The arrogant cannot stand in Your presence; You hate all who do wrong. You destroy those who tell lies; bloodthirsty and deceitful men the LORD abhors.
Only the winners get to decide what were war crimes.
          The abuses of prisoners at Abu Gharib and Guantanamo are where many of the issues that I have raised in this book come together: issues of morals, patriotism, supporting the troops, the arrogance of the Bush administration, the ideas of where you get your news and history from, and who you believe and why, and especially, how we as Christians should react to this news.  Rehashing the many ignominious details of the abuse won't get us anywhere.  Somewhere in the narrative of these events lay lessons that are too important to let drift into the ether of yesterday's news.  We have also arrived at the three-way intersection of the secular deeds of our government, the supporting of this Republican president and his administration, and our fundamental obligation to first and foremost be Christians, which means to me to be followers of Jesus Christ.
          In our thirst for vengeance and retribution after 9/11, we stormed into Afghanistan and swiftly and overwhelmingly crushed the Taliban, in search of Osama bin-Laden and members of al Qaeda.  In fact, our troops swept through so easily, that one might almost think the Taliban had disappeared right before the Americans got there.  The Pakistani Army, second only to the Saudis in playing both-ends-against-the-middle, just may have tipped off the Taliban, who were essentially their creation, as to the imminent arrival of the Americans.  The Taliban headed for the proverbial hills.
          One of the principal shortcomings of American foreign policy in this region had been the lack of human intelligence assets.  The CIA had very few, if any agents able to blend in with the natives in the area or fluent in the various languages of the region.  (Anyone out there looking for adventure that speaks Pashto?)  All of the bombs in our massive arsenal weren't going to be as helpful to us as a timely piece of information on the whereabouts of the elusive bin-Laden.  It was like trying to find a needle in a very large haystack, in which the hay is actively working against you.
          The CIA and the Special Forces units in Afghanistan enlisted the help of the Northern Alliance, a motley collection of various militias united only in their dislike of the Taliban, to provide them with badly needed sources of information concerning bin-Laden and the missing Taliban leaders.  Also providing assistance were some of the other notorious warlords that ran parts of the country, along with the double-dealing Pakistani Intelligence Service.  The deal was info for cash.  Since the Americans had no real solid intelligence of their own on the ground in Afghanistan to discern between the "good" Afghans and the "bad" Afghans, they had to rely on these "assets" of questionable integrity and easily changeable loyalties to tell them who was who.  They would pay a price-per-man (about $5000) delivered to them.  Talk about giving the fox the keys to the henhouse!  Along with actual POW's from what battlefields there were, the Americans were provided with all kinds of Afghan men, from taxi drivers, to shop owners, old men and young men, and men from tribes that needed old scores settled.  As has been the case for over twenty years in this remote cauldron of turmoil, the Americans were fed just enough real information to keep on paying.  It's like a card shark letting a mark win just enough games to keep him from quitting.
          There is the well-documented case of two men, Weegers, or Chinese Muslims from Xianxian Province near the border of Afghanistan, who were rounded up by Pakistani Intelligence agents and "bought" by the U.S. forces in February of 2002.  They had languished in prison for over three years, first at a base near Kandahar, and then at Guantanamo, largely because their U.S. captors couldn't find a translator that spoke the Weeger language.  Their case was brought to the attention of a high-powered corporate Boston law firm, where an attorney named P. Sabin Willett, hardly a left-wing radical, agreed to take the case.  The pair were finally cleared of any wrongdoing in March of 2006, but remained incarcerated at Guantanamo because of extra-judicial powers that the president has assumed since 9/11.
          Back in Washington, the Bush administration was developing legal language to circumvent the Geneva Convention of 1949 concerning the rights of prisoners of war.  In yet another flouting of recognized international law, the US government declared these prisoners "unlawful combatants" and claimed that as such, they were not subject to the protections afforded under the Geneva Convention.  The thinking initially was that if these prisoners were given fair trials in the USA, they might be found not guilty because most of the evidence against them would have to come from very hard-to-collect places such as the mountains of Afghanistan.  They would then have to be set free and would be able to commit further heinous crimes against the American people.  Gee, I would have thought that this is exactly the kind of thing the International Criminal Court was to be used for, but what do I know? 
