"Military Commissions Act of 2006"

Rabbi's Notes - November 2006

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

I just got home from a little vigil in Fort Bragg, mourning the signing, in Washington this morning, of the "Military Commissions Act of 2006." That's the bill, bitterly fought on Capitol Hill but ultimately passed, which removes many legal protections which have theoretically been in place for people suspected of being somehow related to acts of terror or plans for terror. Now it's official: people can be imprisoned indefinitely without charge. They can be prosecuted in special military courts, which don't need to comply with standard criminal procedures. They can be convicted on the basis of evidence extracted through various kinds of physical and mental coercion. They can be convicted without ever seeing the evidence against them. The President alone can decide whether any person is an "enemy combatant" and therefore ineligible for basic constitutional protections. The President alone can decide whether a given form of interrogation is or is not torture. The President alone can decide to abrogate the Geneva Conventions. He can keep these decisions secret and unavailable for review. It's a day to mourn.

I'm wearing a little black ribbon with a cut in it, the same kind that I have pinned on many mourning families before a funeral. When you cut a ribbon for k'riah, the blessing said is "Blessed is God, Source of All Life, the True Judge." It resounds a little differently when you are mourning the death of sections of the US Constitution.

One of the goals of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, in which I participate through my beloved Rabbis for Human Rights-North America, is to "create a sense of moral prohibition against torture which is equal to that against slavery or murder." I find that goal stunning. All my life I would have said that torture was more taboo even than slavery or murder! If there were one worldwide moral consensus, one act prohibited across cultures, religions and political systems, surely it would have to be the universal proscription of torture. Not that other regimes haven't tortured people. But there is usually an effort to deny it, to keep it secret. Some historians claim that the French left Algeria after 150 years because the French press began to expose the use of torture against liberation fighters there, arousing public ire. In Argentina people were "disappeared" before they were tortured and records concealed to this day.

In fact the United States has also used torture in years past and has pioneered the scientific study of ways to break the human spirit through various cruelties. But here too this work was always covert. I was astonished to learn (from A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, by Alfred McCoy) that the famous Stanford Prison experiment and the Millgram research showing how far people would go when ordered to administer electric shocks were both part of the CIA's research into interrogation techniques during the Cold War. Even over the past few years, since the first public allegations of torture at Guanatanmo and Baghram, and the infamous photos from Abu Ghraib, there was an effort to say that these events were anomalies, the misdeeds of a "few bad apples."

But of course the documents have been surfacing, one after another, from the highest offices in our government, showing that torture and the abuse of detainees' rights were in fact a matter of policy, that they had been rationalized in terms of the law and of defense needs. And finally, over the past two months, the campaign began to make these fully and formally legal. Today was the day that these policies became law.

And here I find hope in the analogy with slavery. Unlike murder (with the exception of capital punishment,) slavery was once legal and widely accepted in our culture and in much of the world. Torah itself accepts the institution of slavery, that we might be slaves and that we might buy other human beings as slaves. In fact, we might infer from the beginning of the Exodus narrative that it wasn't the fact that we were slaves in Mitzrayim that brought about God's intervention, but the particular problem that our taskmasters suddenly became unreasonable in their demands.

Today there is more or less a universal consensus against slavery. As with torture, there are slaves (even in the United States -- I think of the indentured orange pickers in forced confinement on plantations in Florida.) But slavery remains taboo and outside all conventional norms. When allegations arise of sex slavery or of child labor, condemnation is swift and total. There is no one arguing that slavery is acceptable and necessary. There is no one trying to legalize slavery.

Societies were able to accept the institution of slavery to the extent that they dehumanized the enslaved population. As long as it was thought that blacks were 2/3 human beings, it was possible to enslave them. Put another way, when the humanity of enslaved populations became inescapably evident to the dominant population -- through literature and art, through intermingling and friendship -- it was no longer possible to enslave.

Likewise, I believe, it has become possible to torture certain populations because they have been made subhuman in the dominant culture. American-instigated torture goes hand-in-hand with our culture's demonization of Arabs and of Moslems.

There is a bitter irony in the Military Commissions Act being signed the week that we read in Torah of the creation of human beings. This is the week of that amazing image of God creating a human form out of mud and then breathing into the mud figure's nostrils, filling him with life. A widely-quoted midrash teaches that all human beings descend from the same two parents -- deliberately, so that no one person or race can claim that they are more worthy than another.

It took a long time and many battles to shift slavery from being the law and accepted paradigm of the culture to being a moral affront which shocks the conscience. I draw hope from the word "slavery" itself -- how completely taboo it now is, after millennia of being widely accepted. Even a few short years ago "torture" was an even more shocking word than "slavery." There is no bible that justifies torture, no language in our Constitution or in our literature which rationalizes and justifies torture, as there were justifying slavery. Today's law is a shocking deviation from world norms, a moral anomaly. It shouldn't be quite as hard to return our consciences to their proper revulsion. And then it should be a relatively simple piece of work to get the law and public policy to follow suit.

So I stood on a street corner in Fort Bragg with three friends this morning, with my little black ribbon flapping in the fall breeze. It wasn't a public affair, not a demonstration or a rally. Just an hour to stop and think, to mourn for a moment, to want the world to be a different way than it is. Then back to work. It will be…

© 2006 Rabbi Margaret Holub

(home) (calendar) (info) (articles) (sponsors) (links) (bios) (reviews) (travel) (recipes) (projects) (photos) (art)