OMG, Civil Disobedience Nuns are Terrorists and Destroying the Fabric of Society!

I love old nuns. More to the point, I love to see those nuns at protests. Clerical garb used in visible, Christological subversive protest? I’m a fan. So it only stands that I would find the following “terrorist” nuns — peace witnesses labeled by the state as terrorists for a time — something of an encouragement. From the Washington Times:

BALTIMORE | For decades, Sister Carol Gilbert and Sister Ardeth Platte have practiced their Roman Catholic faith with an unwavering focus on world peace. Their antiwar activities even landed them in federal prison earlier this decade for trespassing onto a military base and pouring blood onto a nuclear missile silo.

Now they face fresh infamy as two nuns secretly branded by Maryland State Police as terrorists and placed on a national watch list.

“This term terrorist is a really serious accusation,” Sister Ardeth, a nun for 54 years, told The Washington Times on Thursday in the first interview that the women have given since being informed they were among 53 people added to a terrorist watch list in conjunction with an extensive Maryland surveillance effort of antiwar activists.

“There is no way that we ever want to be identified as terrorists. We are nonviolent. We are faith-based,” she said.

The women freely acknowledge their participation in antiwar activities.

On Oct. 6, 2002, the two sisters and another nun – armed with bolt cutters, a hammer and baby bottles filled with their own blood – broke into an unmanned Minuteman III missile site in northeastern Colorado and painted bloody crosses on the silo. It was the day before the one-year anniversary of the war in Afghanistan.

Sister Carol was sentenced to 30 months and Sister Ardeth to 41 months in federal prison for the action.

“I learned to make it a meditation, almost a prayer,” Sister Carol told the Baltimore Sun upon her release in 2005.

SERIOUS THREAT? Sisters Carol Gilbert (left) and Ardeth Platte were offended to learn that the Maryland State Police had placed them under surveillance from March 2005 to May 2006 as part of security efforts surrounding two executions. (J.M. Eddins Jr./The Washington Times)

But they say being tagged as terrorists in a federal database is false and a blow to their commitment to a pursuit of peace.

“We’re Dominicans; our mission is ‘veritas,’ which is truth,” Sister Carol said.

State police have said their surveillance was limited to the period of March 2005 to May 2006, during planning for security related to the executions of two death row inmates.

But activists have long said they think the state police and local law-enforcement agencies cast a broader net across Maryland’s protest community.

The nuns said they were not involved in the protests state police say they targeted. And other activists who were labeled terrorists, including a member of the antiwar group Code Pink, have said they were not active in Maryland protests during the state police’s time period.

E-mails released by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland show that Baltimore police were coordinating with the National Security Agency in 2003 and 2004 to spy on Quakers, who routinely protested outside the security agency’s headquarters. And a member of the American National Socialist Workers Party, or Nazis, told lawmakers Wednesday that he was among the 53 to receive a letter from the state police informing him that he was on the list.

“This leads me to ask who exactly was the Maryland State Police was watching when they thought they were watching me,” Bill White wrote the lawmakers in e-mail obtained by The Washington Times.

Nancy Kricorian, a member of Code Pink, also was entered into the database. She never lived or protested in Maryland, said David Rocah, a staff attorney for the ACLU, which represented the nuns in the effort to obtain information on the spying.

The state police have offered to let the activist see the files and have them purged but have denied them and their attorneys access to the hard copies.

A police spokesman did not answer questions Thursday about allegations that the spying was more expansive or involved many other groups, and said he was unsure why the nuns and other activists were entered into the database.

“The fact there was a record with their name is the reason we’re in this situation that were in,” said state police spokesman Greg Shipley. “We’re certainly not going to perpetuate the problem by creating more records and handing them out.”

Mr. Rocah has asked Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, to force state police Superintendent Col. Terrence B. Sheridan to grant hard copies of the files and allow attorneys to be present during the review.

Despite their history, the nuns were surprised to receive letters recently notifying them that their names were in the Maryland State Police’s database as being affiliated with terrorism.

“It is clear to us that the full extent of the MSP’s improper activities have yet to be fully disclosed,” Mr. Rocah wrote.

The sisters said the O’Malley administration is trying to brush off questions about broader police surveillance.

“Think they just want to kind of pooh-pooh it away and say it’s no big thing,” Sister Carol said.

An O’Malley spokesman deferred questions to the state police.

The spying occurred during the administration of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican, and while the state police was being run by Thomas E. “Tim” Hutchins.

Sister Ardeth Platte (left) and Sister Carol Gilbert have been members of the protest community for years, including an incident in which they and another nun defaced a nuclear missile silo in Colorado, landing them in federal prison. (J.M. Eddins Jr./The Washington Times)

Sisters Ardeth and Carol, a nun for 43 years, said they won’t review their records or have them purged until they are given hard copies and allowed to bring attorneys with them to the state police headquarters.

“Democracy is built on these elements on being able to speak out to speak what we believe is truth,” Sister Carol said.

On Scandal and the Future

Many an important theology has been born out of more than mere reaction, but an urge to address an established evil. Theologians in the past have been rightly scandalized by slavery, abuse, torture, genocide, and reacted with all their being. In a crazy world, it is the calm, sane person who may have the real problem, for they are not responding to what reality is. Simply, the question of theodicy or oppression in a violent world has galvanized theologians like Moltmann, Sölle, Metz, Cone, Copeland, Isasi-Díaz, and numerous others.

