independent non-judicial investigation by the National Center for Human Rights found ill- treatment at the heart of the prison riot. Despite this evidence, the investigation concluded that no official had done anything wrong.

Part of the problem lies in the authority of prison officials to discipline internally, which is used as a way of avoiding formal prosecution of torturers. For example, in 2007, while the PSD investigated 19 allegations of torture across Jordan, referring six to court for prosecution, the directors of three prisons, Muwaqqar, Qafqafa, and Swaqa, told Human Rights Watch that they had internally disciplined six guards for abuse without involving the PSD. Prison directors in Jordan have authority to settle abuse cases as "misdemeanors," including ill-treatment, without resorting to the Police Court.

"The PSD's reluctance to prosecute and punish torturers within its ranks stems from a misguided desire to preserve the reputation of the prison service," Whitson said. "Instead, protecting guards who torture from prosecution tarnishes the image of the entire profession, including those guards who fulfill their duties without resorting to torture and abuse of prisoners."

Furthermore, Human Rights Watch pointed out that it is police prosecutors and police judges who are responsible for investigating, prosecuting and trying their fellow officers for prison abuses, including torture, in the Police Court. Grievances officials, who investigate prison abuses, referred cases for prosecutions only in a small number of cases where there was overwhelming evidence.

Even where the government has prosecuted some egregious cases of torture, the Police Court's verdicts have been flawed. In one case, the Police Court sentenced former Swaqa prison director Majid al-Rawashda to a fine of JOD 120 (around US$180) for ordering and participating in the beating of 70 prisoners in August 2007. The court found 12 other guards who had participated in the beatings not guilty because they were "following orders." The court sentenced prison guards who had beaten Firas Zaidan to death in Aqaba prison in May 2007 to two-and-a-half years in prison. The court also reduced to two-and-a-half years the sentence of guards who had beaten Abdullah Mashaqba to death in Juwaida prison in 2004 because they were "in the prime of their youth."

"The police and prison service cannot credibly investigate itself," said Whitson. "Civilian prosecutors and judges should take over all investigations of prison abuse to end impunity for torturers and begin to provide redress for victims of torture."

Since beginning its prison reform program in 2006, Jordan has sought international advice on improving prison conditions. The New York-based Kerik Group provided training and advised on

 Copyrighted material 56 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. prison management, equipment, and new construction, including a super-maximum security prison with 240 solitary confinement-only cells to be opened in late 2008. Currently, Austria's Ministry of Justice is in an EU-sponsored "twinning project" with the PSD to reform the penitentiary system.

Human Rights Watch calls on Jordan's donors to address the widespread torture, and to condition part of their assistance on the establishment of independent investigation and prosecution mechanisms.

DR Congo: President Brutally Represses Opposition Two Years Since Elections, 500 Dead, 1,000 Detained, and Many Tortured, November 25, 2008

(Kinshasa, November 25, 2008) - Congolese state security forces have killed an estimated 500 people and detained about 1,000 more, many of whom have been tortured, in the two years since elections that were meant to bring democracy, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The brutal repression against perceived opponents began during the 2006 elections that carried President Joseph Kabila to power, and has continued to the present.

The 96-page report, “‘We Will Crush You': The Restriction of Political Space in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” documents the Kabila government's use of violence and intimidation to eliminate political opponents. Human Rights Watch found that Kabila himself set the tone and direction by giving orders to "crush" or "neutralize" the "enemies of democracy," implying it was acceptable to use unlawful force against them.

"While everyone focuses on the violence in eastern Congo, government abuses against political opponents attract little attention," said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher in the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. "Efforts to build a democratic Congo are being stifled not just by rebellion but also by the Kabila government's repression."

On the second anniversary of Kabila's November 28, 2006 election victory, the Congo remains impoverished and in conflict. Those in western Congo who might challenge government policies face brutal repression, while in the east the armed conflict with renegade general Laurent Nkunda's forces has resulted in horrific atrocities by all sides.

The report is based on months of extensive field research including interviews with more than 250 victims, witnesses, and officials. Human Rights Watch documented how Kabila's subordinates worked through several state security forces - including the paramilitary Republican Guards, a "secret commission," the special Simba battalion of the police, and the intelligence services - to crack down on perceived opponents in the capital Kinshasa and in Bas Congo province.

Following the 2006 elections, which were largely financed by international donors, foreign governments focused on winning favor with Kabila's new government and kept silent about

 Copyrighted material 57 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. human rights abuses and the government's increasingly repressive rule. United Nations reports documenting government involvement in politically motivated crimes were deliberately buried or published too late to have any significant impact on events, Human Rights Watch found.

The report says that state agents particularly targeted persons from Equateur province and others thought to support the defeated presidential candidate, Jean-Pierre Bemba, as well as adherents of Bundu Dia Kongo (BDK), a political-religious group based in Bas Congo that promotes greater provincial autonomy and had considerable support in legislative elections.

At least 500 perceived opponents of the government were deliberately killed or summarily executed. In some of the most violent episodes, state agents tried to cover up the crimes by dumping bodies in the Congo River or by secretly burying them in mass graves. Government officials blocked efforts to investigate by UN human rights staff, Congolese and international human rights monitors, and family members of victims.

The detentions came in waves of arrests during the past two years. Detainees and former detainees described torture, including beatings, whippings, mock executions, and the use of electric batons on their genitals and other parts of their bodies. Some were kept chained for days or weeks and many were forced to sign confessions saying they had been involved in coup plots against Kabila.

In mid-October 2008, state agents arbitrarily arrested at least 20 people in Kinshasa, the majority from Equateur province, including a woman and her 3-month-old baby. Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 200 people detained in politically related cases continue to be held without trial in prisons in Bas Congo and Kinshasa.

Armed groups associated with Bemba and BDK adherents also were responsible for killing state agents and ordinary people, including incidents in Bas Congo in February 2007 and in Kinshasa in March 2007. In these cases, the police and army had a duty to restore order, but often did so with excessive force.

Congolese officials have refused to acknowledge abuses committed by state agents despite inquiries by the National Assembly, the media, and other citizens or groups. The officials claimed that the victims were plotting coup attempts or otherwise threatening state authority, but they provided no convincing evidence of such charges and brought only a handful of cases to court.

Journalists who were linked to the political opposition or who protested abuses were threatened, arbitrarily arrested, and in some cases tortured by government agents. The government closed down radio stations and television networks that were linked to the opposition or broadcast their views. Several of these stations were later permitted to operate again.

The National Assembly has tried to scrutinize the conduct of the government. Opposition members sometimes boycotted sessions in protest of the abuses, with some limited impact.

 Copyrighted material 58 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. However, these efforts have not been enough to stop the killings or the wide-scale arbitrary arrests.

Human Rights Watch called on the government to establish a high-level task force under the authority of the Ministry of Justice with input from human rights experts to document the abuses by state agents and release those held illegally. It also called on Congo's National Assembly to conduct a public inquiry into the abuses by state security agents and to prosecute those responsible.

"The Congolese people deserve a government which will uphold their democratic rights, not one that represses opponents," said Van Woudenberg. "An important first step would be to bring to justice those officials responsible for killings and torture."

Selected accounts from the report:

"As they beat me with sticks and whips, the soldiers repeatedly shouted, ‘We will crush you! We will crush you!' Then they threatened to kill me and others who opposed Kabila." - A political party activist detained and tortured in Kinshasa in March 2007 by President Kabila's Republican Guards.

"At 3 in the morning seven Republican Guards came into the prison. They took 10 of the prisoners, tied their hands, blindfolded them, and taped pieces of cardboard over their mouths so they couldn't scream. The captain who did this said he had received orders. He said he would drink the blood of Equateurians that night. They took them away.... I knew one of the guards and asked what had happened. He said the others had been taken to the [Congo] river near Kinsuka and killed." - A Congolese army officer from the Ngwaka ethnic group, arrested by the Republican Guard on March 23, 2007 and detained at Camp Tshatshi.

"They started to hit me. They stripped off my clothes. They took four sets of handcuffs and tied my hands behind me and then to my feet. I was thrown on the ground in this position... They gave me electric shocks all over my body. They put the electric baton in my anus and on my genitals.... I cried so much that I could hardly see any more. I shouted I would sign whatever they wanted me to." - A former detainee held at Kin-Mazière prison on the orders of the "secret commission."

"Kabila took a decision to beat-up on Bemba and to teach him a lesson." - A member of Kabila's inner circle just before violence in Kinshasa in August 2006 following the inconclusive first election round.

"We all saw this coming, but again we did not do enough to avert the crisis." - A European military advisor with close links to the Congolese army about the March 2007 violence in Kinshasa that left hundreds dead.

 Copyrighted material 59 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. "You JED who do you think you are? If you don't agree with the regime, go into exile and wait until your champion takes power. If you don't leave we'll help to shut you up for good. We won't miss. Too much is too much. You have been warned." - A threat received by the local organization Journalists in Danger (JED) in June 2007 after they raised concerns about repression against members of the media.

Iran: Four Journalists Sentenced to Prison, Floggings Four Years After Arrests, No Public Investigation of Abuse Allegations, February 10, 2009

Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East division at Human Rights Watch (New York) - The sentencing of four Tehran bloggers by Iran's Judiciary Court on February 3, 2009, to prison terms, fines and flogging, despite the head of the judiciary's admission that they had been coerced into confessing, violates their right to a fair trial, Human Rights Watch and the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said today. The four said shortly after their arrest in 2004 that they had been tortured during interrogation, but there has been no public investigation into these allegations despite a high-level promise to do so.

Authorities arrested Omid Memarian, Roozbeh Mirebrahimi, Shahram Rafizadeh, and Javad Gholamtamimi in September and October 2004, and detained them without charge. The four said that they were subjected in detention to physical and psychological abuse, as well as prolonged periods of solitary confinement in a secret detention center without access to counsel or family. Three of the men subsequently described the abuse at a meeting with Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the head of the judiciary. On April 20, 2005, a judiciary spokesman said that an official investigation confirmed that their confessions had been coerced. "The interrogators and prosecutors committed a series of negligent and careless acts in this case that led to the abuse of the detainees' words and writings in producing confession letters," the spokesman said.

"These sentences are shocking, given that the head of the judiciary himself admitted the evidence had been obtained by coercion" said Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East division at Human Rights Watch. "The judges should be investigating and prosecuting abusers, not their victims."

Human Rights Watch and the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran called on the Tehran Appeals Court to overturn the sentences, and on the government to investigate the torture claims.

The four journalists were released on bail in late 2004. Memarian, Mirebrahimi, and Rafizadeh subsequently left Iran and are living abroad. Gholamtamimi resides in Iran.

Judiciary authorities informed lawyers for the four on February 4 that Branch 1059 of Tehran's Judiciary Court sentenced them each to prison terms of up to three years and three months, and to be flogged. Memarian was also fined 500,000 tomans (US$520). The known charges against them include "participating in the establishment of illegal organizations," "membership in illegal

 Copyrighted material 60 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. organizations," "propaganda against the state," "disseminating lies," and "disturbing public order." Gholamtamimi was also charged with treason.

The lawyers for the four include the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi, who told Human Rights Watch and the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran that they would "definitely appeal" the sentences.

Memarian, Mirebrahimi, and Rafizadeh met with Ayatollah Shahroudi on January 10, 2005, and described physical and psychological torture at the hands of a specific interrogator, whom they said identified himself as "Keshavarz" (farmer). They said the magistrate in charge was known as "Mehdipour." The apparent purpose of the abuse was to extract confessions that implicate reformist politicians and civil society activists in activities such as spying and violating national security laws (http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2004/12/19/iran-judiciary-uses-coercion-cover-torture ). According to the three men, both the interrogator and the magistrate repeatedly delivered messages and threats to the detainees on behalf of the chief prosecutor of Tehran. Shahroudi's spokesman announced on January 12, 2005 that, "Shahroudi has issued a special order to investigate and probe these [detentions]. If any of the detainees' allegations, at any level, are true then we will prosecute the violators." To date, the government has not made the full findings of any investigation public, nor has it announced any penalties or prosecution for the abuse.

"Either the Iranian judges are not listening to Ayatollah Shahroudi, or he has reneged on his promise to investigate the torturers and not the bloggers," said Hadi Ghaemi, coordinator of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. "These brave journalists stood up for their rights. It's high time the Iranian judiciary stood up for justice."

Human Rights Watch and the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran have documented extensive patterns of forced confessions, arbitrary detentions, and prison torture against opposition political activists, journalists, and anyone perceived as a critic.

 Copyrighted material 61 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. In the Footsteps of the Crucified

SESSION FOUR: Following Jesus, our Tortured Brother: The Blindfold’s Eyes

Note to Participants

Your reading for this session • Reading 1 – “Accounting for Torture” by Maryann Cusimano Love, America Magazine (March 30 – April 6), permission granted by author and America Magazine • Reading 2 – “Way of Torture, Way of the Cross” from Churches’ Center for Theology and Public Policy. • Reading 3 – “Injecting Hope into the Conversation” from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops • Reading 4 – “Testimonies from Human Rights Defenders Maria Julia Hernandez and Bishop Gerardi” from Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition. Read one of two accounts. • Reading 5 – The Blindfold’s Eyes, Chapters 11-13

Goals of the Session • To take hope in the stories of survivors who overcame torture against extreme odds and lived to bear witness to the dignity of every human being. • To strengthen our understanding of Catholic social teaching and its arguments against torture. • To deepen our faith by looking at the torture and crucifixion that Jesus endured as a sign of human sinfulness and God’s resistance to violence and overcoming of death.

Session Four Outline and Notes

 Copyrighted material 62 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA.

Welcome and Opening Meditation Weekly Theme Discussion Theme: Following Jesus Our Tortured Brother

Guidepost questions for discussion, journaling and reflection

Catholic social teaching opposes the use of torture, without exceptions, in the treatment of prisoners or of persons considered to be enemies. In the Catholic Church’s eyes, torture is prohibited on several grounds: • Torture violates a human person’s God-given dignity. Every person bears the image of God. • The end does not justify the means; torture is intrinsically evil, and can never be justified, even for a moral end. • Torture violates international human rights and humanitarian law (the laws of war). Consider each of these three grounds. What is the value that Catholic social teaching seeks to protect behind each of the three grounds? What happens if we disregard this teaching?

Way of Torture, Way of the Cross describes the torture that Jesus endured. Study it for a moment. The torture and crucifixion of Jesus and the torture and abuse of many Catholic saints down through history are never forgotten by the Church. • What do we learn from the interrogation, flogging, and crucifixion of Jesus? How do the torture of Jesus and many Catholic saints remind us of our nation’s response to threatening developments in the world today? • Some think that a sense of desperation began to influence people’s thinking in the period after 9-11. What do you think?

The Church always wants to contribute to the world in positive ways and to help cast light on the most pressing issues of the times. That is why the Church and her people enter into the public discussion of an issue such as torture. • What constructive contribution do you think the Christian community or its individual members can make to the conversation about key issues our nation faces, such as its response to terrorism?

Discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes Again, two volunteers will facilitate the discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes. They will use the following as starting points for the session discussion, but as always they can go in a different direction based on their own experiences and that of the group up to this point. They will not be able to cover all of these questions, but participants are to use them for their own reflection and journaling this week.

Session 4: Chapters 11-13 “Between the hammer strokes, the heart survives...”

 Copyrighted material 63 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. 1. Investigative journalist Allan Nairn writes: “Over the years people like you have tried to publicize what is happening in Guatemala and to change the criminal complicity of the U.S. government in the mass killing and torture there.” (p. 180) How did Nairn’s testimony empower Dianna to speak out? How is the U.S. complicit in torture today? What is our responsibility? 2. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Comment on this Gospel saying in light of Dianna’s journey. 3. At the conclusion of a 12 year civil war that cost 75,000 lives, the church in El Salvador opposed a government amnesty and supported a U.N. “Truth Commission,” saying that true reconciliation must be based on a foundation of truth and justice. What do you think?

Break

Video and Video Discussion

Announcements

Closing Prayer and Meditation

Jesus, Our Tortured Brother, by Dianna Ortiz, OSU

In this world, so many are forced to walk your path today: The suffering and the pain, the humiliation and the betrayal and abandonment, For those with power, the Romans of today, continue to condemn others to modern crosses. You said that what was done to the least of these was done to you and so each day, you are tortured anew. Jesus, Our Guardian of the Wounded and Tortured, bid us to look into the secret prisons – the unmarked graves – the hearts and minds of torture survivors, bid us to wipe the tears of the families of those whose decapitated bodies were cast into the open sea, bid us to embrace the open wounds of the tortured. Jesus, Guiding Spirit, teach us to be in solidarity with those who hang from these crosses, call out to those who torture, “Know the evil you have done and repent.” Call out to the rest of us, “What meaning does love have if you allow torture to continue unopposed?” In the name of all the tortured of the world, give us the strength, give us the courage, give us the will to bring this horror to an end, in the name of love, justice, and the God of us all. Amen.  Copyrighted material 64 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Reading for Session Four

Responding to Sr. Dianna Ortiz’s Story: The Blindfold’s Eyes

Session 4 – Reading 1: “Accounting for Torture: What are our moral obligations as disciples of a tortured God?” By Maryann Cusimano Love, professor of international relations at The Catholic University of America. The following article appeared in the March 30, 2009 edition of America Magazine.

What does it mean to worship a tortured God? Many do not think of the crucifixion in the context of torture, but Christ was in fact tortured – in what would today be considered violations of the Geneva Conventions and Conventions on Torture. God became not just any human, but a person who was methodically tortured, stripped of his clothing, beaten by guards and forced into stress positions by the wood of the cross. Many of the methods used to torture Jesus were also used by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and military bases in Guantanamo and Afghanistan.