          As a result, the system of international provision for prisoners taken during the course of conflict between combatants that was strict enough for Nazi Waffen SS, Japanese fighters, the Vietcong, and North Koreans, was rendered incapable of being sufficient to handle Afghan and Arab mujahedin.  This meant that in the course of trying to extract information from these people, the US could basically use whatever means they chose to get it, keeping these detainees in a "legal black hole," without charges and without legal representation.  Keep in mind, that for every legitimate enemy fighter in custody, there were probably two that were rounded up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
          The ramifications of this profound change in American standards of behavior are immense.  In seeking to defeat the evil in the world it is of the utmost importance that we don't become the evil we are trying to defeat.  The neo-cons in the Bush administration apparently came to the opposite conclusion.  The reason one is proud to be an American is not the name on our jersey or the number of nukes we possess, but our system of laws and jurisprudence, and the fact that we don't resort to extralegal means of treating prisoners of war, and we don't invade countries whenever we feel like it, the rest of the world be damned.  This issue of fairness is one of the seminal characteristics that has made our country great.  The true American patriot should be appalled at what has been done to two hundred-plus years of carefully crafted laws.  (The same neo-cons are the ones most liable to cry for "strict constructionist" judges who don't "legislate from the bench" and alter one hair on the body of our precious Constitution!)
          These heinous taxi drivers and shop owners were then either stuffed in huge metal containers at Bagram Airbase outside of Kabul, or sent to the prison constructed at the US Naval Air Station at Guantanamo on the tip of Cuba, where they were subject to, if not outright torture, then large-scale abuse.  As much as administration apologists would like to tell us that the prisoners are being treated "just fine," the evidence to the contrary is mounting.  (One well-respected man at my church, while almost popping a vein in his neck over the comparison of Guantanamo with other infamous detention facilities of the 20th century, said he didn't see what all the fuss was over "turning the temperature up and down on these people a little bit.")  Reports from freed prisoners may be easy to dismiss, but internal reports from the FBI, the CIA, members of the staff at Guantanamo, including chaplains, the Red Cross assessments, and reports from the Pentagon themselves are not so easy to brush off.  Quoted reports from FBI and CIA officials alone include "prisoners lying in their own feces, military guards slapping prisoners, stripping them, pouring cold water over them and making them stand in stress positions until they got hypothermia."  Prisoners were left in straitjackets in intense sunlight with hoods over their heads for hours, according to a Pentagon adviser.  This was, for many of them, the "recreation periods" that the Bush administration assured critics that it was granting.
          Since it is easy to question the veracity of these claims, if you doubt them, I would urge you to do your own research.  There is way too much information from credible sources to even begin to put in this chapter.  The key is to simply look just beyond the mouthpieces of our government.  If you have Rush Limbaugh on in the car, and Fox News on in the house, then you are merely getting an amplification (to put it mildly) of exactly what the Bush administration has wanted you to hear.  This doesn't mean resorting to Air America in the car; then you are getting loud ranting from the other side implying that everything the administration is doing is always wrong.  (What I have found enlightening is to do a "Google" search on a word like "Guantanamo."  Literally thousands of pieces of information come up, with many points of view, but the end result is a profoundly more rounded view of a subject than the bits and pieces you get on these one-sided "rant" shows.)
          One of the less altruistic and more practical reasons for treating enemy prisoners-of-war decently is that it is a well-known fact that Jesus's commandant to "Do unto other as you would have them do unto you" is a universal principal in wars of all kinds.  US soldiers in enemy custody have, for the most part, been historically treated well by their captors because the other side has known that, by and large, the Americans will treat their combatants humanely.  It's common knowledge that the German soldiers at the end of both World Wars were quick to surrender to the Americans in lieu of having to do the same to the dreaded Soviets, or anyone else for that matter.  The treatment of these "detainees" at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib changed all of that.  Now, there is no more reason for radical Islamists or any other enemy of the US to treat our soldiers any differently than any other hostage they may take.
          In our family, we often talk to the older children about role modeling for the younger ones.  Well, we now have the situation around the world where authoritarian, repressive regimes can call their political opponents "terrorists" and treat their political prisoners with reckless impunity and claim that "if the Americans can do it, so can we!" (Can anyone say Putin in Chechnya?)  So in conclusion, I would say to anyone who says that to support the troops you must support the mission, this part of the mission has assuredly put American troops in greater danger for the foreseeable future, and so to support the troops would mean to strongly disagree with the methods being used at Guantanamo.  Despite all of this, six years later, we still have no idea where Osama bin-Laden or Taliban leader Mullah Omar are, which is largely due not to the flunkies rotting away at Bagram and Guantanamo, but to the refusal of our buddies, the Pakistani Intelligence Service, to tell us where they are.  

