Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
The American people were told Saddam Hussein was building nuclear weapons. He was not. We were told he had stockpiles of other weapons of mass destruction. He did not. We were told he was involved in 9/11. He was not. We were told Iraq was attracting terrorists from Al Qaeda. It was not. We were told our soldiers would be viewed as liberators. They are not. We were told Iraq could pay for its own reconstruction. It cannot. We were told the war would make America safer. It has not. Ted Kennedy
In spite of upheaval in Syria, and Isis military activity in Iraq, and in spite of all of the tension around the negotiation of a nuclear non-proliferation agreement with Iran, it seems that today, this Sunday morning in mid-September of 2015, that there is no nation that the USA is about to invade. And, it seems to me, that at a moment when there are not clouds of war gathering on the horizon, is the perfect time to spend a few sane moments in reflection about war.
I would like to go on the record as being in opposition to the next war, wherever it will be. I trust my saying that doesn't shock anyone. I am a pastor. This is a church. Religious people have been proponents of peace through the centuries when we have managed to keep our wits about us even when congregations are falling prey to the hysteria of fear generated by governments that want to go to war.
The people who profit from warfare always try to silence religious voices by telling us that we have no business commenting on politics when the business of faith has always been to protect life, to seek peace and justice, and to defend the poor and weak.
The military industrial complex makes money in both times of peace and times of war but there really is no comparison to the amount of profit they make in peace times to the money they make in wartimes. Ammunition and equipment that is stockpiled gathers dust and doesn't have to be replaced. Missiles that are fired, airplanes that crash, tanks that are used... they have to be replaced and that is where the profit is, as well as all of the purveyors who make uniforms, provide food, and related services to an army.
The capitalists get rich during wars and so they want the religious people to stay out of their way. Just to be clear, the answer to their request for passive silence is, "No," or, more accurately, "hell no."
Over the past fourteen years the church has been far too silent and, when they weren't silent, that often embarrassed themselves by speaking up on the wrong side of the issue. We began today with this quote from the late Senator Ted Kennedy, who in 2003 accused the Bush administration of lie after lie, saying that the case against Iraq was a myth cooked up in Texas to give them an excuse to start a war.
To the best on my knowledge, I was the only pastor of a Springfield church who opposed the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and it was years before a few others began to join our all too infrequent anti-war protests. The seriousness of the deception sold to the American people through the vehicle of fear, only got worse in later years as we became unavoidably aware that it was not only an illegal war based on lies, it was also being conducted in the most immoral way possible through the unconscionable torture of prisoners of war.
We felt entirely justified in even going into nations who are ostensibly our allies to kill Osama Bin Laden because he was the mastermind behind a terrorist attack that killed more than 3000 Americans. We invaded Iraq and killed possibly more than a half a million people to get Saddam Hussein who, though he had nothing to do with the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the USA, he had been guilty of a running a brutal regime in which he had killed thousands of his own citizens....not a tenth as many as we killed but still, a horrible ruler.
Though, by comparison, the crimes of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein may seem to pale in comparison to our own war crimes, nothing has been seriously said about putting George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their administration on trial for treason against the American people or for war crimes.
Switzerland is not going to invade the United States and arrest or execute George Bush or Dick Cheney though there was speculation in 2011 when Bush suddenly canceled plans to speak at a conference in Switzerland that he did not go because he feared being arrested there. There are no known warrants in any nation for the arrest of either Cheney or Bush because no nation would be willing to suffer the backlash they would get from the US government but it is also true that neither Bush nor Cheney have ventured into Europe since they went out of office.
Even appearances in Canada have provoked thousands of people to show up with signs denouncing them for being war criminals.
In some cases the police have felt the need to don full riot gear to protect them from the angry mobs.
There were certainly people in the United States who wanted members of the Bush administration to be charged and made to stand trial but President Obama made it clear that he would not be seeking prosecution for past crimes though he announced with taking office that the policy of torture would end immediately.
In the past few months the American Civil Liberties Union has been asking the Obama administration to grant pardons to Bush, Cheney, and several key members of their administration. The precedent they cite is the 1974 decision of the newly sworn in President Ford to pardon Richard Nixon who had recently resigned from the office of the President.
Ford's thinking was that the nation needed to be spared the trauma of putting a former American president on trial, but he was not willing to pretend that Nixon was innocent nor that his crimes were insignificant just because a sitting president of the United States had committed them. Sadly, in a interview with David Frost in 1977, Nixon was still clinging to his personal belief that he was innocent when he said, "If the president did it, that means it was not illegal." But the rest of us knew that the president is not above the law and that the mere fact that Ford had pardoned Nixon, was a statement of probable guilt.
President Lincoln pardoned southern soldiers after the Civil War because the nation needed to heal. President Carter pardoned draft dodgers after the War in Vietnam because the nation needed to heal.
What the ACLU is saying is that we should not pretend that lying to the American people, the Congress, the Senate, in order to start an illegal war, and that defying Geneva Conventions of War by torturing prisoners should not be ignored. We cannot pretend that these would be war crimes if committed by an Osama Bin Laden or a Saddam Hussein, but they are not illegal if done by an American President.
While there are certainly those in the ACLU who would like to see some of the Bush administration stand trial, the official request is that, accepting that it would be bad for the country to put an administration on trial, it is morally unacceptable to pretend that they are innocent. They are asking President Obama to:
. . . pardon George J. Tenet for authorizing torture at the C.I.A.'s black sites overseas, Donald H. Rumsfeld for authorizing the use of torture at the Guantánamo Bay prison, David S. Addington, John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee for crafting the legal cover for torture, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for overseeing it all.
Their argument is that we absolutely must not say to the world or to ourselves that torture is okay as long as it is only the USA that is doing it. Nor can we say that USA can invade a sovereign nation without just cause. To pardon Bush and members of his administration will at least acknowledge that we are a nation of laws and not of kings.
Frankly, this is not entirely satisfactory to me because as we sit here this morning there are a half a million Americans who are in prison, not because they led us into an illegal war or because they tortured prisoners but for some drug offense. Thousands of them were just kids caught in possession of small amounts of marijuana. How can their crime merit years in prison but war crimes and treason are somehow above being even mentioned?
For the same reasons that Switzerland wouldn't really arrest a former American president who happened to be on their soil, I know that members of the Bush administration who are guilty of horrible crimes will never serve a prison sentence or stand trial, but they should at least be pardoned to show that we know better than to do to Iran what we did to Iraq.
I'm not anti-American but I am anti-war. I'm not unpatriotic, I am patriotic enough to want my country to be one of the good guys.... You know, the kind of country that doesn't torture prisoners of war. I don't hate George Bush or Dick Cheney, I just don't think that they are any different from the two million Americans who did stand trial and are currently in prison for the crimes that they committed. And that's not politics, that's just sane religion.