The fact that Catholics worship a tortured God is not merely an academic point. Many other Christian communities do not use images of the crucifix, as they feel this memorializes Christ’s suffering and death rather than his resurrection. Over the years my students at The Catholic University of America and I have been questioned about this by Baptists while on service trips. Displaying a crucifix “is like wearing an electric chair around your neck,” one preacher told me.

Being disciples of a tortured God means that we must never be torturers, but must see in the image of Christ our solidarity with the powerless and marginalized, the victims of torture. We must see the fundamental dignity of human life, the face of God, even in suspected enemies, and treat them accordingly.

But what we remember at Sunday Mass and in Lenten Stations of the Cross we seem to forget in the public sphere. General Antonio Taguba, a lifelong Catholic and two-star army general, found in his Abu Ghraib investigation that U.S. forces, C.I.A. operatives and military contractors tortured prisoners by waterboarding, sodomy using sticks, stripping and beating them, sometimes to death. These were not the actions of “a few bad apples,” according to documents recently made public, but the result of policies written by President George W. Bush’s lawyers and approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Bush in an irregular process that avoided the military JAG lawyers (who were against such methods).

President Barack Obama issued executive orders to stop these practices, close Guantanamo and return to the previous U.S. practice of abiding by the Geneva and Torture Conventions. (Before the Bush administration, U.S. soldiers found waterboarding were court-martialed). Is this enough? With an agenda already crowded by economic meltdown and two wars, there is little appetite for “looking backward” into these issues.

 Copyrighted material 65 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. But we may have to. U.S. and international laws commit us to investigate and prosecute such violations. Senior U.S. officials have admitted the practice of torture. If we do not pursue an investigation, other countries or the International Criminal Court will do so. There are practical reasons for an investigation: to restore U.S. legitimacy, credibility and reputation internationally; to rebuild the military’s institutional reputation and functioning; and to understand how the law was perverted and ignored, in order to prevent this from happening again.

U.S. torture practices have hit home. My sister, Theresa Cusimano, Sr. Diane Pinchot, the Rev. Luis Barrios, and others are currently in federal prison for participating in the peaceful annual protest of U.S. torture training at the School of the Americas that resulted in the suffering and murder of many in Latin America, including Jesuit priests. The call to Theresa’s conscience came from the photos of Abu Ghraib and the witness of a torture victim and a Jesuit colleague at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. They advocate signing the online petition to President Obama to close the facility at Fort Benning, Georgia, because of its history and urge the passage of legislation to conduct an investigation.

General Taguba, now retired, also argues for accountability in remarks prepared for a conference at C.U.A. on March 19. General Taguba notes: “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account. [Those tortured] deserve justice… And so do the American people.”

What are our moral obligations as disciples of a tortured God? We must stand in solidarity with torture victims and ensure that our country will never go down this path again.

 Copyrighted material 66 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 4 – Reading 2, “Way of Torture, Way of the Cross: A Bible Study for Lent and Other Occasions Available from The Churches” Center for Theology and Public Policy (www.cctpp.org)

1. Apprehended under cover of darkness by an armed group (John 18.3,12) So Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees, and they came there with lanterns and torches and Weapons….So the soldiers, their officer, and the Jewish police arrested Jesus and bound him. 2. Deprived of sleep (Luke 22.45, 54, 66, and 23.1) When he got up from prayer, he came to his disciples and found them sleeping….Then they seized him and led him away, bringing him into the high priest’s house….When day came, the assembly of the elders of the people, both chief priests and scribes, gathered together, and they brought him to their council….Then the assembly rose as a body and brought Jesus before Pilate. 3. Blindfolded and beaten (Luke 22.63-65) Now the men who were holding Jesus began to mock him and beat him; they also blindfolded him and kept asking him, “Prophesy! Who was it that struck you?” They kept heaping many other insults on him. 4. Subjected to multiple interrogations within a few hours (Luke 22.66, 23.1, 7, 9, and 11) …the assembly of the elders of the people, both chief priests and scribes, gathered together, and they brought him to their council….Then the assembly rose as a body and brought Jesus to Pilate….[Pilate] sent him off to Herod ….[Herod] questioned him at some length….[Herod] sent him back to Pilate. 5. Abused, humiliated, and degraded by military personnel (Matt 27:28-31) Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole cohort around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him; and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on his head. They put a reed in his right hand and knelt before him and mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” They spat on him, and took the reed and struck him on the head. 6. Judged and sentenced to death under unusual legal circumstances (Luke 23.13- 15) Pilate then called together the chief priests, the leaders, and the people, and said to them, “You brought me this man as one who was perverting the people; and here I have examined him in your presence and have not found this man guilty of any of your charges against him. Neither has Herod, for he sent him back to us. Indeed, he has done nothing to deserve death.” 7. Flogged (Matt 27.26) So [Pilate] released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified. 8. Publicly humiliated (Mark 15.29-32) Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “Aha! You would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!” In the same way the chief priests, along with the scribes, were also mocking him amongthemselves….Those who were crucified with him also taunted him.

 Copyrighted material 67 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 4 – Reading 3: “Injecting Hope into the Conversation” The Story of Cardinal Van Thuan: Making Hope Resound, from Torture is a Moral Issue: A Catholic Study Guide, United States Catholic Conference of Bishops

“A Christian is a living Credo, continuing Jesus’ work here on earth and making the song of hope resound in the midst of the world’s trials.”

Those words were written by Cardinal Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan when he was imprisoned by communist authorities in Vietnam. They are found in his book, Prayers of Hope, Words of Courage.

What could make the song of hope resound in the world today?

In his 2007 encyclical on hope, titled Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI recalled the Vietnamese cardinal, who died in September 2002. The pope wrote, “The late Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, a prisoner for 13 years, nine of them spent in solitary confinement, has left us a precious little book, ‘Prayers of Hope.’ During 13 years in jail, in a situation of seemingly utter hopelessness, the fact that he could listen and speak to God became for him an increasing power of hope, which enabled him after his release to become for people all over the world a witness to hope” (No. 32).

Cardinal Van Thuan, born in 1928, was jailed by Vietnam's communist regime in 1975 after becoming archbishop of Saigon, later renamed Ho Chi Minh City. He never was tried or sentenced; he spent thirteen years in solitary confinement. In 1988 he was released, but communist authorities would not allow him to function as archbishop. In 1991 he fled to Rome, after a Vietnamese government official “suggested” he leave. In Rome he went on to head the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

Cardinal Van Thuan long wore a pectoral cross and chain he’d constructed in prison from wood and electrical wire, and hidden from his guards. Speaking in Los Angeles in 2000, he said he wore the cross and chain “not because they are reminders of prison, but because they indicate my profound conviction, a constant reference point for me: Only Christian love can change hearts; neither weapons, nor threats nor the media can do so."

A cautionary note related to hope—to its loss, that is—is found in Pope Benedict’s encyclical on hope. He said, “Our daily efforts in pursuing our own lives and in working for the world's future either tire us or turn into fanaticism unless we are enlightened by the radiance of the great hope that cannot be destroyed even by small-scale failures or by a breakdown in matters of historic importance. If we cannot hope for more than is effectively attainable at any given time or more than is promised by political or economic authorities, our lives will soon be without hope” (No. 35).

 Copyrighted material 68 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. People who have hope “live differently,” Pope Benedict wrote.

“How in our fearful times can we remain hopeful?” That question was posed in 2001 by Cardinal Godfried Danneels. It is a crucial question, he proposed, because "hope is not located somewhere at the edge of human existence: it is its heart. If it is hit, the person dies." Cardinal Danneels, Archbishop of Mechelin-Brussels, Belgium, spoke about this at Jesuit-run John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio, shortly after the attacks of 9-11.

The cardinal asked, “May we still hope?” There is, he observed, “so much war and violence, genocide, unemployment, crime and terrorism.” Thus, “a sort of existential angst hangs in the air,” and “humankind wishes to fight back.” But “do we always choose the right weapon?” The cardinal, responding to his own question, said, “Often we become cold, businesslike, cynical or even indifferent. The real solution lies elsewhere. It is hope.”

How important is hope? Living by hope and conveying hope to others is of the essence, Pope Benedict XVI proposed when he visited the United States April 15-20, 2008. He called upon seminarians and young people at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y., “to invite others, especially the vulnerable and the innocent, to join you along the way of goodness and hope.”

The pope spoke powerfully at St. Joseph’s about what happens when people encounter “mind-sets which stifle hope” and situations in which respect for human rights is lacking. Recalling his youth in Nazi Germany, he said,

“My own years as a teenager were marred by a sinister regime that thought it had all the answers; its influence grew—infiltrating schools and civic bodies, as well as politics and even religion—before it was fully recognized for the monster it was. It banished God and thus became impervious to anything true and good.”

Does “the power to destroy” remain in the world today? Yes, Pope Benedict said. “To pretend otherwise would be to fool ourselves. Yet it never triumphs; it is defeated. This,” he said, “is the essence of the hope that defines us as Christians.”

With that in mind, the pope took care to note that when the whole Church, in its great, annual Easter Vigil liturgy, cries out to God for our world, it is not a cry “from despair or fear,” but a cry “with hope-filled confidence.” The Church cries out: “Dispel the darkness of our heart! Dispel the darkness of our minds!”

Is the virtue of hope an important factor in strategies for dealing with terrorists? How do you think that a strategy developed in an atmosphere dominated by hope would differ from a strategy developed in an atmosphere dominated by fear?

 Copyrighted material 69 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 4 – Reading 4: “Testimonies from Human Rights Defenders Maria Julia Hernandez and Bishop Gerardi” Read at least one of the following two accounts about human rights defenders.

Maria Julia Hernandez: Human Rights Advocate from El Salvador Dies

Eulogy by Eileen Purcell, former Executive Director of the SHARE Foundation, who worked with Maria Julia from 1983 to the present.

Maria Julia Hernandez - sister, human rights advocate, advisor, friend - loved her people, her church, and the body of human rights law that affirmed human dignity and the fundamental right to freedom, life and security of all people.

She stood alongside other giants in Salvadoran history - Archbishop Romero, the Jesuits of the Catholic University, the Mothers of the Disappeared, and above all, the thousands of martyred Salvadorans - demanding an end to the violence of war, poverty and impunity.

Her unwavering faith in the social gospel and a liberating God of love and justice anchored her as she faced generals, presidents, ambassadors, death squads and international courts of law, politics and public opinion. Her ministry became a model, not just for El Salvador but for human rights advocates around the globe, from Latin America to the Middle East.

Enlisted by Archbishop Oscar Romero in the late 1970s to document human rights violations sweeping El Salvador, Maria Julia continued the painstaking and dangerous work after his assassination in 1980. In 1982, Archbishop Rivera y Damas appointed her Executive Director of the San Salvadoran Archdiocesan Tutela Legal.

Housed in the Chancery Offices of the Salvadoran Archdiocese, Tutela Legal became the safe harbor where victims of political and military repression could turn to relate their stories without fear of retribution. Maria Julia and her staff created the space, the expertise and the trust for survivors of massacres, relatives of “the disappeared,” and families of political prisoners to recount their experience and seek legal recourse at a time when the Salvadoran government and Armed Forces along with the United States government denied human rights violations were occurring.

Maria Julia and her staff meticulously documented, dated, and corroborated first hand testimony of war crimes, while at the same time offering compassion and support to the families who turned to her in their grief. She shared her findings in courts of law, before the United States Congress, at the European Union and in the court of public opinion. She met with congressional, religious and community delegations from around the world and painted the picture of systematic state- sponsored terror with the dossier of personal stories of tragedy. She lifted up the tenets of international law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions and called for accountability and an end to impunity.  Copyrighted material 70 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Tutela Legal emerged as one of the most credible and highly respected sources of the lived experience of the Salvadoran people during and after the twelve year war in El Salvador. Its documented accounts and statistical overviews were used by the United Nations Truth Commission, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, the United States Congress, the Organization of American States and the Vatican, among others, to learn the truth of what was taking place in El Salvador. The picture Maria Julia drew was based on impeccable documentation and stood in stark contrast to the account promulgated by the Salvadoran and United States governments, making her a target of death threats and unrelenting political pressure.

Yet she never dwelled on fear for her own life, though she acknowledged the risky business of documenting the people’s experience of torture and murder by governmental, military and paramilitary entities funded and often times trained by the United States. She worried more for her staff than herself and for the communities who had been victimized and the ones left behind. Her weapons: her profound faith, her love of the people, an extraordinary legal mind, and international human rights law, especially the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 1989, when the elite military Atlacatl Battalion broke into the Catholic University and assassinated six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter, Maria Julia was one of the first people to arrive to the crime scene. After praying over the bodies of her brothers and sisters and walking through their rooms and offices which were spattered with blood and littered with shattered glass and melted computers, she picked up the bullet encasements that would later prove the direct role of the Salvadoran military.

Even after the war officially ended, in the early 1990s, Maria Julia fought for the right of the Argentinean forensic team to access El Mozote, the site of a 1981 massacre where more than 800 men, women and children were slaughtered by the Armed Forces. She raised funds from the international community to fund the expedition that ultimately unearthed the remains of the hundreds of victims, which were returned to their loved ones for proper burial, and became part of the body of evidence that she would use to hold the military accountable.

In 1994, Tutela Legal published an extraordinary rendition of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with a prelude by the Archbishop of San Salvador, Arturo Rivera y Damas, in which he wrote,

“Our country has just finished a war that represented the massive violation of human rights. We must not forget the past, rather we must cultivate in our children the culture of life, of sisterhood/brotherhood, of equality, of solidarity seen through the luminous eyes of faith. I believe that this illustrated Manual of Human Rights will be a valuable instrument in … the development of social peace and the construction of a civilization of love.”

 Copyrighted material 71 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Illustrated by nationally acclaimed artist Alfredo Linares, the thin book sought to bring the rich legal tradition of human rights to ordinary Salvadorans. Every page related one of the thirty Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, followed by a brief commentary, a set of reflection questions, and a scriptural text. Alongside the narrative, a colorful portrait of the Salvadoran families captured the essence of the text - the dream of what God’s Kingdom on earth could look like. The Manual was a radical call to love and justice and a creative vehicle for “conscientizacion” through popular education.

In 2000, Maria Julia formed a coalition of religious and community organizations dedicated to erecting a monument to the disappeared and 75,000 victims of the Civil War. Inspired by the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC and by the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, California, she was determined to lift up the memory of the martyrs of El Salvador for future generations. She navigated the coalitional politics, painstakingly raised the monies from private sources by crisscrossing the globe and defeated efforts to derail the project by the right wing.

On March 24, 2005, the twentieth-fifth anniversary of the death of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the black granite memorial inscribed with the names of many who died, was unveiled in Cuscatlan Park in downtown San Salvador. Thousands of Salvadorans joined by hundreds of international delegations visited the wall and read the names of those who died….

Both during and after the war in El Salvador, Maria Julia continued to be in solidarity with struggles for peace and justice around the World. In 1999, she was one of the keynote speakers at the national forum on Jubilee, hosted by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. At the podium she lifted up the importance of worker rights, immigrant rights and the imperative for the Church to be a sign of hope in the struggle for peace and justice.

In her role on the International Board of Directors of Pax Christi, she traveled extensively. I remember her calling me after a trip to Palestine, inviting me to join her in drawing attention to the plight of the Palestinian people, all too reminiscent of her El Salvador. “You must come with me on my next trip to Palestine, Eileen!” she exclaimed in her husky voice. No distance was too great, no challenge too large….

She enjoyed art, visiting the great cathedrals, museums and archives during her trips abroad. They were repositories of the human story. I remember walking through the Tolerance Museum in Los Angeles with her, largely in silence, struck by the enormity of the history.

Later, over a meal, we conspired about how to preserve the stories, how to end impunity of the generals, and, in Maria Julia’s mind how to hold the United States accountable for its indisputable role in fashioning, financing and implementing the reign of terror in El Salvador so that it could never happen again.

 Copyrighted material 72 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Maria Julia was a remarkable woman. She lived the radical imperative of the gospel to “love one another.” She drew strength from her martyred church - who is all of us - which in turn freed her from fear of death to fight for justice with all her might.

She was anchored by her people’s resilience, their struggle and hope and the biblical tradition from which she was born. These stories became her arsenal in fighting for an end to impunity and the fulfillment of a covenant enshrined in her faith tradition and in the principles of international law. She was nourished by international solidarity and never hesitated to nourish us.

As we mark her death and resurrection into new life, may we recommit to carry on her love of life and justice.

Maria Julia Hernandez, Presente!

Remembering Bishop Gerardi, Prophet-Martyr of Guatemala

The following are the words of Bishop Juan Gerardi at the presentation of the Recuperation of the Historic Memory (REHMI) report in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Guatemala City, April 24, 1998. REMHI documented more than two decades of torture, disappearances, assassinations and massacres carried out under successive military dictatorships in Guatemala. Two days after offering these words, Bishop Gerardi was assassinated.

The REMHI project (Catholic Church’s “Recovery of the Historic Memory” Project) is a project of the Human Rights Ministry, which is part of the Social Ministry of the Church. It is a mission of service to people and to society.

When confronted with political or economic issues, many people react by asking “Why does the Church get involved in this?” They would like us to dedicate ourselves strictly to spiritual ministries. But the Church has a mission to accomplish in terms of bringing order to society, and that includes ethical, moral and evangelical values.

What do the commandments tell us? They say, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And it is precisely to that neighbor that the Church has to direct its mission.

Speaking to lay people, Pope John Paul II said, “An essential task of the Church is to rediscover the dignity of the human person.” This was also the evangelizing labor of Jesus. The Lord put the dignity of human beings at the center of the Gospel.

