Torture one reason Brownwood should disavow itself from this presidency. Not likely ! Brownwood IS Bush Country !

Andrew J. Weaver and Fred W. Kandeler, guest column: Torture one reason SMU should disavow itself from this presidency

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Anyone who thinks that the name Methodism or Southern Methodist University should be associated with George W. Bush needs to read the book, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror, by Dr. Steven Miles, professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota.

Using highly credible sources, including eyewitnesses, Army criminal investigations, FBI debriefings of prisoners, autopsy reports and prisoners’ medical records, Miles tells how the highest officials of government are complicit in torture.

While much of the use of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency and special forces troops remains concealed, Miles documents how 19 prisoners were tortured to death by American military personnel.

The book tells of an Afghan prisoner named Dilawar, an innocent 22-year-old, who drove his taxi to the wrong place at the wrong time. At the U.S. detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, in 2002, Dilawar was smothered, shackled and then suspended by his arms.

When he was beaten with a baton, he cried out “Allah, Allah,” which amused the soldiers and triggered more merciless blows.

The official report reads that he was beaten over a five-day period until his legs were, in the words of the coroner, “pulpified.”

He was then chained to the ceiling of his cell, where he died.

Although an autopsy stated that Dilawar’s death was a homicide, Gen. Daniel McNeil told reporters that Dilawar had died of natural causes on the grounds that one of his coronary arteries was partly occluded.

The words “coronary artery disease” were typed in a different font on the prisoner’s death certificate.

Up to 90 percent of the prisoners detained in the Bush “war on terror” have been found to be unjustifiably imprisoned and without intelligence value.

Out-sourced torture

In addition, much of the hideous work of torture is out-sourced by the Bush administration to countries like Uzbekistan, Syria and Egypt, where torture is a long-standing and common practice.

Torture is a crime against humanity and a violation of every human rights treaty in existence, including the Geneva Conventions which prohibit cruel and degrading treatment of detainees.

Torture is as profound a moral issue in our day as was slavery in the 19th century. It represents a betrayal of our deepest human and religious values as a civilized society.

David Hackett Fischer describes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Washington’s Crossing, how thousands of American prisoners of war were “treated with extreme cruelty by British captors,” during the Revolutionary War. There are numerous accounts of injured soldiers after their surrender being murdered and Americans dying in prison ships in New York Harbor of starvation and torture.

After crossing the Delaware River and winning his first battle at Trenton, N.J., on Christmas Day, 1776, George Washington ordered his troops to give refuge to hundreds of surrendering foreign mercenaries.

“Treat them with humanity,” Washington instructed his troops. “Let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British army.”

Contrast this with the Sept. 15, 2006, Washington Post lead editorial titled “The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture.”

“President Bush rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.”

If the Bush Library and think tank are placed at SMU, the United Methodist Church should withdraw its association from the University and demand that the good name from Methodism be removed from the name of the school.

If the United Methodist Church cannot take a stand against the use of torture and those who employ it, including President Bush, what does it stand for?

Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D., is a United Methodist minister and research psychologist living in New York City. Fred W. Kandeler is a retired United Methodist pastor living in New Braunfels and is founding pastor of Christ United Methodist Church of Plano. Both are graduates of the Perkins School of Theology, SMU.

source: http://www.wacotrib.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2007/01/27/01272007wacweaver.html