          Abu Ghraib presents another set of problems to consider.  No one could argue, at least at the outset, that the Iraqis being rounded up and herded into Abu Ghraib were "unlawful enemy combatants" (I mean, they did argue that, but it's absurd).  Another bad thing about making up new rules as you please is that once you've done it, it just gets easier and easier to keep doing it.  Having created a whole new class of incarceration in Guantanamo, the Bush administration decided to transfer the methodology to Iraq.   For their shining new City on a Hill, they unfortunately chose one of the worst symbols of the ancién regime: Saddam's old torture chamber at Abu Ghraib.  The Americans could not have picked a worse place than Abu Ghraib to act like the bullies and barbarians many people around the world think we have become.  The War on Terror is as much a war about ideas as it is anything else, and any possible credibility our government had left in the world of ideas went down the tubes at Abu Ghraib.  Again, President Bush preached to the world that it would be a safer place after we, unprovoked, stormed into Iraq and toppled the brutal dictator, causing billions upon billions of dollars worth of damage and untold amounts of civilian casualties (they're untold because our government won't tell you how many).  He made grand, sweeping pronouncements about Freedom and Democracy, and how happy the Free Iraqi people would be.  What the world saw is some of the worst images of the last century, (Rush Limbaugh called it "frat hazing") happening at a place that was the very symbol of what was so awful about the regime we just toppled.  In our attention deficit culture, this already seems like so much "last year's news," but in the places that spawn the hate that continues to threaten us, this has had lasting consequences.  (Secretary Rumsfeld actually had the gall to protest the parading of five American POWs, captured early in the war by the Iraqis, in front of Iraqi TV cameras as being "against the Geneva Convention!")
          If you are one of those that bought into the "few bad apples" defense put out there by our government, please, please, consider that proposition carefully and soberly.  After 9/11, President Bush conjured up memories of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, Sylvester Stallone, and many other heroes of the American Cinema with his "smoke 'em outta their holes" lingo and confident swagger.  Some of that was probably soothing to many Americans unused to the idea of being attacked on our own soil.  We are used to our celluloid Good Guys turning the tables on the Bad Guys and always prevailing in the end.  This swagger passed from President Bush to Vice President Dick Cheney, and then to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and on down the chain to his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.  Most of these guys didn't need the cue.
          Rumsfeld's press conferences during the early, militarily successful stages of the war were seminars on glibness and confidence bordering on the arrogance and hubris that would come to define the Bush administration.  Parrying and jibing with reporters, answering questions with witty questions and cutting remarks of his own, "Rummy" was the very epitome of a man supremely confident of his own infallibility and the absolute righteousness of the American cause.  There was absolutely no way that this "Wyatt Earp come to clean up this town" attitude was not going to trickle, or should I say gush its way down the chain of command.  The coach sets the attitude of his players.  Each subordinate below Rumsfeld wanted to show the coach that they could be as tough as their boss.  We heard over and over again that this was a new kind of war, and it was going to have to be fought in a new kind of way.  We had to show these terrorists that they couldn't f*ck with the US of A without feeling it the next morning.  Damn straight.
          Whether Donald Rumsfeld or any of the people directly under him actually knew the details about what was going on inside of Abu Ghraib is irrelevant.  That's why they call it a "chain of command."  It also recalls a phrase made popular by the Nixon administration: plausible deniability.  The Bush administration transmitted the attitude of swaggering arrogance, of "we're the frickin' USA and we can do anything we damn well please," and "if we don't like the rules, we'll make up our own," that came directly from the very top on down.  It was the spoiled, rich brat with the biggest car and the lawyer/bigwig daddy that was portrayed so well in the remake of the movie Shaft; the never apologize, never admit that we have ever, ever, done anything wrong or that we didn't absolutely intend to do (which is going on to this day, as I write this).  This is the unmistakable message that these untrained and ill-equipped soldiers at Abu Ghraib learned from their leaders.  And this message is one that is being sadly and most unfortunately being preached from pulpit to pulpit across the United States in a tragic and misguided attempt to "support our leaders, and support the troops."  This misreading of Scripture, and especially the words of Jesus Christ, has influenced millions of Christians everywhere who look to their spiritual leaders for answers and guidance to these huge issues of the day.
          Throughout His life, Jesus modeled the use of power, through healing, instilling life, and feeding others.  Jesus also understood that poverty was a weapon of mass destruction and cared for the poor, the outcasts and the powerless.  Jesus taught His followers that they were not to return violence when violence was directed at them (Matt. 5:38-48; Lk 6:27-36).  That did not mean that he meant them to be passive victims, but rather through endurance and their willingness to sacrifice that they could outlast and overcome evil (Matt. 24:9-14; Lk 21:9-19).  His command to "turn the other cheek" was not the sign of acceptance of defeat but rather one of defiance, demonstrating to the attacker that their spirit had not been broken and that there were ample internal resources of a resistance that couldn't be broken by conventional ways.