Within the pastoral work of the Church, the REMHI project is a legitimate and painful denunciation that we must listen to with profound respect and a spirit of solidarity. But it is also an “announcing.” It is an alternative aimed at finding new ways for human beings to live with one another.

 Copyrighted material 73 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. When we began this project, we were interested in discovering the truth in order to share it. We were interested in reconstructing the history of pain and death, seeing the reasons for it, understanding the why and how. We wanted to show the human drama and to share with others the sorrow and the anguish of the thousands of dead, disappeared and tortured. We wanted to look at the roots of injustice and the absence of values.

This is a pastoral way of doing things. It is working with the light of Faith to discover the face of God, the presence of the Lord. In all of these happenings, it is God who is speaking to us. We are called to reconcile. Christ’s mission is a reconciling one. His presence calls us to be reconcilers in this broken society and to try to place the victims and perpetrators within the framework of justice.

There are people who have died for their beliefs. There are executioners who were often used as instruments. Conversion is necessary and it’s up to us to open spaces to bring about that conversion. It’s not enough to just accept the facts. It is necessary to reflect on them and to recuperate the values lost.

We are gathering the memories of the people because we want to contribute to the construction of a different country. This path was and continues to be full of risks, but the building of the Kingdom of God has risks and only those that have the strength to confront those risks can be the builders.

On June 23, 1994 the parties that negotiated the Peace Accords expressed their conviction that, “all of the people of Guatemala [have] the right to know the full truth” about the events that occurred during the armed conflict, and that “this clarification will help to ensure that the sad and painful pages of history will not be repeated and that the process of democratization in the country will be strengthened.”

They emphasized that [knowing the truth] is an indispensable condition for achieving peace. This is part of the preamble of the Accord which created the Commission for Historical Clarification whose important work is also in the process of being concluded.

The Church resonated with this desire and committed itself to the search to “know the truth,” convinced as Pope John Paul II said that “truth is the strength behind peace.” (World Day of Peace, 1980).

As a Church, we collectively and responsibly assumed this task of breaking the silence that thousands of war victims have kept for years. We opened up the possibility for them to talk and to have their say, to tell their stories of suffering and pain, so they might feel liberated from the burden that has been weighing down on them for so many years.

This has been the essential objective that has motivated the REMHI project during its three years of work: to know the truth that will make us all free (John 8:32).  Copyrighted material 74 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. In the Historical Clarification Accord, we, as people of faith, discovered a call from God to our mission as Church that truth should be the vocation of all of humanity. Coming from the Word of God, we can not hide or cover-up reality. We cannot distort history, nor should we silence the truth.

Twenty centuries ago, Saint Paul made a statement that our recent history has confirmed unequivocally that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth with injustices.” (Rom 1:18). The truth in our country has been twisted and silenced.

God is inflexibly opposed to evil in any form. The root of the downfall and the disgrace of humanity comes from the deliberate opposition to truth that is the radical reality of God and of human beings. It is this reality that has been intentionally deformed in our country throughout 36 years of war against the people.

That’s why in our Bishop’s pastoral letter entitled “True Peace is Urgent!!”, we stated that historical clarification was “not just necessary, but crucial to ensuring that the past, with all of its serious consequences, would not be repeated. As long as the truth is not known, the wounds of the past continue to be open and do not begin to heal.”

As a Church, we do not have any doubt that the work we have carried out in these past few years has been part of a story of grace and salvation, a real step towards peace as a result of justice.

It has been a soft scattering of the seeds of life and dignity throughout the country — and the advocates and participants in the work have been the suffering people themselves. It has been a beautiful service of veneration for the martyrs and a dignification of the victims that were the targets of the plans for destruction and death.

To open ourselves to the truth and to bring ourselves face to face with our personal and collective reality is not an option that can be accepted or rejected. It is an undeniable requirement of all people and all societies that seek to humanize themselves and to be free.

It makes us face our most radical condition as humans; that we are sons and daughters of God, called to participate in our Father’s freedom.

Years of terror and death have displaced and reduced the majority of Guatemala to fear and silence. Truth is the primary word, the serious and mature action that makes it possible for us to break this cycle of death and violence and to open ourselves to a future of hope and light for all.

REHMI’s work has been an astonishing endeavor of discovery, exploration and appropriation of our personal and collective history. It has been an open door for people to be able to breathe and speak in freedom and for the creation of communities with hope.

 Copyrighted material 75 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Peace is possible - a peace that is born from the truth that comes from each one of us and from all of us. It is a painful truth, full of memories of the deep and bloody wounds of the country.

It is a liberating and humanizing truth that makes it possible for all men and women to come to terms with themselves and their life stories. It is a truth that challenges each one of us to recognize our individual and collective responsibility and commit ourselves to action so that those abominable acts never happen again.

This project has made a commitment to the people that gave their testimonies, to gather their experiences in this report and to support all of the demands of the victims. But our commitment is also to return the collected memory to the people.

The search for truth does not end here. It must return from where it was born and it must support the role of memory as an instrument for social reconstruction through the creation of materials, ceremonies, monuments.

Pope John Paul II tell us, “It is necessary to keep alive the memory of what has happened. It is a specific duty. We’ve been better able to comprehend what World War II has meant for Europeans and for the world during these 50 years thanks to the acquisition of new information that has allowed us a better understanding of the suffering caused.” (50th Anniversary of the end of World War II)

This is what the REMHI project has done in Guatemala. Discovering the truth is painful, but it is without a doubt, a healthy and liberating action. The thousands of testimonies of the victims and the recounting of the horrific crimes are the current day manifestations of the figure of the “suffering servant of Yahweh,” who is incarnated in the people of Guatemala.

“Behold my servant,” says Isaiah. “Many were afraid of him. He was so disfigured he was beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of sons of man. He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted.” (Isaiah 52:13 - 53:4)

Bringing the memory of these painful events into the present leads us to confront some of the first words of our faith, “Cain, where is your brother Abel?” “I don’t know”, he answered. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Yahweh replied, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” (Gen 4: 9-10)

 Copyrighted material 76 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. In the Footsteps of the Crucified

SESSION FIVE: Coming to Terms With Our Own History

Note to Participants

We must never forget that indignation is one of the most passionate forms of love. To truly become people of the Beatitudes, to be able to truly love our enemies, to be capable of mercy and compassion, we must be indignant at the destruction of lives and degradation of God’s image that torture represents. Only then will truth and love meet, will righteousness and justice kiss. Only then will the cycle of violence be broken.

Part 3 of the module (Sessions 5 & 6) closely examines Jesus’ Gospel instruction to love our enemies. Is it actually possible to love enemies in these threatening times of terrorism? Is it possible to love an enemy who may harbor information we seek to defend ourselves? The teaching of the Gospel on love for our enemies is not easy to follow, but Catholic leaders tell us in this two-session part of the module why they view it as a teaching of utmost seriousness.

Your reading for this session • Reading 1 – “Love Interrupts the Spiral of Hatred” from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops • Reading 2 – Book Review, Truth, Torture and the American Way by (Jennifer Harbury, Beacon Press, 2005: review by Rev. Philip E. Wheaton, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition • Reading 3 – “We Mourn for Our Country” from Washington Religious Campaign Against Torture, October 2006 • Reading 4 – The Blindfold’s Eyes, Chapters 14-16

Goals of the session

 Copyrighted material 77 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. • To acknowledge the role that our country has played in actively condoning and practicing torture and to feel sorrow and seek repentance for the suffering we have caused. • To see the Beatitudes and God’s call to love our enemies as the heart of our Christian faith. • To understand how love breaks the spiral of violence and hatred and recreates the world.

Session Five Outline and Notes

Welcome and Opening Meditation

MEDITATION Take turns reading one line aloud:

1. First they came for the Muslims, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t Muslim. 2. Then they began to detain immigrants indefinitely and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t an immigrant. 3. Then they began to eavesdrop on suspects, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a suspect. 4. Then they began to prosecute non-citizens before secret military commissions, and I didn’t speak up because I was a non-citizen. 5. Then they entered homes for unannounced “sneak and peek” searches, and I didn’t speak because I had nothing to hide. 6. Then they practiced surveillance of religious and political groups and I didn’t speak up because I had stopped participating in any groups. 7. Then they came for anyone who protested government policy because it aided terrorists, and I didn’t speak up because I did not want to cause trouble. 8. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up. 9. As people of faith we are shamed by government endorsed torture of political prisoners, by the indefinite detention of suspects and by secret renditions. 10. As followers of the tortured Christ, we are ashamed and we will not be silent!

Weekly Theme Discussion Theme: Love Your Enemies

Guidepost questions for discussion, journaling and reflection

“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” Luke’s Gospel reminds Christians of every century that Jesus taught his followers to love their enemies (Luke 6:27). In every century, however, this has seemed, for reasons unique to the times, a very difficult teaching to follow.

 Copyrighted material 78 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. • Who first comes to mind when you reflect upon this teaching of Jesus? • Someone who harmed you personally or who doesn’t appear to wish you well? • Groups whose thinking differs so greatly from yours that you see no grounds for mutual understanding? • What does it mean “to love your enemies,” when those enemies are religious extremists who plotted against our nation and harmed innocent people? • What does it mean “to love” persons we don’t even know, for example, prisoners accused of terrorist acts, or detainees who may harbor information sought for purposes of self-defense?

In God is Love, Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, he wrote: “Love is the light—and in the end, the only light—that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep living and working. Love is possible, and we are able to practice it because we are created in the image of God. To experience love and in this way to cause the light of God to enter into the world—this is the invitation I would like to extend to you… (No. 39)”

• Dorothy Day spoke of “a harsh and dreadful love.” Is such a love always required? Is it humanly possible to love one’s enemies? • In your own life or even the life of your nation, do you recall an occasion of reconciliation—a time when an “enemy” became a friend? What paved the way to reconciliation? • How does the torture of a detained terrorist, or turning a blind eye to such torture, represent a failure to love our enemies?

Discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes Two volunteers will facilitate the session discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes using some of the following questions. These questions are also to be used as the focus for your journaling this week.

Session 5: Chapters 14-16 “Like the tongue that between the teeth and in spite of everything goes on praising…” 1. “I lit a candle. Then I cut out the names of the disappeared and tortured and placed them in a large glass jar which I kept hidden under my desk. I remembered the names, held them in my head. Those people, at least, were not anonymous. They were not forgotten.” (p. 249) What claim do those who are disappeared and tortured have on our lives? Why is it important to remember the names of the victims? 2. “Congress liked the idea of treatment centers. Sympathizing with victims was easy. Turning the spotlight on the abusers, especially when it involved looking at our own role in the abuse, our own complicity, was another matter. It didn’t involve feeling virtuous. It involved contention, conflict, and possibly making enemies. And Congress just wasn’t going there.” (p. 308) Do you see any parallels to the public debate going on today about torture? Can we “move forward” without addressing the past?  Copyrighted material 79 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. 3. “I don’t know how to describe this… but I suddenly felt this deep urge to live, I wanted to live – to reclaim that desire to live life as fully as possible. I knew that I had made another big mistake.” (p. 328) How is this book a story of redemption? What role can we play in the struggle of survivors to live and to defend the lives of others?

Break

Video and Video Discussion

Announcements

Closing Prayer and Meditation

Closing Prayer: It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us…

No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church's mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own. This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. Amen Written by Fr. Ken Untener, later Bishop Untener, bishop of Saginaw as homily at Blessed Sacrament Cathedral, Detroit, October 25, 1979.  Copyrighted material 80 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Readings for Session Five

Coming to Terms With Our Own History: Torture, USA

Catholic Voices: What They Say About Loving Our Enemies

“In a time of terrorism and great fear, our individual and collective obligations to respect dignity and human rights, even of our worst enemies, gains added importance. Reaffirming the standards contained in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Accords would reflect the conviction that our nation must treat its prisoners as we would expect our enemies to treat our own military personnel.” (Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando, Fla., writing in June 2006 as chairman of the Catholic bishops of the United States’ International Policy Committee to then-U.S. Defense Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld)

“It is clear to us today that the only way to peace is by destroying enmity, not the enemy. (Should we destroy half the population of the world dissatisfied with the way things are? And how do we identify the enemy where terrorism is concerned?) Someone once took Abraham Lincoln to task for being too courteous to his enemies and reminded him that his job as president was to destroy them. Lincoln answered, ‘Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?’ … Enemies are destroyed with armies, but enmity with dialogue.” (From the Good Friday 2003 homily by Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household, to Pope John Paul II)

 Copyrighted material 81 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 5 – Reading 1: “Love Interrupts the Spiral of Hatred; Love Recreates the World” From Torture is a Moral Issue: A Catholic Study Guide, United States Catholic Conference of Bishops

There is a temptation to empty the words “Love your enemies” of meaning, to make them “innocuous.” Pope Benedict XVI, in Deus Caritas Est, said, “In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message [that God is Love] is both timely and significant.” (DCE 1)

Pope John Paul believed that loving “the one who offends you disarms the adversary and is able to transform a battlefield into a place of supportive cooperation.” Love of enemies helps to interrupt “the spiral of hatred and revenge” and break “the chains of evil which bind the hearts of rivals,” he wrote. For Pope Benedict XVI, “Love of neighbor . . . consists in the very fact that, in God and with God, I love even the person whom I do not like or even know.” (DCE 18)

Is love that powerful? Can love light up for us the passageways that actually lead toward peace?

Actions to Avoid, Actions to Undertake

Love isn’t just an idea. Rather, love is oriented to action. Love motivates actions of many kinds; in this way love becomes visible. How does love for enemies become visible?

First, this kind of love becomes visible through actions that are avoided.

At the end of October 2007, Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, discussed some actions to avoid. He said, "Christians are called to cooperate for the defense of human rights and for the abolition of the death penalty, torture, inhuman or degrading treatment" both in wartime and in times of peace. "These practices are grave crimes against the human person created in the image of God and a scandal for the human family."

Second, this kind of love becomes visible through actions that are undertaken by us, and by our nation.

Just days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, someone posted these well-chosen words on a Franciscan-sponsored Web site that at the time was soliciting pledges for peace: “I will cultivate a place in my heart where the Spirit can teach me love of enemies.” Another person posted this message: “I will pray daily for world peace and show, by my own actions, that people have the ability to transform their own piece of this world.”  Copyrighted material 82 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Can we, indeed, love our enemies? Ponder that question. Note that it is a question about “enemies,” but it also is a question about “love.” What “love” are we talking about? Often it is said that to love someone we must desire or will only the good for him or her. How do we “will what is good” for an enemy?

No doubt about it: Loving enemies isn’t easy! Simply contemplating the examples above makes that perfectly clear.

Today, in the 21st century, hauntingly vivid memories keep the terrorist events of September 11, 2001 very much alive for people. Anxiety surrounds the threat of additional terrorist attacks. Our society asks, are we doing all that can be done to deter terrorism? In this atmosphere, many undoubtedly feel that they know with surety who their enemy is.

It is within such an atmosphere that our conversation takes place, a conversation about what Jesus said in Luke’s Gospel: that we ought to “love [our] enemies, do good to those who hate [us].” This may not be an easy conversation to pursue. After all, do we even begin to grasp what it means to desire only what is good for people who, we believe, do not desire the same for us?

Page through the Gospel of Matthew, and you’ll hear this teaching of Jesus again. He says, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44-45). In Matthew, this teaching comes hard on the heels of the astonishing message communicated by the Beatitudes—a message that peacemakers, the gentle, the merciful and the poor in spirit truly are blessed.

It often is said that the Beatitudes present a vision for Christian living. The Beatitudes are not platitudes. The Beatitudes are a call to live as Jesus lived, and to approach the world around us in an entirely new way.

In Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI said, “Love is ‘divine’ because it comes from God and unites us to God: through this unifying process it makes us a ‘we’ which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is ‘all in all’.” (DCE 18)

 Copyrighted material 83 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 5 – Reading 2: Book Review, Truth, Torture and the American Way, by Jennifer Harbury (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005) Review by Rev. Philip E. Wheaton

The title of this book says it all: truth, torture and the American Way… that is, it reveals the truth about torture by connecting the dots between specific cases of torture in Latin America (Chapters Two and Three) and the U.S. governmental agencies responsible for them. Moreover, in her Introduction, Jennifer Harbury underscores the fact that the historical context for most of this torture involved the “dirty wars” carried out under the auspices of the United States during the 1960s, 70s and 80s….

“The report on Guatemala, for example, found the [national] military [which was supported by the CIA, Pentagon and the White House in these decades] responsible for genocide and for 93 percent of the war crimes, including 200,000 civilian murders and “disappearances” and 660 massacres.” - Truth, Torture, and the American Way, Beacon Press, Boston, 2005, p.xxv

And Ms. Harbury bases her continental focus on the involvement of Sister Dianna Ortiz and herself in Guatemala in relation to what happened to them and their loved ones, so that her analysis of specific case studies is grounded upon first hand knowledge of both women in this horrifying practice which has the fingerprints of our Government written all over it.

Interestingly, her first chapter begins what is going on today in Afghanistan and Iraq today where Jennifer intermixes cases involving victims of torture from both the East and the West. She then highlights the torture scandals in Abu Ghraib prison which had their origin, as we all know, in the U.S. prison in Guantanamo, Cuba where there are no foreign actors involved in the torture there, only U.S. guards, soldiers, agents and high-level Pentagon officials. In the next two chapters, where Jennifer gets specific about human rights abuses and the torture practices in Latin America, she makes two points which stood out for me. In the case of Latin America, she writes:

“As the Dirty Wars in…[Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras]… progressed, human rights violations reached extraordinary levels. Yet U.S. military aid continued, as did the close working relationship between CIA agents and the local army death squads.” (p.32)

In the case of Guatemala, the specificity of torture became deadly personal for Jennifer in relation to her husband, Everado, a Guatemalan Indian guerrilla commander whom she married in 1991 and who returned to his embattled front in 1992, when he was captured and tortured. Harbury learned of this from a Guatemala soldier named Santiago who witnessed what happened and later escaped. (See: Ms. Harbury’s other book, Searching for Everado). Santiago told her he saw Everado at the Santa Ana Berlin military base and later, he was startled to see Everado at the San Marcos military base very much alive….

