The Character of the Country

A Sermon by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, March, 7, 2010

Reading Before Sermon:
Taken from an article entitled, “The Predator War” by Jane Meyer, in The New Yorker magazine, October 26, 2009

On August 5th, officials at the Central Intelligence Agency in Virginia watched a live video feed relaying footage of one of the most wanted terrorists in Pakistan. Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, could be seen reclining on the rooftop of his father-in-law’s house in a hamlet in South Waziristan. It was a hot summer night, and he was joined by his wife and his uncle, a medic; at one point, the remarkably crisp images showed that Mehsud, who had diabetes and a kidney ailment, was receiving an intravenous drip.

The video was being captured by the infrared camera of a Predator drone, a remote control unmanned plane that had been hovering, undetected, 2 miles or so above the house. Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, told me that Mehsud was resting on his back. Using his hands to make a picture frame, Malik explained to me that the Predator’s targeters could see Mehsud’s entire body, not just the top of his head. “It was a perfect picture,” said Malik, who watched the videotape later. The image remained just as stable when the CIA remotely launched 2 missiles from the Predator. Authorities watched the fiery blast in real time. After the dust cloud dissipated, all that remained of Mehsud was a detached torso. Eleven others died: Mehsud’s wife, his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, a lieutenant, and 7 bodyguards.

Pakistan’s government considered Mehsud its top enemy, holding him responsible for the vast majority of terrorist attacks inside the country, including the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007, and the bombing, last September, of the Marriott in Islamabad, which killed more than 50 people. He was also thought to have helped in attacks in Afghanistan on American and coalition troops. A former counterterrorism official on the National Security Council said, “Mehsud was someone both we and Pakistan were happy to see go up in smoke.” Indeed, there was no controversy when, a few days after the strike, CNN reported that President Obama had authorized it.

However, at about the same time, there was widespread anger after The Wall Street Journal revealed that during the Bush Administration the CIA had considered setting up hit squads to capture or kill Al Qaeda operatives around the world. The furor grew when the Times reported that the CIA had turned to a private contractor to help with this highly sensitive operation. Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees demanded investigations of the program, which they said, had been hidden from them. Many legal experts argued that, had the program become operational, it would have violated a 1976 executive order banning American intelligence forces from engaging in assassinations.

Hina Shamsi, Human Rights lawyer at the New York University School of Law, was struck by the inconsistency of the responses. “We got upset about a targeted-killing program that didn’t happen,” she told me, “but the drone program exists. These are targeted international killings by the government.”

Vicki Divoll, a former CIA lawyer who now teaches at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, observed, “People are a lot more comfortable with a Predator strike that kills many people than with a throat-slitting that kills one. But mechanized killing is still killing.”

So ends our Reading this morning.

Sermon:

"But mechanized killing is still killing." What if the world reached a point where all the developed nations had robot armies? More to the point, what if the United States had a robot military that we could deploy anywhere we wanted, to fight our battles for us? If you’re like me, then part of you would probably be glad that no American young person would have to be sent to some faraway place to be wounded or killed in combat – but then, another part of you would likely be worried that such robots would mean that our country would permanently be in a state of war, somewhere, with the only real human beings involved being on the other side. Would that be a good thing? What kind of country would we be if we went there?

Reverend Suzanne Meyer used to advise all her ministerial students, including me, to always preach on a topic when it becomes “a burr under your saddle.” (She had an unlimited fund of Texas expressions for every occasion.) Ever since I first read about the CIA’s Predator drone planes, the unstaffed aircraft that drop missiles thousands of miles away from where the computerized operators sit, I have had such a burr. I can’t stop chewing over it in my mind, and wondering what this means for us as a nation. And so here I am, preaching about it this morning.

It’s not just the drones. Other aspects of the so-called War on Crime and War on Terror have been nagging at me as well. Can we really feel “safe and secure” as Americans if we routinely use such practices as long-term solitary confinement to deal with criminals and mental patients (and criminals who are mental patients) and water-boarding to deal with accused terrorists? What kind of country does these things? Who are we?