I’ve found that often, while there is a social foundation to evil, there is also a specific occurrence that grabs a theologian and never lets go. I myself have found a slew of scandals instances that could function as scandals for theologians in recent years, or at least have scandalized me to one degree or another: the “war on terror,” American torture, neo-colonialism, immigration, the response to Rev. Jeremiah Wright (racism), the sexist treatment of women, to name a few. And this makes me wonder, what will be the theodicy questions and issues that will push us forward in the future? What will we respond to? Have we as a generation yet to be gripped?

Humane? Lies.

From Yahoo News on Omar Khadr:

The prisoner appears to have given up hope by the end and doesn’t seem likely to cooperate with authorities, former FBI agent Jack Cloonan said after viewing the excerpt. “He has probably made up his own mind that he is dead, he is dead man walking.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, denied Khadr was mistreated. “Our policy is to treat detainees humanely and Khadr has been treated humanely,” Gordon said.

The video was made by U.S. authorities and turned over to Khadr’s defense team, Gordon said. The tapes are U.S. property.

A Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs report said a Canadian official, Jim Gould, visited Khadr in 2004 and was told by the American military that the detainee was moved every three hours to different cells.

That technique, dubbed, “frequent flyer,” was one of at least two sleep deprivation programs the U.S. military used against Guantanamo prisoners. Detainees were moved from cell to cell throughout the night to keep them awake and weaken their resistance to interrogation.

Treated humanely? Bullshit. Techniques like that are not humane. Torture has to go. Jesus was Omar. This is wicked.

Again, from my thesis:

There is no help for the voiceless in torture. In fact, everything is against the voiceless, leaving the victim a hollow, deconstructed shell of a person soon ready to be filled with the voice of the torturer: “Torture inflicts bodily pain that is itself language-destroying, but torture also mimes (objectifies in the external environment) this language-destroying capacity in its interrogation, the purpose of which is not to elicit needed information but visibly to deconstruct the prisoner’s voice.”

In sum, torture does not merely leave its mark by the disillusion of one’s world through the mind and body. It also leaves an imprint – a constructed structure designed by the torturer. “In torture, it is in part the obsessive display of agency that permits one person’s body to be translated into another person’s voice, that allows real human pain to be converted into a regime’s fiction of power.” Like a brand searing into flesh, torture obliterates the established cellular structure as it also leaves a sign of ownership – a reconstituted structure predicated on the structure of the brand, or in this case, the state who tortures. Simply put, the tortured is re-made in the image of the torturer.

That is not humane, in fact, it is the exact opposite. It is a violent cloning, the force feeding of a story, the creation of zombies, a lobotomy if you will. Its wrong and it certainly is not humane.

On Torture, or Why America Should be Damned

A short video of an interrogation of Omar Khadr was released today. It shows torture for what it really is: a violent, coerced conversion. As usual, it made me sick. And again, made me realize my complicity. God help us.

From my thesis on torture:

The abstract “how” of torture, the grammar so to speak, is quite easy to cerebrally understand. Indeed, it is simple – the means of torture is overwhelming pain (physical or psychological) inflicted on a thoroughly vulnerable person by another human being to destroy the subject’s world. Either way the end result is a writhing, shamed, terrorized bio-mass that was once a human being. As one inflicts massive amounts of pain on the other, there is a great gulf created between the torturer and tortured. The tortured has lost, while the torturer has forcibly taken control of the relationship resulting in one of the most sadistic, one-sided relational situations ever conceived: “Every weapon has two ends. In converting the other person’s pain into his own power, the torturer experiences the entire occurrence exclusively from the nonvulnerable end of the weapon.” There is no gifting in such a relationship, only violation and impressment, for violence and blinding pain is the ruling language and defining experience.

I wrote my MA thesis regarding torture. For a much lengthier treatment, one can download it here, titled “Responding Theologically in the Face of Torture: Re-Politicizing American Christianity in Light of the Interruptive Jesus.” I realize quoting myself may seem a tad narcissistic, but I’m a bit busy and since I’ve already written on it, I might as well use what I’ve done. Its not like I’m pulling a Piper and quoting from another book I wrote, telling you to buy that as well…

The Destruction of the Church by America

Fundamentally, the myths of innocence, nature, God, chosen, and millennial are stories that alter our identity in favor of a white washed America. It is true we are exceptional – we are exceptionally bad. We have a tragic past, as I have displayed, and a tragic future, as we maintain an innocence of our past. “The American national mythos is messianic; it seeks to tell a story of freedom spread through self-sacrifice, not victories won through the spread of terror. To sustain the myth, Americans need to rewrite history just as surely as did Stalin to sustain his own version of communist orthodoxy.”1 It is incredibly telling that to confront the myths of America, Robert Hughes spoke of the prophetic, Black experience. The implication is, that the American myths are categorically racist; the American hagiographic myths hide the evil past, present injustice and the future of malevolent violence. There is very little in the myths that pushes America forward in a moral way.2 Instead the myths make it possible for America to turn a blind eye to violence, to injustice, to torture and insomuch that Christians take in these myths, they take in the blindness as well. The simulacra of American messianism subverts the real Jesus, and therefore, it unsettles and divides the body of Christ.

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1. Lee Griffith, The War on Terrorism and the Terror of God, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 38.
2. Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 63.

Terror

Who says America doesn’t use terror as a weapon? Remember “Shock and Awe”? Or how about this, little beauty?

We are not innocent and the American cause is not righteous. Instead, as one can hear in the narrator’s voice, there is an unholy fixation on power, blood and death. Its virtually pornographic — voyeuristic. How Roman. And worst of all, people think this is a good idea. It was Rome that crucified and it is America that lynched. It is this culture that Jesus rejects and provides an alternative way of being, an ontology grounded in God’s rule. Personally, it doesn’t seem that it could get any clearer: America, Jesus has some serious problems with you.