“He was bound, stripped, blindfolded, and raving. His entire body was terribly swollen, one arm and leg heavily bandaged. Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez was presiding.” (p.58)

 Copyrighted material 84 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. But even more telling and reveling for me are her final two chapters where she deals with “What can be Done? The Law” (Chapter 4) and “Paying the Price” (Chapter 5). In the former, she focuses on Civil Law, Criminal Law, International Law and Military Law. This review is essential for anyone seriously interested in the often confusing and conflictive aspects of law on torture and human rights in the USA.

In the case of Civil Law inside the USA, Jennifer asks “Does the Constitution prohibit the brutal ‘interrogation techniques’ developed and utilized by the CIA in Vietnam and Central America and now in Iraq and Afghanistan?” Her answer is an unequivocal “No!” She explains why not:

“As the above discussion makes clear, our long-standing intelligence methods fall far beyond the outermost limits of our Constitution… water-boardings, electrical shocks, suffocation, and severe beatings are unthinkable… In short, the CIA has been making a mockery of traditional American values and legal principles.” (pp.107-108)

In the case of International Law, the Bush administration, as others before it, have frequently tried to make exceptions in the case of war, that is, in terms of those the government declares our enemies, or in relation to cases where someone has committed an extreme abuse and is an “enemy.” Nonetheless, the Geneva Convention is quite clear…

“The Convention against Torture prohibits the torture or abuse of any person at any time and under any circumstance. The International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights also makes the prohibition against torture and cruel and degrading treatment non-derogable [that is, that it can't be dismissed], even during times of war.” (p.128)

In her last chapter (Chapter Five), “Paying the Price,” Ms. Harbury makes her strongest point by noting that when torture is employed not only does “violence beget violence” but even more contradictory there is always powerful backlash to it. She explains by asking a question: “If we permit our own agents to engage in torture, will we be able to obtain better information and thus win the war against terror?” The answer she offers is by referring us to what happened after the Abu Ghraib torture photos emerged in 2003:

“By the fall of 2004, bombings against the U.S. military and its allies had increased [from] thirty to fifty per day, and international solidarity with the insurgents was clearly rising in the Islamic world.” (p.169)

In other words, torture doesn’t work, and worse, it usually backfires as it has in Iraq. Jennifer Harbury explains why this is so. She gives us several explanations, each one more telling than the former. For instance:

Human Costs: Those tortured never get over it: “torture not only harms the body, but it corrupts a portion of the brain that screams at the body to fight back or flee….”

 Copyrighted material 85 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Family Members: “The relatives of those whose whereabouts are unknown and whose fate has never been clarified have therefore suffered long-term mental anguish….”

Society as a Whole: The systematic use [of torture] “foments public terror and paralysis, which often leads to the complete breakdown of civilian institutions…”

Backlash: “Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations [like war and torture] and [an] increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.”

This book deserves our full attention… and reading. This is a matter for all of us to take seriously. As its sub-title makes clear, “The History and Consequences of U.S. Involvement in Torture” will end up damaging all of us.

 Copyrighted material 86 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 5 – Reading 3: “We Mourn for Our Country: We Will Not Be Silent!” From the Washington Region Religious Campaign Against Torture, October 17, 2006

A gray sky, with drizzle turning to a hard rain, accurately reflected our pain this morning as the shameful Military Commissions Act was signed into law. Wearing black as a sign of mourning, about two hundred of us gathered with our umbrellas in front of the White House. We listened as religious leaders, a torture survivor, and a constitutional lawyer denounced one or more of the elements of this new law, and then challenged us to get past our sadness and despair so that we can begin to undo the damage created by this act.

We waved flags, set at half mast and billowing black streamers to demonstrate that we are patriots in the old tradition, the one that sees “America” as a dream of freedom and law and justice. We tore off our black armbands, in a symbol of our distress at the damage done to this dream. We placed flowers on a coffin in which lay the corpse of habeas corpus, a right granted to Western peoples four centuries prior to the discovery of America. We sang songs, some religious, some patriotic. We affirmed the true, the good values of our American heritage, those that are now in peril.

We carried signs and banners, reflecting our personal views of this outrageous and unconstitutional law. Here is the text for a few of our signs:

• Torture is a sin • Torture harms our troops • What country has legal torture, unlimited detentions, kangaroo courts? The U.S.A. • Habeas Corpus: Born in England, Magna Carta, 1215; Died in the USA, 2006 • Zero Tolerance for Torture • Torture is Un-American

We also signed the People’s Signing Statement. In this statement, we rejected this law. Our speakers also rejected it.

Bill Goodman of the Center for Constitutional Rights: “The Military Commissions Act represents a dangerous retreat from American values and an infringement of our constitutional rights and our international obligations. In enacting this law, the President does not speak for us.”

Reverend Scott Alexander of River Road Unitarian Church: “We are American citizens and patriots…and we are standing together here this morning - shoulder to shoulder - because torture is wrong. We are here to say, with a loud and clear voice, that torture is immoral. It is un-American…and it is totally unacceptable as a policy and practice of our government. President Bush may have the power to sign the ill-advised Military

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Orlando Tizon, a torture victim with the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition: “We must organize-organize! There is no time to wait.”

We carried the People’s Signing Statement and our coffin to the gates of the White House, as we, representing all Americans sick at heart over this Act, asked to be a part of the President’s signing ceremony. We were not permitted to enter. So, some of us refused to leave, as this is our country, our White House, and our Constitution. How dare they take it from us! Sixteen of us were arrested in this act of civil disobedience.

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SESSION SIX: Walking the Path to Conversion – The Road Ahead

Note to Participants

Your reading for this session • Reading 1 – “Becoming a People of the Beatitudes” from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops • Reading 2 – “Who is Jesus Christ for Us Today” by Rev. George Hunsinger, National Religious Coalition Against Torture • Reading 3 – “Guantanamo Prison Put on Trial” from Witness Against Torture, May 2008 • Reading 4 – The Blindfold’s Eyes, Chapters 17-19

Goals of the Session • To see how closely bound we Christians are to the other Abrahamic faiths (Islam, Judaism) by virtue of being children of the same God and brothers and sisters to one another. • To strengthen our conviction in the power of the Beatitudes as a counter-cultural truth that has the power to transform violence and hatred into bonds of peace and reconciliation. • To give examples from our own lives of the power of compassion to heal the wounds of violence and to recreate bonds of love.

Session Six Outline and Notes

Welcome and Opening Meditation

MEDITATION  Copyrighted material 89 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA.

“The SS hung two Jewish men and a boy before the assembled inhabitants of the camp.

Pause

The men died quickly but the death struggle of the boy lasted half an hour.

Pause

‘Where is God? Where is he?’ a man behind me asked.

Pause

As the boy, after a long time, was still in agony on the rope, I heard the man cry again, ‘Where is God now?’

Pause

And I heard a voice within me answer, ‘Here he is– he is hanging here on this gallows...’”

(Elie Wiesel, Night)

Weekly Theme Discussion Theme: Love Your Enemy, Part 2

Guidepost questions for discussion, journaling and reflection

Benedict XVI believes that loving our enemies is not naïve, that it is a “realistic” way to approach our world. Among the reasons we could give to support his statement, we could say that Christians love their enemies because they:

• Take the words of Jesus in the Gospel seriously. • Recognize their enemies’ human dignity. • Hope to discover the difference that a people of the Beatitudes can make for today’s world. • Discuss each of these reasons. What other reasons might you give? • Which one speaks to you most deeply? Which one grounds your faith and gives you strength to love your enemies?

What Jesus taught his followers about loving their enemies adds up to a demanding, even difficult instruction for Christians of the 21st century, and of every century. In fact,

 Copyrighted material 90 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles said in a September 2003 speech that “one of the greatest challenges put before us in the Gospels is the call to love our enemies.” But, he explained, “This is not a simplistic command to ignore the potential for evil in our world.… It is a call to reflect fully and honestly on the ethical dimensions of our responses to evil.”

• What are some ways for individuals, families, parishes, communities and even nations to respond to evil with good? • How ought we to respond to those who have committed crimes who are in prison? • How ought we to respond to those who have been classified as “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo?

Discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes Two volunteers will facilitate the session discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes and use the following as a basis for the discussion. Use these questions as a focus for your journaling this week.

Session 6: Chapters 17-19 “Do not fear the truth, hard as it may appear, grievously as it may hurt…” 1. “Today, on Palm Sunday, I begin my silent vigil for truth in front of the White House – the truth about my own case, and the truth about all those Guatemalans who have suffered and died at the hands of the officially sponsored death squads. For those of us who know and love Guatemala, it is painfully clear that our own United States government has been closely linked to these death squads… We need and demand this information so that we can heal our wounds, bury our dead, and carry on with out lives.” (p. 349) Why is truth important to healing? Is there a “right” to the truth? Why is the truth about U.S. foreign policy important? 2. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, “To forget would be an absolute injustice. To forget would be the enemy’s triumph. The enemy kills, tortures and disappears twice, the second time in trying to obliterate the traces of his crimes.” Dianna adds: “By refusing to forget, I hope I am keeping the memory of the dead alive.” (p. 368) Why is it important to remember? Can we ever move forward and forget the past? What does it mean: “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it?” 3. After the vigil, Dianna gathered with community to give thanks, as they sang, The River Will Rise. “The song defines God as our light, greater than grieving, more than our death, and says we can hear a nameless voice, crying within our hearts. And God is that nameless voice, the name that no one calls alone, which the world will hear, deep in the night, when the river will rise. Peace will flow like a river and the river will rise.” Comment on how your faith has been challenged, changed, or been deepened by your reading of Dianna’s story.

Break

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Video and Video Discussion

Announcements

Closing Prayer and Meditation

“God is no executioner– and no almighty spectator (which would amount to the same thing). God is not the mighty tyrant.

Pause

Between the sufferer and the one who causes the suffering, between the victim and the executioner, God, whatever people make of this world, is on the side of the sufferer. God is on the side of the victim, (God) is hanged…

Pause

It is no less significant for us than it is for the boy that God is the one hanging on this gallows. God has no other hands than ours, which are able to act on behalf of other children.

Pause

In this sense those who suffer in vain and without respect depend on those who suffer in accord with justice.”

(Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, Fortress, 1975)

 Copyrighted material 92 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Readings for Session Six

Walking the Path to Conversion: The Road Ahead

Session 6 – Reading 1: “Becoming a People of the Beatitudes: Path to Peace” From Torture is a Moral Issue: A Catholic Study Guide, United States Catholic Conference of Bishops

God’s ways are mysterious, sure enough! Nonetheless, can’t Christians say with surety that hating enemies isn’t God’s way, and that hating our enemies won’t lead to peace? The 2006 letter that Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando, Florida, sent to then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, spoke about this. The bishop said, “A respect for the dignity of every person, ally or enemy, must serve as the foundation of the pursuit of security, justice and peace.”

But in loving their enemies and taking the Beatitudes seriously, are Christians being naïve, or attempting to escape from the realities of the world as it really is?

Is It Realistic to Love Enemies?

“Christ’s proposal [that we love our enemies] is realistic,” Pope Benedict XVI said in remarks in St. Peter’s Square February 18, 2007. These words, “love your enemies,” represent “some of the most typical and forceful words of Jesus’ preaching,” the pope commented.

But why are these words realistic? Because they take “into account that in the world there is too much violence, too much injustice, and therefore this situation cannot be overcome except by countering it with more love, with more goodness,” Pope Benedict explained. What the Gospel says about loving our enemies “does not consist in succumbing to evil, as a false interpretation of ‘turning the other cheek’ claims, but in responding to evil with good and thereby breaking the chain of injustice.”

For Christians this “is not merely tactical behavior but [is] a person's way of being, the attitude of one who is so convinced of God's love and power that he is not afraid to tackle evil with the weapons of love and truth alone,” said Pope Benedict. He continued, “Love of one's enemy constitutes the nucleus of the ‘Christian revolution,’ a revolution not based on strategies of economic, political or media power: the revolution of love, a love that does not rely ultimately on human resources but is a gift of God which is obtained by trusting solely and unreservedly in his merciful goodness.”

What the Beatitudes Offer Our World

 Copyrighted material 93 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Terrorism is indeed a reality of the world we live in today. But Christians who, even in this kind of world, love their enemies believe it is possible to counter terrorism “in a way that is consistent with the Gospel,” to borrow words from Holy Cross Father Edward Malloy, former president of the University of Notre Dame.

The Beatitudes constitute a “countercultural truth.” But when this truth has been followed, it has “changed our world,” the Catholic bishops in the United States said, in a November 1999 message titled “Because God Loves You.”

And Cardinal Roger Etchegaray said, in a 1991 speech in Washington, D.C., that a “volcano” erupted into a world searching for peace with “the Sermon on the Mount and its incandescent Beatitudes.” The cardinal was president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace at the time of his speech. He said that "merciful love is, perhaps, the greatest challenge to the hardness, to the ferocity, of our modern times.”

Peace, said Cardinal Etchegaray, “is waiting impatiently for pioneers who will open up new ways.”

Our enemies should be treated as if they were “another self”—treated as though we recognize in them people who are not simply different from us, but who, in so many ways, also are like us. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church makes this point:

“Inextricably linked in the human heart are the relationship with God—recognized as Creator and Father, the source and fulfillment of life and of salvation—and openness in concrete love toward man, who must be treated as another self, even if he is an enemy (cf. Mt 5:43-44)” (No. 40).

Once we recognize an enemy as “another self,” haven’t we begun to recognize that person’s God-given human dignity? Like us, that person is made in the image of God. And, if Christ died and rose to new life for all, haven’t his death and resurrection somehow touched that person too?

 Copyrighted material 94 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 6 – Reading 2: “Who Is Jesus Christ for Us Today?” By Rev. George Hunsinger, Princeton Theological Seminary, founding member of the National Religious Coalition Against Torture (NRCAT). Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor executed on April 9, 1945 for his resistance to the Nazis. He was the author of The Cost of Discipleship.

Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me (Matt. 25:40).

The question that Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked himself, his students, and his readers remains as urgent now as when he first raised it: Who is Jesus Christ for us today? Bonhoeffer by no means intended to challenge the authoritative biblical answer. What he confessed with the prophets and the apostles, he attested at the cost of his life. He affirmed that Jesus Christ is the Risen Lord who had become incarnate for our sakes in order to die for our sins and liberate us from the power of death. That was the answer presupposed in every other possible answer to his question. It was the one answer that contained all others within itself.

But Bonhoeffer knew that other answers were indeed included within that one answer. He knew that in dying for our sins, Jesus Christ had made the sufferings of the world his own. He knew that discipleship to Christ meant participating in Christ’s sufferings in the present time. “The hungry need bread,” he once wrote, “and the homeless need a roof; the oppressed need justice and the lonely need fellowship; the undisciplined need order and the slave needs freedom.” Because Jesus had entered into our world of sorrows, and because he had taken up the cause of those in need, making their cause to be his own, Bonhoeffer could continue: “To allow the hungry to remain hungry would be blasphemy against God and one’s neighbor, for what is nearest to God is precisely the need of one’s neighbor” (Ethics, p. 137).

That was Bonhoeffer’s great insight. “What is nearest to God is precisely the need of one’s neighbor.” On this profound basis he saw that it made no sense to choose between evangelism and social action. He saw that evangelism without social action was empty, and that social action without evangelism was blind. Both were key to the church’s mission, since both were ways of bearing witness in the world to God’s love for the world in Jesus Christ. Social action against crying injustice was an indirect form of evangelism, while evangelism that led unbelievers to know and love Jesus remained an indirect goal of social action. In different ways they both proclaimed that God’s love extends to the whole person at every level of human need. Feeding the hungry, as Bonhoeffer once said, prepared the way for the coming of grace.

“What is nearest to God is precisely the need of one’s neighbor.” This statement provides a real clue to how Bonhoeffer answered his own question. The Risen Lord, he believed, confronts us here and now precisely as the neighbor in need. That is who Jesus Christ is

 Copyrighted material 95 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. for us today: he comes to us in the form of the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the prisoner locked away. The neighbor in need is revealed as an incognito form of Christ’s presence. This epiphany does not mean that Christ and the needy are simply identical, but it does mean that by divine grace they are inseparably one. It is impossible to serve Christ here and now without serving one’s neighbor in need. As you did it to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me (Matt. 25:40).

Since what is nearest to God is the need of one’s neighbor, and since Christ has made himself to be one with those in dire need, Bonhoeffer drew the right conclusion. He recognized that Christians have a special obligation to those in any society who are being persecuted, humiliated and abused. “Only those who cry out for the Jews,” he wrote, “have the right to sing Gregorian chants.” For the church in the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer perceived, the presence of Jesus Christ could not be separated from the plight of persecuted Jews. Whoever would serve Christ had to enter into solidarity with that despised and mistreated group, crying out by word and deed.

But that was then, and this is now. Who is Jesus Christ for us today? Who are those who are being persecuted, humiliated and abused in our particular society? Sadly there are many contenders, and too many to be mentioned here, yet chief among them, I would suggest, are the victims around the world today of U.S. sponsored torture.