          Think of the phrase "freedom fighters."  It's a very slippery phrase.  My freedom fighters might be your terrorists.  In the American government's lexicon, freedom fighters are any indigenous resistance group fighting a guerilla war against a government or country not of our liking. Otherwise, anybody doing exactly the same thing in countries that we like is called an "insurgent" or a "terrorist." 
          The original insurgent/terrorists were the American Indians.  To many outside observers (of the non-European, colonial types), they might have been seen as freedom fighters, as they were fighting a desperate, and ultimately losing battle for their homeland. They certainly weren't portrayed as freedom fighters by the American government or press when we were wiping them out and rounding them up in the name of "progress." 
          You could actually make the case that the American colonists were the original insurgent/terrorists.  After all, the Revolutionary War started as more of an insurgency on the colonists’ part, and the Boston Tea Party was an act of economic terrorism.  In our glorious past, they are viewed as the ultimate freedom fighters, tossing off the yoke of British colonialism. In Britain at the time, they were surely viewed as insurgents.
          During the Civil War, the southern Confederates were viewed as either insurgents trying to undermine the Union, or freedom fighters defending the principles of their home states.
          The next insurgent/terrorists on the American horizon came in the Philippines, after we 'bought' the islands from the Spanish after defeating them in the Spanish-American War.  The Filipino people were initially happy to be free from the Spanish yoke, and thought the freedom-loving Americans were coming to grant them their independence.  They were in for a rude awakening as they came to the realization that they had only traded one colonial master for another.  So let's pose a question: Were the native Filipinos who resisted the colonial occupation with violent acts against the American soldiers freedom fighters or insurgent/terrorists?  Four thousand American soldiers died before the Filipino resistance was finally subdued.
          In World War II, as the Germans occupied country after country with seeming ease, resistance groups started to undertake guerilla actions in the German rear, blowing up train tracks, severing supply and communication lines, and picking off German soldiers and officers.  Let's pose another question, courtesy of Tariq Ali: If, during the Second World War, Jewish groups in France, Germany, Poland or Hungary had carried out suicide bombing raids against their (German) oppressors, would posterity have condemned their methods or lauded their courage? Freedom fighters or terrorists?  
          Jewish fighters in Palestine, including a couple of future Prime Ministers, carried out brutal and deadly attacks against colonial British soldiers and officers in the run-up to gaining their independence in 1948.  Freedom fighters or terrorists?
          In Vietnam, the Vietnamese resistance threw out the Japanese, then the French, and then the Americans in what they consider a continuous 30+-year struggle against foreign occupation. Freedom fighters or insurgents?
          In Hungary and Czechoslovakia, rebellions against Soviet domination of their countries were brutally crushed by Soviet tanks in 1956 and 1968, respectively. Insurgents or freedom fighters?
          Latin America has seen so many coups and counter-coups and insurgencies and counter-insurgencies that it is literally impossible to begin to list them all.  One thing seems constant–today's insurgents are tomorrow's freedom fighters, depending on who's in power on any given day and whether we like them or not.
          In Afghanistan, the very mujahedin that we backed to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and labeled "freedom fighters" for throwing the Soviets out of that country are now most definitely labeled terrorists for trying to throw us out of the Middle East.
          In the Occupied Territories of Israel, Palestinian people strap on bombs and blow themselves up because they have no other weapons to fight the enormous might of the Israeli Army.  Are they freedom fighters or terrorists? That's a tricky one, isn't it?
          This brings us to Iraq again.  In light of all of the above examples, have the Iraqi resistors to the US occupation been freedom fighters or insurgent/terrorists?  And if there have been Arabs from other countries assisting the resistance would they automatically be considered terrorists?  Why, if there were soldiers from Poland, the UK, Italy and Ukraine helping the Americans, shouldn't there have been Arab/Muslim soldiers helping their Arab/Muslim brethren?  This was a well-planned resistance.  It is believed that they had enough weapons to hold out for at least five years.  They are fighting to remove the occupiers from their country.  In the eyes of many people around the world, if not ours, they are freedom fighters.
          Let me pose a "what if?" historical question.  The French were very helpful to the American colonists in their quest for independence from the British.  What if the French monarchy decided to land 50,000 troops in America to 1) root out the remaining Tory resistance, and 2) to make sure that we chose a government of their liking?  Remember, until 1789, France was most definitely a monarchy, and there is little doubt that the French Revolution was inspired by events in America.  Having seen this American Revolution up close and personal, the French wanted to quell this outbreak of democracy before it spread.  What would the Americans have done?  If the Americans resisted, what would they have been called by the French?