Of the issues of mechanized war and how we treat those who convicted or suspected of heinous crimes, I think it is the former that worries me the most. With every advance of weaponry – fist, stick, knife, gun, missile, bomb, and now robo-war – the trend in human history, and American history, is always to go to the extreme. That seems more unstoppable than the ways we treat other human beings who are captured or imprisoned.

I am disappointed that President Obama, like many new Chief Executives (remember the Bay of Pigs early in JFK’s presidency?), has fallen in with the CIA and approved drone strikes. In addition to the one last summer detailed in this morning’s Reading, there were 2 on Obama’s 3rd day in office. Those strikes killed over 24 people in Pakistan, including 4 likely terrorists and 3 small children. According to a study just completed by the New America Foundation, the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically under President Obama; indeed, he has so far authorized as many aerial attacks in Pakistan in his first 18 months as George Bush did in his final 3 years.

It has been estimated that in 2009 alone, CIA attacks have killed between 326 and 538 people in Pakistan – with whom, it should be noted, we are NOT at war. Many of the victims have been innocent bystanders and relatives, including children. This sickens me and makes me ashamed for my country.

The operators of the drones, who work out of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, using joysticks that resemble video games, often dress in flight suits for their somewhat unreal work at desk monitors. In the way of military personnel everywhere in every war, they have developed a language of their own. For example, human beings running uselessly for cover from a robo-strike are called “squirters.” I was not surprised to find out that despite their insulation from the effects of what they do to people across from the globe from them, many suffer from the same, or worse, combat stress of pilots in the field.

Ethicist Peter Singer has recently written a book about the robotic revolution in warfare; in it, he argues that drone technology is worryingly “seductive” because it creates the impression that combat can be “costless.” Think about that. On the one hand, war that doesn’t kill Americans seems like a good idea. I don’t want our young people put needlessly at risk, and neither do you. But then, it’s not like our robots are fighting some other country’s robots. The truth is, real human beings are cut in half and exploded, but they are not “ours,” we do not see them, we hardly hear about it, and thus we do not have to think about it at all. Thus, we are distanced not only from the quite real human toll of drone warfare, but even worse, from the moral consequences. Do we think that people in villages in rural Pakistan think well of the United States for what we do there? Do we really think that there will be no repercussions for what we are doing?

Repercussions, consequences, end results, by-products. You’ll find all these words grouped together in a Thesaurus. This is what concerns me about other aspects of our endless war syndrome. Because we are engaged in a “war” on crime and a “war” on drugs, criminals are the “enemy” and there are lots of folks who seem to think there’s no punishment bad enough for them. But aren’t there consequences, repercussions, unintended consequences, not just for those we mistreat, but also for ourselves?

Right now, according to some estimates, the United States holds between 25,000 and 100,000 people in solitary confinement, in what are often called “super max” or “lockdown” facilities, whether prisons or mental institutions. (I am not sure if these numbers include those held in solitary in Guantanamo Bay or other military installations.) It has been scientifically proven since the 1950s that enforced isolation from other human beings, whether entered voluntarily, such as by long-distance solo sailors, or involuntarily by prisoners or mental patients, causes permanent, irreparable, severe damage to the human psyche and personality. We know this, and study after study, year after year, has proven it conclusively. There is no corresponding benefit to go along with the proven harm, since financial costs associated with solitary confinement are higher than other forms of incarceration, and prisoners released from solitary, whether into a prison population or back into society, are often unable to cope and thus harder to deal with. None of us is safer because of solitary confinement, and we are all degraded in its common use. So why is it still so widespread? What does it say about our country?

And this brings me to my third point about the character of our country. I hope that even if the life of a member of my own family were at stake, I would not countenance torture of any kind in order to save my loved one. I know I would FEEL like hurting someone if anyone I loved was in harm’s way, but I hope I could maintain my values and principles even in such dire circumstances. I know there are many in our country who feel our country is safer and more secure if we use torture to extract information from suspected, accused, or convicted terrorists. But even many military experts concede that information obtained in this way is nearly always unreliable. That is a good logistical reason not to use torture, and there is the consideration of our own personnel being more likely to be mistreated if it is known that we abuse prisoners. But in my mind there is a much larger issue at stake: who are we if countenance torture of prisoners, no matter what they did or what we think they did and no matter what knowledge they might have?