April 2006 marks the second anniversary since shocking photos were released from Abu Ghraib. These photos are difficult to look at yet impossible to forget. How can we view them without thinking of Christ? How can we view the wrenching scenes of nude male bodies stacked in postures of sexual humiliation without remembering the saying: I was naked and you clothed me? How can we gaze on the shackled man kneeling in an orange jumpsuit with terror in his eyes as a ferocious German shepherd strains at the leash only inches from his face without recalling: I was in prison and you visited me. Where is the outcry? Why the silence of the churches? Can we learn what Dietrich Bonhoeffer has to teach us? Or will we be “good Germans” all over again? Who is Jesus Christ for us today?

“The thought of Jesus being stripped, beaten and derided until his final agony on the cross,” wrote Pope John Paul II, “should always prompt a Christian to protest against similar treatment of their fellow beings. Of their own accord, disciples of Christ will reject torture, which nothing can justify, which causes humiliation and suffering to the victim and degrades the tormentor.”

The torture-abuse scandal, as first revealed by the photos from Abu Ghraib, has by no means gone away. According to recent human rights reports:

• Detainee deaths at the hands of U.S. soldiers continue around the world.

 Copyrighted material 96 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. • Aggressive, painful force-feeding has been instituted at Guantanamo where prisoners are so desperate that many would prefer to commit suicide. • Secret CIA prisons, rife with torture situations, remain scattered across the globe. • Thousands of persons have been subjected to what is called “extraordinary rendition,” whereby suspects are essentially kidnapped and sent to countries that use torture as a means of interrogation. Yet who can deny that outsourcing torture to other regimes is the moral equivalent of practicing it ourselves? • Finally, the Department of Defense has admitted to the Red Cross that “70-90 percent” of the Abu Ghraib prisoners were entirely innocent. Similar if somewhat lower figures have been estimated for other U.S. detention centers, including Guantanamo.

Not a single major human rights organization in the world believes that these abuses can be explained merely as the actions of a few bad apples at the bottom of the barrel. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, has stated that top officials - up to and including the president - have given a green light to soldiers to abuse detainees. “You don’t have this kind of pervasive attitude out there,” he observed, “unless you’ve condoned it.” Yet no officials at the higher levels have seriously been brought to account.

The photos from Abu Ghraib make one thing clear. Working against torture as sponsored by our government must begin at the local and congregational level. As dismaying as it may seem, polls show that at least 73 percent of the American people believe that torture may be used at least rarely, and 15 percent say it is “often” permissible. The figures for Christians in particular are, sadly, no exception.

The terrible stain of torture—which is not only morally wrong but has many harmful consequences even from the standpoint of self-interest—will not be removed from our nation until we learn to act from higher motivations than blinding fear, narrow self- regard, and ugly resentment—to say nothing of cultural racism. If torture is not evil, then nothing is evil, for torture is the very essence of evil. Only those who cry out today for the detained Muslims and Arabs have a right to sing Gregorian chants.

Let me close with these words from Holy Scripture.

Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured (Heb. 13:3).

Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen (I John 4:20).

 Copyrighted material 97 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. This verse might be glossed to read: Those who say, “I love God,” and torture their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who torture a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen - and the same holds true for those who turn a blind eye to torture or otherwise condone it.

Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me (Matt. 25:40). Bonhoeffer’s searching question thereby remains: Who is Jesus Christ for us today?

 Copyrighted material 98 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 6 – Reading 3, “Guantanamo Prison Put on Trial” From Witness Against Torture, May 29, 2008, www.witnesstorture.org

Thirty-four Americans arrested at the Supreme Court on January 11, 2008 were found guilty after a three-day trial which began on Tuesday, May 27th in D.C. Superior Court. The defendants represented themselves, mounting a spirited defense of their First Amendment rights to protest the gross injustice of abuse and indefinite detention of men at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.

Charged with “unlawful free speech,” the defendants were part of a larger group that appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on January 11-the day marking six years of indefinite detention and torture at Guantanamo. “I knelt and prayed on the steps of the Supreme Court wearing an orange jumpsuit and black hood to be present for Fnu Fazaldad,” said Tim Nolan, a nurse practitioner from Asheville, NC who provides health care for people with HIV.

Defendants and witnesses argued that they did not expect to be arrested at the Supreme Court, “an internationally known temple to free speech.” Ashley Casale, a student at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, told the court, “I am 19– the youngest person in this courtroom-and I come on behalf of all the prisoners at Guantanamo who were younger than I am now when they were detained. According to the U.S. Constitution we have a right to petition the government for a redress of grievances and Guantanamo Bay prison is beyond grievous.”

Historian Michael S. Foley, a professor at the City University of New York, teaches the U.S. Constitution to undergraduates. He testified that if “you told me that the defendants would be arrested for ‘unlawful free speech’ just twenty feet from where the Justices decide First Amendment cases, I’d say you were ‘crazy.’”

Those who stood trial this week were arrested (along with 43 others) without their identification and taken into custody under the names of Guantanamo prisoners. This twist on traditional protest allowed the defendants to symbolically grant the Guantanamo prisoners the day in court that the Bush administration and the Pentagon have denied them.

“I am not surprised at being convicted,” continued Nolan, “but I felt compelled as a medical professional to speak out against torture that is facilitated by medical personnel at Guantanamo. I have to act on my ethical principles every day: if I know child abuse is occurring, I am required to report it. The abuses at Guantanamo must also be acted upon.”

The defendants are common citizens: priests and pastors, construction workers and farmers, schoolteachers and professors. They come from Charlottesville, Des Moines, New York City, Scranton, Saratoga, Worcester, and other cities and towns.

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A number of the defendants waived their right to speak during the trial, recognizing the near-total denial of legal and human rights to the Guantanamo detainees. “We could not in conscience exercise our rights,” says Matthew Daloisio of this courtroom witness, “when our country continues to deny the rights of others. It was powerful to hold the name of Yasser Al Zahrani in my heart as I sat in a court of law. Yasser was a 22-year-old Yemeni man. He was arrested at 17, and brought to Guantanamo. He was never charged or tried. On June 10th, 2006, he apparently took his own life. He will never have the chance to sit in this court room, and my conviction today seems a small price to pay to bring his name in court.”

During the trial, some defendants took the stand to testify to their motivations and intentions in acting on January 11. They argued that they were there to appeal to the Supreme Court Justices to rule against the Bush administration in the cases of Boumediene v. U.S. and Al Odah v. Bush. They contend that after all other remedies had been exhausted; direct action and appeal were the only options.

The judge refused to let Thomas Wilner, a partner at the Washington law firm Shearman and Sterling, take the stand. Wilner represented twelve Kuwaiti citizens detained at Guantanamo Bay in the case decided in their favor by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 28, 2004. His descriptions of the predicaments of his clients, and expressions of horror and dismay at the failure of most Americans to act against the detainees’ indefinite detention and torture were part of forming many of the defendants’ motivation and intention. After his testimony was deemed “not relevant” and “unnecessary” by Judge Gardner, Wilner addressed defendants and supporters outside the courthouse, saying: “Hopefully, we’ll end torture and indefinite detention as a matter of law. And then, we need to work to make sure that hysteria and false facts don’t sweep away the soul of the nation again.” He then addressed those on trial directly, saying, “You are standing up for the soul of this nation.”

In the defendants’ first closing statement, Father Emmett Jarrett, an Episcopalian priest from New London, CT, told Judge Wendell Gardner, “we came to the Supreme Court on January 11th with one intention: to put dramatically before the court—both the Supreme Court and the higher court of public opinion and conscience—the plight of the men and boys detained at Guantanamo. We came to the Supreme Court on January 11th not to protest but to present a letter to the justices, asking them to act on behalf of detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo, to restore their human and legal rights, and to give a voice to the voiceless.”

Arthur Laffin followed with a closing statement that touched on both legal and moral arguments for the defendants’ innocence, and pleaded with the court and the prosecution to join the defendants in “ending the horrors.” “The Nuremberg Accords,” he asserted, “state that

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After Laffin finished, Claire Schaffer Duffy, of Worchester, MA stood and stated, “on behalf of Abbas Hasid Rumi Al Naely, I stand by Art’s closing statement.” And then, one after the other, each pro se defendant also stood, stated their own name, the name of the prisoner at Guantanamo they carried on January 11 and through the trial experience. Many were openly weeping as they stood.

The action on January 11 was organized by Witness Against Torture, a group that formed in 2005 when 25 people walked from Cuba to the U.S. detention facilities to protest conditions there. January 11, 2008 marked six years since the opening of U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay. The Supreme Court demonstrators were joined by protestors in London, Sydney, Edinburgh, Istanbul, Barcelona and throughout the world.

Retired Admiral John D. Hutson, the former judge advocate general of the Navy, said of the Supreme Court demonstrators, “In the military, there is the concept of ‘calling in artillery onto your own position.’ It refers to heroic action taken in desperate situations for a greater good. That’s essentially what these courageous Americans are doing… They accept that there may be an adverse consequence to them personally but they believe drawing attention to the issue is worth the sacrifice.”

Witness Against Torture will continue its efforts to have the detention facilities at Guantanamo shut down and torture by United States ended. For more information: www.witnesstorture.org

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SESSION SEVEN: Taking Decisive Moral Action: Torture is a Moral Issue

Note to Participants

The story goes that the waves of the Red Sea only parted when one of the Israelites stepped into the sea. Only then did God divide the sea for the people to pass to freedom. The journey of hope begins with that one step of solidarity. Step by step the longest march can be won. Each of us can do something; and that something we can do, we must do. Love produces hope. Good, not evil, will have the last word.

The final two sessions of the module are designed to promote discussion of actions that individuals, families, small groups in parishes, schools and others might take to address the issue of torture and to raise awareness of its importance as a moral matter.

Your reading for this session • Reading 1 – “Torture Should Never Be Official U.S. Policy” © Fr. Louie Vitale, OFM, in San Francisco Chronicle, April 21, 2006 • Reading 2 – “We Need a Truth Commission to Uncover Wrongdoing” © James Cavallaro, Christian Science Monitor, February 20, 2009 • Reading 3 – “Letter to President Obama” by Sister Dianna Ortiz and Catherine Grosso, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition • Reading 4 – “A Model Resolution; and Five Goals to End Torture” from the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, 2009 • Reading 5 – The Blindfold’s Eyes, Chapters 20-22

Goals of the Session

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Session Seven Outline and Notes

Welcome and Opening Meditation Meditation:

From the Muslim Qur’an All that is in the heavens and on earth gives praise to God. His is the kingdom and His is the praise and His the will that has power over all things. He it is who created you. There are both unbelievers and believers among you and God is watchful over all your actions. With truth He created the heavens and the earth. He fashioned you well and He made your frame. To Him is your destiny. His knowledge encompasses everything in the heavens and the earth. He knows your hidden secrets and your manifest deeds. God knows the very heart within.

Adapted from the Jewish Liturgy of Yom Kippur

Today, let us remember the earth’s oppressed; let us restore the human heritage to the victims of torture, to the weak and the weary, all who are imprisoned without cause. Let us remember them, bring peace to every home, and comfort to every heart. We know the wisdom by which You would have us live; oceans of ink have been spilled to say it: Be faithful, be true, love one another as you love yourselves. But the world is dark and cold with fear and rage. The hammer of chaos beats loudly within our breast: How can we endure? This is the vision of a great and noble life: To endure ambiguity and to make light shine through it; to stand fast in uncertainty; to prove capable of unlimited love and hope.

Weekly Theme Discussion Theme: Overcoming Evil With Goodness and Truth

Guidepost questions for discussion, journaling and reflection.

Look at NRCAT’s “Five Goals to End Torture” in the readings for this session. Consider the following statement: In his closing arguments at the Nuremberg Trials, Chief Justice Robert Jackson said: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our lips as well... If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes,

 Copyrighted material 103 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

What course of action do you think that our country should take in light of the justification and practice of torture by former U.S. government officials? Refer to the readings and consider which, if any, of the suggestions offered there might be appropriate responses for our nation to take.

During the session, the following may be discussed in small groups: • Should there be an official truth commission to investigate what happened? • Should those who justified or ordered torture be held accountable? Should those who did the actual torture be held accountable? • What will it take for our nation to restore its credibility as a country that respects human rights in the family of nations?

Discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes Two volunteers will facilitate the discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes, using some of the questions below. Use these questions as the focus for your journaling this week.

Session 7: Chapters 20-22 “Truth is still right, and you were born for it…” 1. “Somehow on that trip I was able to see the light within myself. I was able to see that I do have the right to live and to recapture the feeling I had just after I attempted to take my life – to realize that I was being given another chance… I had a right to live and a right to defend myself.” (pp. 444-45) Reflect on Dianna’s story of conversion. What insights does she have that resonate with your own story of conversion? 2. “I know that there are people who would disapprove of my decision… All I can say is that I did what I had to do. I hate the choice I was forced to make... As horrible as this experience has been, I’m a much better person. I care for those who are oppressed, and for those who commit crimes against humanity. And I do not judge people – I leave that to God. I have a deeper understanding of the fragility of humanity and the evil that dwells in our midst.” (p. 463) Comment. 3. “We cannot and will not judge Dianna but will respond to her with compassion and we will call on the Mount Sinai Ursuline Community to prayer and action for the creation of a torture-free world… Her Ursuline sisters will continue to walk with her to the very end, knowing that ultimately truth and love prevail; knowing, also, that at this very moment, even in the midst of unspeakable corruption and evil, GOD is ever present to all who seek mercy and work for justice.” (pp. 466- 67) What can we do to commit ourselves to prayer and action for the creation of a torture-free world?

Break

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Announcements

Closing Prayer and Meditation “In the collapse of worlds of meaning and value, in the insecurity and uncertainty that riddles personal and communal life, there is room to make a way.

Pause

But we are to make a way in a world sorely disheartened by the disorientation brought on by the great disparity between events and our expectations of what might have been.

Pause

Like Mary and the Beloved Disciple at the foot of the Cross, we are swathed in the consoling hope that in giving ourselves to this mystery, God comes.” Michael Downey

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Taking Decisive Moral Action: Torture is a Moral Issue

Excerpt from Pope Benedict XVI’s message for the 2006 World Day of Peace

The fathers of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council in the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes [Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World] pointed out that ”not everything automatically becomes permissible between hostile parties once war has regrettably commenced.” As a means of limiting the devastating consequences of war as much as possible, especially for civilians, the international community has created an international humanitarian law.

International humanitarian law ought to be considered as one of the finest and most effective expressions of the intrinsic demands of the truth of peace. Precisely for this reason, respect for that law must be considered binding on all peoples. Its value must be appreciated and its correct application ensured; it must also be brought up to date by precise norms applicable to the changing scenarios of today's armed conflicts and the use of ever newer and more sophisticated weapons.

Pope Benedict XVI reiterates the Vatican Council II teaching that not everything becomes permissible once war commences. Are there actions in times of war that instead of furthering peace, actually prolong or intensify the fighting and violence?

Session 7 – Reading 1: “Torture Should Never Be Official U.S. Policy” © Fr. Louie Vitale, OFM, The San Francisco Chronicle, Friday, April 21, 2006. Used with permission.

Revelations of torture in Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-sponsored prisons have shocked the world. They also have brought the subject of torture and our country’s participation in this practice into our consciousness. Perhaps even more shocking is the knowledge that torture has been practiced for years, right here in the Americas.

For the second time in the past four years, I find myself in a federal prison as a result of my protest against these inhumane policies. My country’s involvement in torture was at the heart of my decision to leave my post as pastor of St. Boniface Catholic Church in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district in order to speak out against these crimes.

 Copyrighted material 106 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. I was arrested at the annual vigil and protest at Fort Benning, Ga., home of the School of the Americas, which has been renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The institute has trained Latin American military and police forces in counterinsurgency warfare for more than 60 years. Numerous graduates have been involved in documented human-rights abuses, including rape, torture and the massacre of innocent civilians in Latin America.

During the 1980s, I, and others from across the country, met with Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador. He told us that the lot of many of his countrymen in El Salvador - especially those working on behalf of the poor for economic justice and democratic political change - was “to be captured, tortured, disappeared and found dead.” Shortly after our meeting, Romero was assassinated by graduates of the School of the Americas.

In 1996, after pressure by School of the Americas Watch and other human-rights organizations, the Pentagon was forced to release torture manuals that had been translated into Spanish and used in courses at the School of the Americas for at least a decade. I have interviewed many survivors of these horrendous tragedies, including some who were actual participants in the death squads. They told me that those involved in their training were U.S. military officers, some of whom were even present at the scenes of torture.

After hearing this firsthand testimony, I and others committed civil disobedience at Fort Benning at the annual protest in November 2001. As a U.S. Air Force veteran, I wanted to speak out against the role my country had played in these atrocities. For this action, I was sentenced to three months in federal prison.

Last November, once again I joined 19,000 people at the gates of Fort Benning in the solemn vigil. Thirty-seven of us crossed onto the military base in a nonviolent witness of conscience. This time, we protested not only the history of torture at this place, but the apparent continuation of these practices by our own military in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay Naval Station or outsourced by U.S. agencies to other countries, such as Egypt, Syria and Jordan, according to Amnesty International. Survivors of torture in Latin America addressed the crowd at this massive gathering, and many asked the same thing, “Why are the same methods of torture now being committed by the U.S. military so similar to those that were used on us?”

I was tried and convicted of trespass and am serving my six months’ sentence in Crisp County Jail in Georgia. During my time in prison, I have reflected on questions regarding these issues:

- Will Congress hold an independent investigation (as recommended by Amnesty International and required in HR1217, legislation introduced by U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., to suspend operations of the School of the Americas) into past practices and history of the School of the Americas, whose legacy still haunts the people of Latin America?

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These activities have raised troubling questions for all concerned citizens. True democracy cannot be imposed by the use of force that breeds anger and desperation; but can be [fostered] through policies that promote understanding, fairness and compassion.

