G. Frink's

Use of the Qur'an as an instrument of torture is a Guantánamo mistake that may do us harm for generations, warns Michael Peppard in the upcoming issue of the Catholic magazine Commonweal.

He writes:

Qur'an from the British Museum

Lord Harris
Some Rights Reserved

Religious torture generates determined resistance and long-lasting resentments. What has been a mere footnote for us may be the main story for the Muslim world.

The U.S. military knows that desecration of the Qur'an leads to hunger strikes and suicide attempts, that playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" over the call to prayer is demoralizing. But they seem not to have considered the long-term effects of such tactics.

Principal among those long-term effects is creation of a stream if new enemies.

The effect is the same, even if the torture does not involve disrespect of the Qur'an.

In the Washington Post today, a former Special Operations interrogator who worked in Iraq in 2006 warms that American torture techniques are costing a lot of American lives.

He writes:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

Worth repeating until it is heard and acted upon, the warning is not new.

In June, former Navy general counsel Alberto J. Mora told[.pdf] a Senate committee:

[T]here are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq -- as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat -- are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Torture and the places which have become emblematic of it not only aid the enemy, they work less well than the legal, honorable interrogation techniques which preceded them. The anonymous (for security reasons) author of today's Post op-ed piece wrote that his team succeeded by turning away from the new brutality. Even with the hard cases:

I know the counter-argument well -- that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that's not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate."

Fortunately for all of us, outlawing torture is a clearly stated priority of President-elect Barack Obama.

Watch as he takes that stand Nov. 17 on 60 Minutes:

Did you know?

No one had to die under the feet of door-busting shoppers this morning. The 34-year-old employee who was trampled at a Long Island, N.Y., store would have been spared had more people celebrated Black Friday as Buy Nothing Day.

On Buy Nothing Day, some of us celebrate our own refusal to be stampeded by the kind of fear-driven consumerism that kills relatively few people outright, but is deadly to lasting human happiness and a livable planet.

Suffering from "political Stockholm Syndrome," the GOP is hostage to the "oogedy-boogedy" social fundamentalists, write Christine Todd Whitman and Robert M. Bostock in the Washington Post today.

So the GOP must give up the rabid identity politics of the culture wars and all that evangelical money?

Stop laughing, Sarah. We know from your easy domination of the Republican Governor's Association meeting in Miami that you're still in charge. Yes, we do remember that you're a political offspring of the GOP's oogedy-boogedy, evangelical right. Yes, the folks who are holding the GOP "hostage."

Yes, Sarah, Whitman and Bostock are saying the GOP must free itself of enslavement to your primary religious/political sponsors, or be relegated to obscurity.

You betcha.

Update

A Nov. 21 Gallup Poll found that Republicans and Republican-leaning independents liked oogedy-boogedy Sarah best as their 2012 presidential nominee.

Mormon Mitt Romney was their next choice for 2012.

Third was evangelical Baptist Mike Huckabee.

Those results tend to affirm that the GOP is fundamentally an evangelical property, not an evangelical kidnap victim.

Do we agree?

NBC News and the Associated Press yesterday officially decreed what most of us have known since late Tuesday night: North Carolina's electoral votes go to President-elect Barack Obama.

Obama is the first Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

This Democratic victory swept down the ticket, electing Bev Perdue the state's first woman governor, putting Democrat Kay Hagan in the U.S. Senate and otherwise substantially reversing the 1972 landslide victory of Richard Nixon which for decades wove the Republicanism of Jesse Helms into our state's political fabric.

North Carolina State Board of Elections presidential vote map

Whether you're a celebrating Democrat or a Republican who is wondering how to rebuild, it is a new day.

Sen. Barack Obama was elected the 44th president and first black chief executive in our history Tuesday night.

"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer," said Mr. Obama in his Chicago acceptance speech.

With the biggest turnout since women won the right to vote in 1920, we repudiated economic pillage that has plunged the nation into deepening recession, embraced a future of caring health and education policies, affirmed out commitment to the shared freedoms which are our heritage, demanded sound foreign policy and triumphed over the racial division which has dogged us since the end of the Civil War.

