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.

Wikipedia up-to-the-moment Mumbia entry and an Annonated Map of the attacks.

There is also India Broadcasting Network live, streaming coverage (avoid this if you suffer from PTSD), or for less superheated up-to-date coverage, visit The Lede at the New York Times.

We will add to and update this list as we discover additional resources.

• A sortable list of the injured and dead.
• Mumbai Help has resources including several pages of lists of the dead and injured and rescued.
• Mumbai Contact Numbers has a collection of useful phone numbers.
• Mumbai Terror Helpline Blog: Terror In Bombay
• Mumbai Police contact numbers.
• JJ Hospital Requires Blood here are some numbers you can get in touch with JJ Hospital no. - 022 23735555 JJ Hospital Blood bank no. - 022 23739400?
• St. George Hospital requires blood, numbers (022) 22620242.
• Live Scrolling of Latest Updates from Twitter on Mumbai attacks
• Search twitter for additional resources at #mumbai help using twitter search.
• Search twitter and identi.ca for additional resources at #mumbai help using tweetscan.
• Search twitter for help finding loved ones using #mumbaifamilies at twitter search.

Xerophyllum asphodeloides (turkey beard)

© 2004 Claude W. Rankin and Southern Connections Inc.

Turkey Beard sans gobble, this one bloomed sweet-smelling almost three decades ago in a burned-over Cumberland County, N.C., glade.

Claude W. Rankin.com, named for the late photographer who made the image, explains:

The eastern turkey beard's dense clusters of creamy, starlike flowers bloom from May to July.

Flowering on stalks two to three feet high, they are tough, elegant lilies. Their lovely flowers have a sweet nectar that attracts insects and hummingbirds.

The plant is sometimes called beargrass, because in spring bears seek out and eat the roots and tender young leaves.

...

Fire-control practices have helped make them hard to find in some areas. In the absence of a fire, relatively few turkey beard plants produce flowers each year.

The Naional Geographic reports that after a fire, however, they need only a year to recover before blooming.

NatureServe, a non-profit conservation organization, reports that they are ranked "vulnerable" in North Carolina and Tennessee. They are ranked as critically imperiled in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and West Virginia. They are believed to have disappeared from Delaware and perhaps from Kentucky.

Native to North Carolina, they are also found in the pine barrens of New Jersey, and the Appalachian woods of Virginia to Georgia and Alabama. The photograph on this page was taken in Cumberland County, N.C.

Baptist Planet says, tongue firmly in ironic cheek, that the pope may have downplayed interfaith dialog just as a prominent Southern Baptist pastor argued, quite oddly, that Catholicism is a "cult".

Is the opinionated Jacksonville, Fla., pastor a Batholic, or perhaps a Cathist?

Uh huh. Read it all HERE.

Import Peace is non-profit organization that sells high-quality, fair-trade, USDA organic olive oil produced in Palestine.

It was founded by a group of 100 Presbyterians in response to the frustration, pain and poverty of the people of the Palestinian Occupied Territories during a 2006 trip with the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program.

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?

Your pastor is a high-risk, even life-endangering choice for mental health advice, a recent Baylor University study found.

More than 32% of 293 previously diagnosed, "seriously mentally ill" church members reported that their pastor said they did not have a mental illness.

Misleading pastoral responses came most often from "conservative" or "charismatic" ministers, according to an account published in the Texas Baptist Standard. Matt Pene of Baylor University wrote:

YHWH ("Yahweh")

Fundamentalists beware of Public Television's The Bible's Buried Secrets. Or seek it out as I did, because it was created in good faith and explicitly to enlighten -- not to harm.

It offers archeological evidence and scholarly analysis if perhaps not the hill of inerrancy dramatically cited at the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina meeting in Greensboro.

Consider, for example, how the Bible was written in an item-by-item, paragraph-by-paragraph and internal-contradiction-by-internal-contradiction way.

Michael Coogan is a Professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College and Director of Publications for the Harvard Semitic Museum. He says:

Update

The program is online in 13 chapters, each available in both Quicktime and Windows Media Player format.

Fire inside and outside of church burns hotter and hotter over Mormon involvement in passage of California's Proposition 8.