Louis Vitale is a Franciscan friar of the Santa Barbara Province, and the former pastor of St. Boniface Catholic Church in San Francisco. He is co-founder of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service and a member of School of the Americas Watch (www.paceebene.org and www.soaw.org)

 Copyrighted material 108 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 7 – Reading 2: “We Need a Truth Commission to Uncover Wrongdoing” © James L. Cavallaro, clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School, who worked on human rights in Chile (1988-1990) and in post-transition Brazil (1994-2002). February 20, 2009, Christian Science Monitor, (www.csmonitor.com). Used with permission.

Does the United States need a truth commission to uncover the wrongdoing committed by the Bush administration in the war on terror? Yes, says Sen. Patrick Leahy (D) of Vermont. Earlier this month, he proposed a process to do just that. “Many Americans feel we need to get to the bottom of what went wrong,” he said. “We need to be able to read the page before we turn the page.”

Many in Washington bristle at the idea. “If every administration started to reexamine what every prior administration did, there would be no end to it,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R) of Pennsylvania. “This is not Latin America.”

No, Senator Specter, this is not Latin America. But as someone who has spent the past quarter century researching and working on human rights issues in the Americas, I cannot help noticing instructive parallels and lessons that we might learn from the experience of our southern neighbors.

To be clear: I am not suggesting that the scale of wrongdoing by the U.S. in the past eight years equals the atrocities of Argentina’s dirty war, Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, or Guatemala’s long civil war. But the nature of the abuses and the official responses and justifications are, tragically, similar. How so?

Let’s begin with the violations that characterized the authoritarian Latin American regimes of the 1970s. In Argentina and Chile, state agents employed brutal violence in the interrogation and detention process (torture). They kidnapped political dissidents and suspected subversives whom they often tortured to extract information, and ultimately, secretly executed them (forced disappearances). Latin American judicial systems failed to oversee the actions of the executive branch of government to gauge the legality of security and antiterrorism policies (lack of judicial independence). And, all too frequently, state agents killed suspects without legal process (extralegal killings).

Sound familiar? It should. In the past eight years of the war on terror, the U.S. government has compiled quite a record of torture, forced disappearances, extralegal killings, and lack of judicial independence. In light of these similarities, we should ask – despite Mr. Specter’s objections – whether anything can be learned from the Latin American experience. Two lessons spring to mind:

First, as Senator Leahy implicitly recognizes, while the period immediately following the departure of offending officials may not always be the most opportune for prosecutions, it is

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Today, in Latin America, the countries that most respect human rights are precisely those that lived through terrible periods of repression but that – gradually – have come to terms with their abusive pasts by thorough investigations and accountability. In each successful case, authorities created truth commissions to document and preserve relevant information in the early transition period in which they were unable or unwilling to prosecute violators.

Second, even with the creation of truth and reconciliation commissions, revelations about past abuses irrupt. Human rights expert Alexander Wilde has termed these “irruptions of memory” – unplanned moments in which vital truths about repressive practices are made public. One example is the 1995 confessions of Adolfo Scilingo, an Argentine naval captain who had participated in death flights over a decade earlier in which drugged detainees were thrown out of planes to drown. Mr. Scilingo simply could not live with his conscience and, a dozen years after Argentina’s transition, chose to speak openly about the many crimes he had committed and witnessed.

Another source of this sort of irruption of memory is external: foreign courts, as was seen with the investigation and arrest of Pinochet in London in 1998 and the effects this produced within Chile. But there are other similar cases of leaders (such as Peru’s Alberto Fujimori, extradited by Chile) and mid-level administrators who have been brought to justice or forced to testify outside their home countries. Each of these instances has triggered consequences in the country of origin. What irruptions of memory and external prosecutions have in common is that both destabilize the apparent calm established in the country, a calm often built on a negotiated forgetting and non- examination of the past.

What Senator Specter and the rest of the U.S. can learn from Latin America is this: If we are to control our own destiny, we must reclaim our past. A truth commission, along the lines suggested by Senator Leahy, would be a good means of beginning that process. The alternative – to turn the page without knowing what is on it – could doom us to a haphazard and unpredictable future in which individual consciences and other nations’ courts control our destiny.

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Sister Dianna Ortiz, US born survivor of torture, is the founder of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), an organization of torture survivors. Catherine Grosso is a member of the faculty of the Michigan State University College of Law and worked with survivors of torture in the Middle East. This op-ed appeared in several newspapers across the country.

We will soon know whether the Obama administration believes in one law for all citizens or whether the powerful are exempt from that principal. More specifically, will President Obama initiate an investigation into those who have ordered and approved the practice of torture no matter how high up in the previous administration they may have been?

Enough is known by now to suggest that officials such as former Vice-President, Cheney, former Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, and the former President, himself may have violated U.S. law and hence, should be the subjects of investigation, and if warranted prosecution as well. The only question now is whether the president will do what under law, he is required to do. (There has been much discussion of how he may avoid this responsibility in favor of placing a thin veneer of concern over the issue of torture by ordering a commission to “look into the facts” but nothing more, thus, in his words, “looking forward not back.”)

The Obama administration has already conceded or is prepared to concede that the Geneva conventions apply to the war on terror, that torture is and should be illegal, and that the military commissions violate our basic tenants of fair process. The risk, however, is that in the euphoria over succeeding in these areas that required such vigilance and persistence during the Bush administration, we will lose track of the scope and depth of the damage. When it comes to torture, the biggest harm is to ordinary people all over the world who come face to face with an interrogator. U.S. policy has chipped away at the very notion of an international ban on torture. U.S. rhetoric badly eroded belief that civilized nations do not torture. Most fundamentally, U.S. practice eroded the nascent restraint that might have existed in some interrogation cells in some corners of the world. We must focus today on how to repair this damage and to restore the global understanding that torture and ill-treatment are only practiced by outlaws, thugs, and renegades.

The immediate risk is that a "forward looking" administration will be tempted to fix the outrageous policies and laws, perhaps even to authorize an investigation of some sort, but to avoid at all cost any prosecution of people who have violated the law. An investigation is important. The truth is powerful and we must be ready to hear, to know, to own, and to document the grave breaches of human dignity that have been perpetrated in the name of the war on terror. But an investigation alone cannot remedy the harm that has been done to customary international law and, more importantly, to the safety of detainees all over the world. The U.S. discourse on torture, so often in its defense, has diminished the shame associated with torturing or ill-treating

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The United States, as a member of the world community, must say loudly and clearly that this discourse was wrong and that those who advanced it stood outside of our laws and our values. We must work to ensure certain prosecutions are squarely on the table as a possible response to the findings of any investigation. Prosecutions like this have happened before and history will admire this administration if it proves to be courageous enough to follow this honorable path.

Eric Holder, Attorney General designate, stated that waterboarding, an interrogation technique admitted to have been used by the CIA under the Bush administration, is torture. However, waterboarding is not the only form of torture on the table. The Geneva Conventions (treaties that were negotiated at a time when nations and citizens were acutely aware of the dangers of war) "prohibit at any time and in any place whatsoever . . . violence to life and person, in particular . . . cruel treatment and torture." Remember the mock executions, distortions of light and temperature, shaking, the use of dogs, humiliation based on religion, sexuality, sanitation. Torture is illegal. It is also a war crime.

If domestic law appears not to provide enough force, our treaty obligations should. The United States is a party to the Convention Against Torture and as such we accepted an obligation to conduct a “prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.” Certainly the evidence available in the public record today provides a “reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed.”

The way we, as a modern democracy, show that people have transgressed our laws is by prosecuting them as law breakers in the court of law. Our Constitution and our criminal laws require that we do nothing less. Our usual procedures for the investigation, prosecution, and trial of those who break the law will serve us well. Why should we reserve our criminal courts for drug users and dealers? An independent criminal investigation is how we get from accusations to evidence. It is time to start this investigation, and to follow the evidence honestly and in good faith.

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U.S.-Sponsored Torture: A Call for a Commission of Inquiry

WHEREAS one of our core principles as ______[insert faith or “people of faith”] is our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of all persons; and

Whereas torture violates the basic dignity of the human person, degrades everyone involved -- from policy-makers to perpetrators to victims -- and contradicts our nation’s most cherished values; and

Whereas torture is inherently wrong and immoral, because it is designed to break the human soul and the human body; and

Whereas reliable evidence available to the public has shown that the United States has engaged in torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in response to the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, including a report produced by the International Committee of the Red Cross and made known to the public in February of 2009 that concluded: “[T]he ill-treatment to which [detainees] were subjected while held in the CIA[Central Intelligence Agency of the United States]program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture.”; and

Whereas the full story on the scope, breadth and depth of U.S. sponsored torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment has yet to be fully revealed; and

Whereas public awareness, acknowledgement, and understanding of what the United States has done with respect to the use of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment are necessary in order to make sure that our nation never again engages in this conduct;

Therefore, be it resolved that the ______(name of institution) endorses the following statement “U.S.-sponsored Torture Now: A Call for a Commission of Inquiry”:

The United States must never again engage in torture. Torture is immoral, illegal and counterproductive. It causes profound and lasting harm, especially to its victims but also to its perpetrators. It contradicts our nation’s deepest values and corrupts the moral fabric of our society.

We call for an impartial, nonpartisan, and independent Commission of Inquiry. Its purpose should be to gather all the facts and make recommendations. It should ascertain the extent to which our interrogation practices have constituted torture and "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment". Understanding the causes, nature and scope of U.S.-sponsored torture is essential for preventing it in the future and eliminating it from our system without loopholes. U.S. law will determine the extent of any criminal culpability.

 Copyrighted material 113 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. As people of faith, we know that brokenness can be healed – both in individual lives and in the life of the nation. All religions believe that redemption is possible. Learning the truth can set us on a path toward national healing and renewal.

The United States must never again allow itself to be driven by blinding fears and bitter resentments in responding to national tragedy. The use of torture only serves to undermine our security in a dangerous world.

Nothing less than the soul of our nation is at stake in confronting U.S.-sponsored torture and completely renouncing its use. Let the U.S. reaffirm its values by establishing a Commission of Inquiry.

NRCAT: Five Goals to End Torture

National Religious Campaign Against Torture: Agenda for 2009

1. Secure an Executive Order banning torture. President Obama signed this executive order on January 22, 2009 – just two days after taking the Oath of Office.

2. Secure an independent Commission of Inquiry that will investigate and disclose the torture policies and practices of the U.S. government since September 11, 2001.

3. Monitor the special task force created by the Presidential executive order on interrogation to ensure that its recommendations do not provide for secret, or non-“Golden Rule” compliant interrogation techniques, and to ensure that its recommendations provide for strong safeguards against rendition for torture.

4. Codify the elements of the executive order and other important anti-torture provisions into law.

a. The “Golden Rule”: Congress should create one national standard for interrogation by requiring the President to affirm publicly that every interrogation technique authorized for use by American interrogators is based upon the “Golden Rule.”

b. ICRC Access: President Obama has ordered that the International Committee of the Red Cross be allowed access to all detainees. Congress should codify this into law.

c. Videotaping Interrogations: Congress should require that all interrogations of detainees be videotaped.

d. Repealing the MCA: Congress should repeal the Military Commissions Act (MCA). The MCA promotes the use of torture by allowing the use of evidence gained through coercion and protects officials who authorized or ordered the abuse of detainees.

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5. Increase the number of people in the U.S. who believe that torture is always wrong – without exception. The religious community will implement this goal through the activities described below, drawing upon support and resources provided by NRCAT (www.nrcat.org)

Worship and study within religious communities.

Community outreach through educational videos, facilitated dialogue, banners, posters, and bumper stickers.

Public events, including local programs/conferences and nationally coordinated days of witness.

Media coverage generated nationally, regionally and locally to amplify the primary messages of our education, organizing and advocacy.

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SESSION EIGHT: Bearing Witness to the Gospel: A Prophetic Church in the U.S.

Note to Participants

Your reading for this session • Reading 1 – “Letter of the US Catholic Bishops to the Congress” from U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, December 2007 • Reading 2 – “Ten Things We Can Do to Respond to Torture” from Torture is a Moral Issue, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops • Reading 3 – “A Christian Call to Stop Torture” from National Catholic Reporter and Roll Call, Pax Christi, USA. April 2006 • From the Appendix: National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), NEW Video and Discussion project • Engaging the World Together online link: http://www.justfaith.org/graduates/pdf/engaging_the_world_together.pdf

Goals of the Session • To raise our awareness about social movements that oppose torture and violence and that defend life and justice. • To find hope in the inspiring ways that the Catholic Church has spoken out against torture and violence, even at the risk of its own life. • To commit ourselves to transforming action, building on what we can do to foster dialogue, peace and justice, and solidarity with others, particularly those who are viewed as different or as enemies.

Session Eight Outline and Notes

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MEDITATION Used in the opening prayer:

Out of the depths. Not from the top of our lungs. Not out of the need just to do something. Not out of pure frustration, anger, desire for revenge. Not out of the superficiality of our restlessness.

Pause

Out of the very depths of our being we cry to God for peace. Out of that fearful place where we have to confess that we too are part of the destruction against which we are protesting.

Pause

Out of that center where we discover that we too are so high up in the air that we have become numb and no longer see, feel and hear the agony of thousands who are struck by the seeds of destruction…

Pause

Out of that empty spot of silence where we feel helpless, embarrassed, and powerless, where we suffer from our own impotence to stop the reign of death in our world.

Pause

Out of those depths we cry to the Lord and say: Lord have mercy Christ have mercy Lord have mercy

(Henri Nouwen, The Road to Peace)

Discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes Again, two volunteers will facilitate the discussion of The Blindfold’s Eyes. The following questions will be the basis of the session discussion and are to be used as the focus for your journaling this week.

Session 8: Epilogue “I have to offer all I have and believe and hope it’s enough…”

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Break

Video and Video Discussion

Weekly Theme Discussion Theme: Next Steps

Guidepost questions for discussion, journaling and reflection.

Summary of 10 Things We Can Do to Respond to Torture from this session’s readings. Think of practical actions you could commit to for some of these.

The ten actions suggested are: 1. Listen to the voices of torture survivors. 2. End the use of euphemisms for torture. 3. Educate, educate, educate—and pray! 4. Consider signing a statement of conscience; make our voices heard. 5. Pray for our enemies or those who consider us their enemies. 6. Overcome evil in the world with goodness. 7. Participate in inter-religious dialogue; know who our enemies are NOT. 8. Prepare the young for a new world of dialogue. 9. Fast for justice and peace; foster solidarity with torture victims. 10. Promote justice in the world.

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The “next steps” discussion will also revolve around the Engaging the World Together document that should be read before the session. Also, the final document in the Participant Packet is “JustFaith Ministries: A Multilayered Ministry of Formation.” It is important to consider these documents as we consider where to go from here.

Evaluations JustFaith Ministries has created a participant evaluation which is very helpful to the ongoing development of modules in its JustMatters program.

Doing the evaluations online saves paper and time and allows the JustFaith Ministries staff to analyze the responses more effectively. Also, the online evaluation is easy to complete and should not take more than fifteen minutes. It can be accessed at: http://survey.constantcontact.com/survey/a07e37fbcrvghp3oy0d/start

It is important to note that once you start the evaluation you will need to complete the whole thing at that time.

Please complete this evaluation within two weeks of finishing the module. The timely return of the evaluations is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

From Closing Ritual

May you keep vigil in the dark… May you stay awake and stay informed… May you stand up and speak out… May you ask awkward questions… And may the Spirit of the tortured Christ give you the courage to act on behalf of those whose bodies and minds have been broken. Amen

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Bearing Witness to the Gospel: A Prophetic Church in the U.S.

Session 8 – Reading 1: “Letter of the U.S. Catholic Bishops to the Congress of the United States”

December 17, 2007

Dear Senator:

As Chairman of the Committee on International Policy of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, I am writing regarding proposed legislation in HR 2082, the Intelligence Authorization Act, to prohibit torture as an interrogation technique. I urge you to ensure that the United States continues to insist upon the highest ethical standards and fully complies with U.S. commitments to observe international law in its treatment of detainees whether here in the United States or abroad.

In 2005 our Conference of Bishops encouraged Congress to adopt provisions in the FY2006 Defense Appropriations Act prescribing uniform standards for the interrogation of persons under the detention of the Department of Defense and prohibiting cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment of persons under the custody or control of the United States government. We welcomed President Bush’s endorsement of those provisions. When Congress adopted them, the United States began to answer the profound moral question of how we should treat detainees. This issue has a major impact on human dignity and on the way the United States is viewed abroad.

We hoped that through these recent actions the United States would regain the moral high ground on this issue. We also hoped that these favorable actions would not be jeopardized by any proposed or adopted legislation or other actions that would appear to once again decriminalize torture and abusive conduct. Any legislation adopted by the Congress must be unambiguous on these issues, just as the U.S. Army Field Manual is unambiguous in rejecting torture and cruel treatment as dangerous, unreliable and illegal.

As you know, the United States has long supported Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits “cruel treatment and torture” as well as “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment….” Our own troops and citizens benefit from the protections of this standard. As events continue to unfold in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, we recognize that combating terrorism remains a top priority for Congress and the Administration. We also recognize, however, that any report of prisoner mistreatment by members of the armed forces of the United States or its allies could seriously undermine U.S. efforts to defeat terrorism.

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More importantly, prisoner mistreatment compromises human dignity. A respect for the dignity of every person, ally or enemy, must serve as the foundation of security, justice and peace. There can be no compromise on the moral imperative to protect the basic human rights of any individual incarcerated for any reason.