"Change has come to America," reshaping the political landscape as thoroughly as any election since since Franklin D. Roosevelt won at the depths of the Great Depression in 1932, and the challenges are in some ways the equal of those faced 76 years ago.

Neighbors reported blizzards of Liddy Dole/John McCain robocalls filling up answering machines without regard for whether they had voted, while the only boots-on-the-ground get-out-the-vote effort we saw here was Obama's.

Obama's GOTV team left beautiful, information-rich color "door hangers" which featured easy-to-read, personalized information about both where I vote and how to use the oddly structured North Carolina ballot.

Those "door hangers" illustrate the Obama campaign management skill and attention to detail which created the edge that drove polling analyst Nate Silver to predict an Obama North Carolina win and national electoral vote landslide.

Knowing elections aren't over until the votes are counted and/or Supreme Court judges have ruled, I've nonetheless been predicting Obama would turn North Carolina blue since the first debate, when McCain failed to use the words "middle class" or meaningfully explore issues afflicting this state's economically besieged middle class.

Even the giddy populism of Sarah Palin couldn't fully make up for that Republican message and platform mismanagement.

If through some fluke Obama doesn't win North Carolina tonight, that failure will still have helped elect Democrat Kay Hagan to the U.S. Senate and perhaps helped put Bev Perdue in the governor's mansion.

Omission of those words exemplified Republican concern for the very well-off at the expense of the rest of us, and condescending stunts like exploitation of Samuel J. Wurzelbacher as "Joe the Plumber" did little to obscure the message.

Obama not only used the words "middle class," he spoke in dollar-and-cents tax-cut terms to the real, meat and potatoes needs of real North Carolinians.

That combination of sound management under pressure and proposals faithfully designed to meet the needs of real North Carolinians are the keystones to the Obama victory I expect.

Twelve years ago in a kinder, gentler era of presidential politics, the late J. Marse Grant argued with some eloquence that "America be spared the mean-spirited name calling between now and Nov. 5."

Grant, who died Friday at the age of 88, was editor emeritus of The Biblical Recorder, North Carolina's state Baptist newspaper. He seemed to be addressing himself primarily to other Southern Baptists, whose leadership he felt had lost its way by making the Southern Baptist Convention a political adjunct to the Republican Party.

Today the general issue of dangerously divisive overstatement is an inescapable national concern -- one well-addressed by Grant's comments.

Grant's book, Whiskey at the Wheel: The Scandal of Driving and Drinking," was published in 1970.

J. Marse Grant, who was editor of the N.C. Biblical Recorder for 22 years, died Friday at the age of 88.

As editor of North Carolina's principal Baptist news publication, Grant stood against racism, liquor by the drink sales and the conservative revolution which politicized the Southern Baptist Convention, and for equal rights.

Grant, a professional journalist to the core, had the longest tenure of any Biblical Recorder editor. During that tenure he saw that publication to its peak print circulation of 120,000 in 1978, before the denominational controversy of the Southern Baptist "conservative revolution" began to grind it down, and earned it the respect of mainstream journalists.

Grant was a clear voice against the rightist politicization of Southern Baptists and against the associated negative campaigning.

In a 1996 article, Southern Baptist Political Bosses Show Hands Again in Election Year, he compared rabble rousing Baptist leaders to "Supporters of slavery 150 years ago," and warned that irresponsibly stirring up followers could lead to deadly violence.

A Pew Research Center survey released today suggests that tonight's presidential debate will be won by the candidate who most persuasively articulates sound plans for the economy.

Americans have retained their optimism, concluded the Oct. 9-12 Pew survey, but "are concerned about the nation's economic problems almost to the exclusion of every other issue."

The poll found not only a clear advantage for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama as "best able to deal with the problems of financial institutions," but also indicated that going negative tonight could be the end of Republican Sen. John McCain's presidential hopes, if negative campaigning has not already undone him.

Princeton University economics professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has this simple country boy's applause for his Nobel Memorial Prize award.