These 3 things, drone warfare, solitary confinement, and torture, have been weighing on me. None of these things are likely to happen to me or, most likely, to anyone I know. If I want, I could continue not to think about them; I could say to myself that since they don’t affect me directly in any way, they are not my problem. I could say that people with more power than me and with more information than me make these decisions, and that it’s not my responsibility.

I guess I could say those things, but I would be wrong. I don’t want to live in a country that not only kills “bad guys” but also their wives, mothers-in-law, aunts and uncles, and children, using computerized planes flown by young people watching a video monitor thousands and thousands of miles away. I don’t want to live in a country that imprisons even the worst criminal in solitary confinement. I don’t want to live in a country so fearful that it allows torture in order to feel safe.

I don’t want to live in a country that does these things, but I do. And I love my country, and I believe in its ideals and values. So that is my, and our, dilemma this morning. What do we do about this? What are we called to do by our Unitarian Universalist values and principles?

I confess I don’t have answers to give you today, just questions to ponder. I do not know what is the best course for each of us to take in situations so complicated, so ambiguous and so fraught with contradictions. Let us remember that other people love their countries too – that the sun and the rain and the sky are over us all. Let us stand as our bodies and spirits allow, and sing #159, “This is My Song,” and then go into a time of reflection and meditation, feeling our way toward the paths we are drawn to take.

Meditation: Pray for Peace by Ellen Bass

Pray to whoever you kneel down to:
Jesus nailed to his wooden or marble or plastic cross,
his suffering face bent to kiss you,
Buddha still under the Bo tree in scorching heat,
Yahweh, Allah, raise your arms to Mary
that she may lay her palm on our brows,
to Shekinhah, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
to Inanna in her stripped descent.

Hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, Record Keeper
of time before, time now, time ahead, pray. Bow down
to terriers and shepherds and Siamese cats.
Fields of artichokes and elegant strawberries.

Pray to the bus driver who takes you to work,
pray on the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus
and for everyone riding buses all over the world.
If you haven't been on a bus in a long time,
climb the few steps, drop some silver, and pray.

Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM,
for your latté and croissant, offer your plea.
Make your eating and drinking a supplication.

Make your slicing of carrots a holy act,
each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.

Make the brushing of your hair
a prayer, every strand its own voice,
singing in the choir on your head.
As you wash your face, the water slipping
through your fingers, a prayer: Water,
softest thing on earth, gentleness
that wears away rock.
Making love, of course, is already a prayer.

Skin and open mouths worshiping that skin,
the fragile case we are poured into,
each caress a season of peace.
If you're hungry, pray. Pray if you're tired.

Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day.
Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.
Pray to the angels and the ghost of your grandfather.

When you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
to the video store, let each step
be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
that we do not blow off anyone else's legs.
Or crush their skulls.

And if you are riding on a bicycle
or a skateboard, in a wheel chair, each revolution
of the wheels a prayer that as the earth revolves
we will do less harm, less harm, less harm.

And as you work, typing with a new manicure,
a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail
or delivering soda or drawing good blood
into rubber-capped vials, writing on a blackboard
with yellow chalk, twirling pizzas, pray for peace.

With each breath in, take in the faith of those
who have believed when belief seemed foolish,
who persevered. With each breath out, cherish.

Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace,
feed the birds for peace, each shiny seed
that spills onto the earth, another second of peace.
Wash your dishes, call your mother, drink wine.

Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your sidewalk.
Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child
around your VISA card. Gnaw your crust
of prayer, scoop your prayer water from the gutter.

Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling
your prayer through the streets.

Resources for this service:
"Annals of Human Rights: Hellhole" The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture? by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker magazine, March 30, 2009

"The Political Scene: The Predator War" What are the risks of the CIA's covert drone program? by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker magazine, October 26, 2009

"Prisoner Needlessly Kept in Solitary Confinement for 12 Years Released at Urging of ACLU of Louisiana" ACLU of Louisiana newsletter, February, 2010