We share the concern of lawmakers and citizens for the safety of U.S. soldiers and civilians serving abroad in these times of great uncertainty and danger. In the face of this perilous climate, our nation must not embrace a morality based on an attitude that “desperate times call for desperate measures” or “the end justifies the means.” The inherent justice of our cause and the perceived necessities involved in confronting terrorism must not lead to a weakening or disregard of U.S. or international law.

In a time of terrorism and fear, our individual and collective obligations to respect dignity and human rights, even of our worst enemies, gains added importance. Reaffirming the standards contained in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions would reflect the conviction that our nation must treat its prisoners as we would expect our enemies to treat our own military personnel or citizens. We urge you to support proposed legislative language that would definitively implement America’s commitment to Common Article 3.

Preserving the strong U.S. commitment to humane and ethical treatment of detainees would continue your efforts to restore the moral credibility of the United States at a crucial time.

Thank you for your consideration of our views on the just treatment of prisoners and detainees.

Sincerely yours, Bishop Thomas G. Wenski Bishop of Orlando Chairman, Committee on International Policy

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Every so often a news report astonishes us. Maybe it makes us aware, as if for the first time, of a challenging situation in the world around us. Maybe the report disturbs us and leaves us wanting to do something about the concern it brought to our attention.

Think back to a news report that affected you this way. Was there, for example, a report that awakened you as if for the first time to the number of abortions performed annually in the United States? Were you astonished by a report that detailed the profound effects of poverty on children? Was there a report on the plight of homeless people, human trafficking or elder abuse that really brought the problem into the light for you and left you feeling disturbed?

When a new awareness of a particular challenge emerges within us, it is common to feel personally challenged. At first we may just want to learn more about the issue. Soon, however, we’ll very likely want to share our new awareness with others, to draw them into the circle of our concern. And before long we may begin to ask what we can do to address the problem personally or together with others.

At the time of this writing, torture makes an appearance almost daily in news reports. It is investigated, analyzed, debated. Torture even has become the subject of primetime TV dramas, with some even seemingly justifying it.

Most current news reports that discuss torture relate to how the United States and its allies have treated and interrogated captives of the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, and others detained in an effort to deter future terrorist attacks. That is the module’s primary concern. At the same time, an organization known as the Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition reminds us that torture currently is practiced by more than 150 governments of the world. Torture is not merely a reality of the past. You may well know someone who is a torture survivor or find yourself sitting next to one while commuting to work.

Many people were astonished to learn of the ways prisoners were interrogated by U.S. personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Often, what people heard awakened them; it brought to the front of their minds a moral concern that up to that time hadn’t come into full view.

Not surprisingly, people began to ask what they could do about torture and prisoner abuse. Where could they learn more about this? How could they share their concern about this with others? What constructive action could they take—alone, or with others?

What to do about torture is the focus of this chapter. In keeping with the twin concerns that shaped our three earlier chapters, we’ll examine

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2. Ways to view torture within the larger context of Catholic Social Teaching and a consistent ethic of life, in hopes of establishing a less fearful and desperate tone within society, and thus helping to build a society less likely to resort to practices such as torture.

Perhaps we can begin this discussion by pondering the following question, which may give direction, and lend substance, to our investigations:

What can any of us do, alone or together, that makes a difference in matters of great public concern such as poverty, or abortion, or human trafficking, or torture?

#1. Listen to the Voices of Torture Survivors

A. Torture’s Immense Toll Invite a torture survivor to speak at your church, your school, or in another context. That is an action recommended by the Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition (TASSC) as a means of helping to abolish torture wherever it is practiced in the world today.

TASSC was established in 1998 by Ursuline Sister Dianna Ortiz, a U.S. citizen and missionary who, in November 1989, was tortured and raped in Guatemala. Sister Ortiz wrote in The Blindfold’s Eyes (Orbis Books), her 2002 account of the suffering she endured and her long quest for justice, that she is “but one of millions worldwide who has ascended from the torture chamber.” She notes that according to one source, in 2001 “more than 150 governments engaged in torture or ill treatment.”

In The Blindfold’s Eyes, Sister Ortiz said that “while working as a missionary in Guatemala, I was abducted by security forces and taken to a secret torture center in the capital city.” She explained, “People who were considered threats to the status quo were abducted and tortured at a rate of nearly two a day.”

As a teacher working with indigenous children, the security forces considered her a possible subversive, Sister Ortiz said. She said that with Vatican Council II in the mid- 1960s and the subsequent 1968 meeting of the Latin American bishops in Medellin, Colombia, “the Church made a commitment to work toward social justice on behalf of the excluded, poor and underprivileged. The Guatemalan army, accordingly, ‘considered Catholics to be allies of the guerrillas,’ as Guatemala’s truth commission would find years later.”

After she was tortured, Sister Ortiz promised to “tell the world what I have seen and heard.” Yet, she writes, “every time I have spoken publicly about what happened to me in that secret prison in Guatemala, I have relived the experience.”  Copyrighted material 123 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. In an October 2003 Catholic News Service report by Tara Dix, Sister Ortiz said it was ironic that in Guatemala she had found herself, her mission in life, but that in Guatemala, she also lost herself in the darkness of despair, and “saw evil at its worst.”

Torture’s toll is immense, Sister Ortiz makes clear in her book. “The damage torture does can never be undone. If I survived for any reason, it is to say that.”

B. Visit the TASSC Web Site “The mission of TASSC is to end the practice of torture wherever it occurs and to empower survivors, their families and communities wherever they are,” the Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition’s Web site explains. TASSC actively works on behalf of torture survivors, especially those seeking asylum and living in fear that they will be deported back to their nation of origin. It encourages local groups to aid torture survivors, noting that many live in poverty. You can make an online visit to TASSC at www.tassc.org.

“Survivors of torture live all over the world,” says TASSC. “Survivors of torture may be working in offices beside us, cleaning our homes and caring for our children.”

The TASSC Web site includes a helpful list of Frequently Asked Questions and Answers About Torture. You can access the questions and answers by clicking on the site’s “About Torture” section.

Truth Speakers is TASSC’s public speaking network, promoting education about torture by providing speakers for local groups. These speakers are torture survivors. Contact TASSC at 4121 Harewood Rd. N.E., Suite B, Washington, D.C. 20017, or by telephone at 202-529-2991.

#2. End the Use of Euphemisms for Torture

How important is it to label a reality accurately—to call it what it is? Some commentators believe that by avoiding the use of certain terms in discussions of disturbing social realities, we actually avoid dealing with these realities themselves.

The use of “sanitized” or “evasive” terminology and “skewed definitions” in discussions of the handling of prisoners in the current combat against terrorism has a way of keeping torture itself from coming into full view, the Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition suggested, in a 2006 submission to the U.N. Committee Against Torture. TASSC called it “highly deceptive” for government officials to use such language.

Father Bryan Massingale, a Catholic moral theologian who teaches at Jesuit-run Marquette University in Milwaukee, also has called attention to the terminology sometimes used in discussions of major social realities, including torture. In a July 2007  Copyrighted material 124 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. speech to the Roundtable Association of Diocesan Social Action Directors, Father Massingale said, “Consider some contemporary euphemisms, that is, how we describe social reality in ways that disguise and misrepresent it to dull our awareness of injustice. We speak of ethnic cleansing instead of genocide; of gated communities instead of racially segregated neighborhoods; of neutralizing the enemy instead of killing; of downsizing instead of unemployment; of domestic surveillance instead of spying; of corporate restructuring instead of profit maximization; of enhanced interrogation techniques instead of torture.”

Enhanced interrogation techniques: This terminology, cited above by Father Massingale, undoubtedly represents the euphemism most frequently cited by commentators on the contemporary use of torture. And the second most frequently cited euphemism for torture is surely “the extraordinary rendition” of prisoners, meaning that the United States or its allies sends a prisoner into another nation’s custody for interrogation. Often, commentators point out, it is well known that these other nations practice torture.

But any terminology that waters down the reality of torture, or that masks its reality, may be a euphemism. Thus, “sleep management” might replace “sleep deprivation,” forcing prisoners to sit or stand in “stress positions” might mean forcing them to assume cruelly punishing postures for long periods.

Sometimes severe forms of interrogation are labeled “abuse,” rather than “torture”— apparently out of a sense that “abuse” somehow sounds less cruel. Some might say that a certain interrogation technique is “tantamount” to torture, as if to suggest that it is almost, but not quite, torture. And some commentators consider even the term “waterboarding” euphemistic—a term that they say does not fully call to mind the reality of a simulated drowning.

What do you think? Do you find it difficult even to use the term “torture” in discussions of the treatment of military prisoners held by your country? If so, why?

# 3. Educate, Educate, Educate – and Pray

Franciscan Father Kenneth Himes, chairman of the theology department at Jesuit-run Boston College, reports seeing a display at one time in the home church in Rome of the Sant’Egidio movement that vividly called attention to the issue of prisoner abuse. Sant’Egidio is a contemporary church movement actively working for peace and justice

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Father Himes said that when he visited the church some years ago, a display had been set up “in one of the niches of the church that had been a side altar. The exhibit was set up like a prison cell, painted dark gray, with bars across the stained-glass window and various instruments of torture on display: chains, pincers, handcuffs, a whip, needles, blindfolds, etc.”

The display included “photos of a half dozen or so people who were recent victims of torture in different regions of the world,” Father Himes added. He said there also was “a placard on a small stand that was a prayer for healing and courage for victims.” Whenever Father Himes visited the church while the exhibit was up, he saw someone kneeling in prayer before it.

Raising awareness of the reality of torture is a first step to creating a consensus of the need to end this practice. Distributing reading materials about torture or sponsoring a workshop can raise awareness. You can show a film to raise public consciousness or write to television producers to protest programs which appear to justify torture.

You can keep abreast of current news and legislation related to torture by checking out the Web site of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), www.nrcat.org, for a list of other sites to visit as further sources of information about torture and activities undertaken to combat its use. And you can keep track of USCCB actions against torture by visiting the human rights page of their Web site, www.usccb.org/sdwp/international/libertyind.shtml.

What are some contexts in your church community—classes, small groups, etc.—where a religious educational effort might be undertaken to address torture and prisoner abuse in today’s world?

# 4. Consider Signing a Statement of Conscience

More than 18,000 concerned people have signed the “Torture is a Moral Issue” Statement of Conscience of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture. The president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has endorsed this statement. Anyone can join them, simply by signing the Statement of Conscience online at www.nrcat.org. Here is the text of the statement:

 Copyrighted material 126 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Torture violates the basic dignity of the human person that all religions, in their highest ideals, hold dear. It degrades everyone involved—policy-makers, perpetrators and victims. It contradicts our nation's most cherished ideals. Any policies that permit torture and inhumane treatment are shocking and morally intolerable. Nothing less is at stake in the torture abuse crisis than the soul of our nation. What does it signify if torture is condemned in word but allowed in deed? Let America abolish torture now— without exceptions.

You can visit the Web site’s “People of Faith Act” section for a discussion of additional actions to take against torture. At the NRCAT Web site, in addition to its many other materials and offerings

• You can order an anti-torture banner to display in your faith community, or school, or in some other location, as a means of raising awareness of the reality of torture today. Just click on the site’s “People of Faith Act” section to order a banner with the message “torture is wrong” or “torture is a moral issue.”

• You’ll find a sample letter to the editor to send to your local newspaper, opposing legislation that allows the use of practices commonly regarded as torture. (Click on “Don’t let this be ignored!” on the NRCAT home page.)

• You can phone, e-mail, or write your representatives in Washington, D.C. (call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121, or go to www.house.gov and www.senate.gov to locate your representative) to urge them to support legislation banning torture

What are some ways for people of faith to make their voices heard in society on the issue of torture and its use today?

#5. Pray for Your Enemies

Does it make sense to pray for those we perceive as enemies or who perceive us as their enemies?

“We need every day to pray for our enemies in order to avoid the toxin of hatred. Praying for our enemies enfolds this chaotic world into the harmony of God's kingdom,” Jesuit Father Frederic Maples, a chaplain and spiritual director in Littleton, New Hampshire, wrote in a 2004 article for the Catholic News Service religious educational service Faith Alive! (January 12, 2004).

 Copyrighted material 127 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, “Pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44). Those words have been recalled frequently since September 11, 2001. Often it is said that in praying for our enemies, we begin to see them more clearly as persons—that prayer counters a temptation to demonize them. How important is this at a time when, as Holy Cross Father Edward Malloy, former president of the University of Notre Dame, wrote recently, “we are increasingly tempted to characterize our enemies as satanic, demented” (Portland magazine, winter 2007, p. 28).

Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, says that the love of God and of neighbor is so firmly linked “that to say that we love God becomes a lie if we are closed to our neighbor or hate him altogether.” In his 2001 Lenten message, Pope John Paul II said that when the Church speaks about loving enemies, it hopes to inspire within the human family “a new way of relating to each other—a somewhat difficult way, but rich in hope.” He said, “To love those who have offended us is to disarm them and to turn even a battlefield into an arena of mutual support and cooperation.”

One opportunity to pray for enemies arises in the Prayers of Intercession during the Mass. What form might an intercession for enemies take? In a 2002 article, Father Thomas Faucher of the Diocese of Boise, Idaho, cautioned against turning any prayer of intercession—including a prayer for enemies—into an editorial statement or brief sermon. With that in mind, he wrote, “All the parts of the Mass that we compose (homily, General Intercessions, announcements) must truly be anchored in the Gospel, must challenge everyone and must be written with theological care. That might be as simple as praying for ‘those who consider themselves our enemies…’” (Catholic News Service, Faith Alive!).

Is there a way for your parish community to pray for those your nation regards as enemies or who regard your nation as an enemy, including prisoners accused of terrorist acts?

In a September 2002 homily, one year after the attacks of 9-11, Bishop John Kinney of St. Cloud, Minnesota, said, “As difficult as it is at this moment, we even pray for our enemies as Christ has commanded us to do. We pray for all those whose hatred has become so great that they are willing to commit such horrible crimes against our common humanity. How is it possible for people to commit such horrible acts of cruelty and ferocity against other human beings? We must struggle beyond our anger to search out the reasons why they hate us so much.”

“Prayer is the breath of the soul. Without prayer, the soul suffocates,” Cardinal Francis

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#6. Overcome Evil with Good

“We must be convinced that the power of good can overcome evil in each and every human heart and nation,” Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington, Virginia, wrote in a pastoral letter for the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in America.

Bishop Loverde cautioned that “revenge and resentment are deeply entrenched human emotions which we have all experienced.” He said, “As Catholics we know a higher road. We are called to respond to terrorism by imitating our Lord, the loving author of peace and justice. For Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.’”

The Arlington diocesan offices are located near the Pentagon, one target of the 9-11 attacks. Bishop Loverde described the horror of the morning of 9-11. He said, “The memories I have … will never leave me.”

How can peace be found in times such as these? “Appeasement,” Bishop Loverde wrote, “has never shown itself to be the friend of peace; therefore we must act in a just manner to confront the evil of terrorism, so that the world may be a safe and peaceful place.”

Here the bishop quoted Pope John Paul II, whose 2002 World Day of Peace message said “that the shattered order cannot be fully restored except by a response that combines justice with forgiveness.” Are forgiveness and justice irreconcilable? In the pope’s words, “forgiveness is the opposite of resentment and revenge, not of justice. In fact, true peace is ‘the work of justice’ (Is. 32:17).”

Several ways of responding to the attacks of 9-11 were proposed by Bishop Loverde. He urged respect for Muslims, many of whom live in his Northern Virginia area, even attending diocesan schools. (“Our respect is always for the dignity of the person. There is no dignity in terrorism,” the bishop said.) He encouraged authentic inter-religious dialogue.

Other ways of responding were suggested by Bishop Loverde:

forming consciences “so that our response is in accord with the teachings of Jesus Christ”  Copyrighted material 129 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. praying, seeking divine guidance for our own actions and those of our nation

insisting that just-war criteria are met

doing all that we can to avoid “the taking of innocent human life in military undertakings aimed at eliminating the scourge of terrorism.”

Catholics know a higher road than that of revenge and resentment for responding to terrorism, Bishop Loverde said. Do you think that revenge and resentment often condition our society’s response to terrorists? Is there an alternative to this?

# 7. Participate in Inter-religious Dialogue: Know Who Your Enemy Is NOT; Become a Peace Builder

Dialogue among the people of the world’s religions is essential in these times, the Vatican has said. Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, the Vatican’s equivalent of a foreign minister, spoke about this in an address October 1, 2007, at U.N. headquarters in New York. He said, “Dialogue among peoples of different cultures and religions is not an option; it is something indispensable for peace and for the renewal of international life.”

In the present era of globalization, the world grows smaller. The citizens of nations once considered distant from each other now find themselves in much closer contact. The forces of international trade, instant communications and rapid travel are major factors in the shrinking of the planet.

At the same time, globalization has given rise to increased nationalism in numerous places. Concerned that globalization will lead to a loss of respect for their unique identities, nations—and religions—are tempted in some cases to retreat into themselves.

Therefore, one goal of the dialogue between religions that Catholic Church leaders consider essential is to foster respect—a respect for each other’s God-given human dignity and a respect born of recognizing the right of each person to seek the truth for himself or herself—and to reach out and listen to each other on the basis of that mutual respect. The risk, otherwise, is that the people of differing religions, instead of moving toward a closer relationship, could, even in an era of globalization, drift further apart.

Inter-religious dialogue also is regarded today as necessary for world peace. This is particularly important at a time when terrorists typically attach a religious justification to their actions. It becomes ever more vital that the world’s religions show themselves to be

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Pope John Paul II brought leaders of the world’s religions together a number of times to address the role of religion in promoting peace. Speaking at the Vatican to more than 200 representatives of some twenty religions and Christian denominations in October 2000, he said, “Either we learn to walk together in peace and harmony, or we drift apart and ruin ourselves and others.”

There is an additional benefit of inter-religious dialogue to mention: Inter-religious dialogue fosters a clearer awareness of who our enemies are NOT. Since the time of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many religious leaders have gone to great lengths to make clear that the world’s Muslims as such are not enemies of the United States, or of the West, or of Christians.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, Ireland, spoke about this in November 2003, in a speech to the Catholic bishops of the United States. He said that “because the ‘enemy’ … is difficult to define” in the fight against terrorism, “we have to be careful to avoid that everyone becomes a potential enemy,” to avoid regarding the combat against terror as “a war against the other.” For, said Archbishop Martin, “a society built on fear and mistrust of the other will never be a peaceful society.”

Does your parish, diocese, or local Catholic college conduct an ongoing inter-religious dialogue, perhaps one involving Jews, Catholics and Muslims? If so, might you attend or help to plan this dialogue? If not, how can you encourage your parish, diocese, or local Catholic college to initiate such a dialogue?

# 8. Prepare the Young for a New World of Dialogue

Cardinal Francis Arinze spoke in 2000 of the need to prepare young people to live in a new kind of world. Today, the education of young people ought to encompass “the fundamental values of human dignity, peace, freedom and solidarity,” he said. Moreover, their education ought to evoke “the desire to know other people, to be able to share their sorrows and to understand their deepest feelings.” Cardinal Arinze, then president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, presented these thoughts in his December 2000 message to the Muslim world marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

“Education for dialogue means nurturing the hope that conflict situations can be resolved through personal and collective commitment,” Cardinal Arinze’s message said.

 Copyrighted material 131 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. “In accompanying young people along the highways of life, attention has to be given to the preparation required for living in a society marked by ethnic, cultural and religious pluralism,” Cardinal Arinze said. Such education implies “that we broaden our vision to an ever wider horizon … so that we can see humanity as a single family in both its diversity and its common aspirations.”

Finally, the cardinal noted, “education for dialogue is not just for children and young people; it is also important for adults.”

How can you support an educational effort or program in your church community that could focus for a period of time on the reasons why it is important to create positive relations with the “others” living alongside us in this globalized world, such as members of the worldwide Muslim community?

# 9. Fast for Peace and Justice: Foster Solidarity With Others

Two months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Catholic bishops in the United States urged Catholics to begin fasting one day a week. In a statement titled Living With Faith and Hope After September 11, the bishops said, “A successful campaign against terrorism will require a combination of resolve to do what is necessary to see it through, restraint to ensure that we act justly and a long-term focus on broader issues of justice and peace.”

Fasting was among actions the bishops encouraged. They said, “This fast is a sacrifice for justice, peace and for the protection of innocent human life.” Your group may want to consider dedicating one day during your examination of the torture issue to fasting.

What is fasting good for? It can be penitential; it often is regarded as a form of prayer and it facilitates conversion (turning our lives around). Fasting also can express solidarity with others.

The fact that fasting is a practice shared by Christians and Muslims was noted in November 2001 by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C. (The cardinal retired as Washington’s archbishop in 2006.) Cardinal McCarrick said, during an interfaith commemorative service in Washington, that among its various purposes, fasting can “assure our Muslim brothers and sisters of our love and respect, and remind ourselves that it is never right to indict a whole people for the crimes of a few.”

 Copyrighted material 132 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Also in November 2001, Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles encouraged Catholics to “fast for an end to fear and terror, and that paths of peace might be found throughout the world.”

How can a sacrificial means of fasting that you, your family or a group in which you participate might undertake as a means of saving money to contribute to Catholic Relief Services (www.crs.org) or some other organization that aids suffering people, work for justice and thus help to create a basis for peace in the world?

#10. Act to Foster Justice in the World

“A more just world will likely be a more peaceful world, a world less vulnerable to terrorism and other violence,” the Catholic bishops of the United States said, in their November 2007 statement on political responsibility. The United States, they said, “has a unique opportunity to use its power in partnership with others to build a more just and peaceful world.” In a February 2002 statement regarding September 11, bishops said, “Without in any way justifying the unjustifiable, the U.S. must do much more to address policies and problems that provide fertile ground in which terrorism can thrive.”

When leaders and educators in the church call attention to the role of social development in the creation of world peace, they are echoing the voice of Pope Paul VI, who, in a 1967 encyclical titled Populorum Progressio, called development “the new name for peace.”

Pope Benedict XVI visited Turkey in November 2006, where he had this to say, in an address to the diplomatic community in Ankara: “We have come to realize that true peace needs justice to correct the economic imbalances and political disturbances that always give rise to tension and threaten every society.” The pope said, “More than 40 years ago the Second Vatican Council wrote that ‘peace is more than the absence of war: It cannot be reduced to the maintenance of a balance of power between opposing forces ... but it is the fruit of the right ordering of things with which the divine founder has invested human society and which must be brought about by humanity in its thirst for an ever more perfect reign of justice.’”

To promote international justice and peace and oppose the use of torture, go to USCCB’s Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development Web site. See the attached link, www.usccb.org/sdwp/international/libertyind.shtml.

Are you aware of actions carried out by your parish to foster social justice on the local level? What are some additional actions you might take to promote justice locally or on the larger national and international levels?

 Copyrighted material 133 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. Session 8 – Reading 3, “A Christian Call to Stop Torture” Pax Christi USA published this statement in the National Catholic Reporter and Roll Call, Congress’s daily newspaper. April 2006.

“The thought of Jesus being stripped, beaten and derided until his final agony on the cross should always prompt a Christian to protest against similar treatment of their fellow beings. Of their own accord, disciples of Christ will reject torture, which nothing can justify, which causes humiliation and suffering to the victim and degrades the tormentor.” - Pope John Paul II

As followers of Jesus, we must state clearly and unequivocally that torture violates the basic human dignity afforded all of God’s children, and is never morally acceptable. On this two-year anniversary of the revelations of the cruel, inhumane and humiliating treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison - the first of numerous revelations regarding institutionalized torture practices in the U.S. War on Terrorism - we reiterate our Church’s profound respect for the dignity of all persons and reject as antithetical to Christianity any and all justifications for the use of torture.

There is no debate on where the social teachings of the Catholic Church lie on the issue of torture: “International judicial instruments concerning human rights correctly indicate a prohibition against torture as a principle which cannot be contravened under any circumstances,” states the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church.

Pope John Paul II echoed this call when he decisively stated that there is never any justification for torture. “Christ’s disciple refuses every recourse to such methods, which nothing could justify and in which the dignity of humanity is as much debased in the torturer as in the torturer’s victim.”

Despite U.S. laws banning torture, the Bush Administration has employed interrogation techniques in the War on Terrorism which clearly constitute torture. Despite prohibiting cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners, the recently passed McCain bill also provides legal defenses that greatly shield those who command or commit torture.

As people of faith, we are ashamed of efforts by the Bush Administration to circumvent national and international laws that prohibit the use of torture, under the auspices of national security. Evidence that the Bush Administration implemented a system of “rendition outsourcing” - which involves other countries implementing policies of torture under the direction of the U.S. government - as a component of its War on Terrorism is exceptionally egregious. Such evidence - two years after the reports from Abu Ghraib of water-boarding, beatings, pouring chemicals on inmates, and unleashing attack dogs on prisoners - shows that this Administration aims to institutionalize torture practices.

We call on the Bush Administration:

 Copyrighted material 134 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. to cease its justifications of torture in the name of national security; to publicly reaffirm U.S. support for the U.N. Convention on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; to institute as a national policy that no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture; to follow the recommendations from the United Nations that the United States close the Guantanamo Prison in Cuba.

We call for the U.S. Congress: to establish an independent commission to publicly investigate the reports of abuse in U.S. detention centers around the world; to pass legislation to uphold U.S. and international law against “extraordinary rendition,” requiring a ban on transferring a detainee to a country that has a history of torture; to investigate ongoing reports of torture by Iraqi officials, particularly in the Interior Ministry, and hold accountable any U.S. citizens, either military or civilian, associated with conceiving, directing, supporting or acquiescing to this use of torture.

We join with the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference, the National Council of Churches and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture in saying that torture debases the torturer and tortured alike, and denies the preciousness of life “and the dignity of every human being.” As citizens of the U.S. and followers of the nonviolent Christ who suffered torture at the hands of imperial power, we offer sincere and heartfelt apologies to our sisters and brothers in the Middle East, Iraq, Latin America, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and throughout the world who have been victims of torture. We pledge that we will do everything necessary in our country to abolish torture and to hold all offending parties accountable for this affront to God and human dignity.

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Appendix – Additional Resources

The View from Below There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled - in short, from the perspective of those who suffer... We have learned that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christian hope, the hope that characterizes the martyrs, is not shallow optimism but a way of expressing confidence in God despite the circumstances that surround us. Surely this is what we need to rediscover for our times, the hope that will save the world. That is why we do well to reflect on the lives of true martyrs, martyrs who do not seek death as a way to paradise, but who live for justice and peace, and die in the confidence that God will bring healing and salvation out of suffering...

Bonhoeffer knew that he could not stand by and do nothing in the face of immense evil. To do nothing was not only irresponsible, but un-Christian. Bonhoeffer's example is a challenge to all of us who are bystanders in the face of injustice. It is a challenge to recognize that as Christians we are called to be faithful in our witness to Christ, and that this implies faithfulness in the struggle for justice and peace in the world.

- From a sermon in honor of ten twentieth century martyrs - including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero and Martin Luther King, Jr., represented by statues on the west facade of Westminster Abbey - July 21, 2002

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1943 for his anti-Nazi activities. He is best known for his books, "The Cost of Discipleship," and "Letters and Papers from Prison." Bonhoeffer was executed on April 9, 1945.

 Copyrighted material 136 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) NEW Video and Discussion project For discussion of “next steps” in Session 8

All the information on this page is available at the NRCAT website, http://www.nrcat.org

One of NRCAT’s goals from its genesis in 2006 has been to increase the number of people who believe that torture is always wrong with no exceptions. In light of the results of a recent poll* by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, NRCAT is asking congregations to make a commitment to show a new, revised version of the video Ending U.S.-Sponsored Torture Forever. (*the poll illustrates differences in the views of four major religious traditions in the U.S. about whether torture of suspected terrorists can be justified.) Congregations are also being asked to hold a discussion of the film.

To facilitate this project you can view the film in the following ways: • Preview the 20-minute film from a computer with the link on the NRCAT. You can also use this link if you want to project the film on a screen for public viewing, directly from the online version. • Order the DVD which is $5.00 per copy.

Discussion Guides NRCAT has created a one or two session discussion guide for use with the video. It is available in version for Evangelical Christian, Mainline Protestant and Catholic congregations. Versions for Muslim, Jewish and Unitarian Universalist are currently being developed. You can download the discussion guides from the NRCAT website.

The Discussion Guide includes a step-by-step process for preparing for the discussion, suggestions for promotion, and the process for each session.

• Once a congregation agrees to screen the video, NRCAT asks that the leaders of the congregation complete an online registration form, so they can provide further information and support and track participation across the country. • They also ask that discussion facilitators make copies of NRCAT's statement on a “Commission of Inquiry” (also on the website) and urge those who participate in the discussion to consider endorsing it. • NRCAT further encourages facilitators to have a copy of the definition of torture included in Article I of the U.N Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment:

“For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or  Copyrighted material 137 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.”

• Because this film and discussion tool is intended to help reach new audiences, NRCAT hopes that congregations participating in this project will also promote the video to other congregations in your area.

If you have questions about this project, please contact Amber Neuroth ([email protected]) of the NRCAT staff.

Other “Next Steps”

From Pax Christi USA http://paxchristiusa.org

In 2005, as our nation debated the issue of torture, Pax Christi USA published a national sign-on statement calling on political leaders to definitively stop the practice of torture, to cease justification of torture, and to follow the lead of religious leaders from every tradition in recognizing torture as illegal and immoral as well as actually increasing threats to national security. Pax Christi USA’s work on torture includes partnerships with the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC) and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT). If you are interested in next steps on this issue, we encourage you to consider using a prayer card we published, “Jesus, Our Tortured Brother Today,” written by Sr. Dianna Ortiz, OSU, a torture survivor and current Program Director at Pax Christi USA. The prayer card is available from our website, www.paxchristiusa.org, and includes action ideas like organizing events each June in observance of Torture Awareness Month.

Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC) Truth Speakers Network

Truth Speakers is our public speaking network, comprised of survivors of torture who have chosen to speak out publicly about their experiences to promote the campaign against torture.

Truth Speakers is one of TASSC's three education and advocacy programs through which we fulfill our mission to educate the public about the increased use of torture today by the United States and 150 other governments.

The mission of TASSC's Truth Speakers is to educate the public about the fact that governments today use torture despite nearly every state's legal responsibilities to desist from torture under the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, and in the United States, the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.

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TASSC promotes public understanding of crucial facts about torture, including: that torture does not produce truth during interrogation; that torturing detainees may increase the probability of the torture of U.S. personnel when captured; and that torture brutalizes the torturer and all persons responsible for it, no matter their standing in the chain of command.

Request a Truth Speaker Truth Speakers give several presentations to church groups, nongovernmental organizations, community forums, advocacy groups, high school classes and universities in cities across the United States and abroad. The topics on which we speak include issues of torture related to women's or children's rights, refugees, slavery, impunity, economic globalization, and international law. All presentations incorporate the authentic voices of those who have survived torture and speak of it from personal experience. Contact TASSC 4121 Harewood Road NE ~ Suite B Washington, DC 20017 Tel. (202) 529-2991 Fax: (202) 529-8334 [email protected]

TASSC Mission Statement

MISSION The Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC) is the only organization founded by and for torture survivors. The mission of TASSC is to end the practice of torture wherever it occurs and to empower survivors, their families and communities wherever they are.

VISION In the spirit of non-violence and with the hope of achieving justice and social change, TASSC • Works to abolish torture and ill-treatment currently practiced by more than 138 governments. • Advocates for the immediate implementation of Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and all other relevant treaties and conventions. • Breaks the silence surrounding torture and gives voice to survivors through outreach, education and advocacy. • Calls for an end to military assistance, training and arms sales to governments that torture. • Demands an end to impunity for the architects of torture--those who order, justify and practice it.

WHO WE ARE/CORE VALUES:

 Copyrighted material 139 JustFaith Ministries · www.justfaith.org · (502) 429-0865 JustFaith Ministries receives over half of its funding in the form of charitable contributions from program graduates and works in partnership with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Relief Services, Bread for the World, Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, and Pax Christi USA. TASSC is a coalition of torture survivors, representing countries and ethnic groups throughout all parts of the world. The following principles guide our actions. We believe that: • Survivors are one of the strongest and most effective voices in the campaign to abolish torture. • TASSC survivor-advocates must build solidarity with other advocacy groups and the global community of survivors. • Family members as well as survivors of all forms of torture, ill-treatment and political violence are invited to join the global movement for the abolition of torture. • TASSC is concerned not only with the prevention of torture but also addresses its aftermath, the individual survivor, family, community, and society. • The voices of all survivors must be heard equally in TASSC's decision-making.

WHAT WE DO / GOALS: • Create a world-wide network of International Communities of Healing for torture survivors and their families. • Influence domestic and international policy through advocacy, social action, public testimony, and targeted media campaigns. • Monitor human rights violations in nations where TASSC members may be at risk • Operate Helping Hands, a direct assistance program for survivors. • Coordinate the annual United Nations International Day in Support of Torture Victims and Survivors (June 26th). • Speak out personally to the public through the Truth Speakers program.

TASSC is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization and operates independently of any ideology, government or economic interest.

Other Resources

Delve Deeper into the video Soldiers of Conscience

. Reading list: http://www.pbs.org/pov/film- files/soldiersofconscience_dd_reading_list_0_1.pdf . Discussion guide: http://www.pbs.org/pov/film- files/pov_soldiers_dg_action_discussion_file_0_1.pdf . Organize a film screening and discussions about issues including conscientious objection and military resisters.

Similar tools available for Ghosts of Abu Ghraib http://www.workingfilms.org/downloads/GhostsofAbuGhraibToolkit_1.pdf

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JustFaith Ministries A Multilayered Ministry of Formation

Congratulations on completing a JustFaith Ministries (JFM) JustMatters module. JFM provides programs that transform people and expand their commitment to social ministry. Through these life-changing opportunities, members of a church can study, explore and experience Christ’s call to care for the poor and vulnerable in a lively, challenging, multifaceted process in the context of a small faith community. Jack Jezreel, M.Div., the founder and Executive Director of JustFaith Ministries, introduced the original JustFaith program in 1989 while working in a parish in Louisville, Kentucky. It was immediately and dramatically successful. Since then, over 20,000 people have participated in various JustFaith Ministries programs in over 1,200 churches across the country. JustFaith Ministries, in conjunction with its partners, makes available introductory workshops, curriculum, resources, a website, and support services. While JustFaith Ministries was born from the success of the JustFaith program, the organization now includes the following new layers of opportunity for faith formation. JustFaith focuses on discipleship and the call to be about God’s dream of justice and compassion in a world scarred by the domestic and global crisis called poverty. Engaging Spirituality presents a spiritual deepening process that invites small groups to explore the intersection between contemplative presence and social action. JusticeWalking (J-Walking) is a process that forms small communities of older teens and adults to engage in a spiritual journey and exploration of the radical call of the Gospel. College JusticeWalking (J-Walking) is a semester- long “Discipleship Journey” that forms small communities of college students as they experiment with living the Gospel message and the social implications of our faith. JustFaith Ministries is able to offer these programs through the generosity of donors.

JustFaith Ministries also provides an online document, Taking Action Resource Guide http://www.justfaith.org/graduates/pdf/takeaction_resourceguide.pdf to help participants learn more and get involved in this issue.

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