New Quaker Notebook

Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel (Murray Waas, National Journal)

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the US intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

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What I did on the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials (Rose Marie Berger, Sojourners)

Last week I spent two days in the US District Court in Washington, DC, on trial after being arrested Sept. 26, 2005, while delivering petitions to President Bush at the White House. Several hundred people met on Pennsylvania Avenue that day, bringing boxes and boxes of letters to President Bush demanding that he "redress the grievances" of hundreds of thousands of Americans regarding the war in Iraq.

Waiting for a reply took several hours. The guards at the gatehouse called the executive office, but apparently no one was able to come pick up the mail. Eventually, roughly 370 of us were arrested for demonstrating on the White House sidewalk without a permit—the largest number ever arrested by the US Park Police, according to one officer. Some of us spent up to 14 hours in handcuffs and all were released with a citation. We had the option of paying a fine or appearing at one of three court dates.

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China's hidden churches. While everyone is amused at Bush's goofy attempt to escape from a Beijing news conference by going through a pair of locked doors,¹ there are accolades for his having promoted religious freedom in China by attending a worship service at a state-sanctioned church, one of only five officially recognized Protestant churches in Beijing.²

What's really wrong with this picture isn't the locked doors at the news conference. It also isn't that this poseur attended a church service, which is pretty much a rare occurrence for him here in the US, but instead it's that he made no attempt to walk through any of the locked doors of a house church in China.

It is not for nothing that China again was featured in the US State Department's annual International Religious Freedom Report, joining eight other countries (including Saudi Arabia) as violently hostile to Christian expression. Surely it is nice that our president went to church, but it was again nothing more than an empty photo opportunity. If nothing else, its message to Christians in China is that joining the state-controlled church is in fact a good thing to do. Perhaps Bush meant to convey that message, especially since that is and has been the genuine tilt of Christianity in America.

It is ironic, I think, that on Friday, right before his two-day visit to China, the Chinese government arrested a Catholic priest and 10 seminarians from the underground Roman Catholic Church in China, after detaining the Catholic Bishop there and two other priests—all because of their refusal to become part of the government-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association, which itself rejects Vatican authority.³ The Chinese government strives for control over Christian factions in the country and is known for violent suppression of Protestant groups not registered through the China Christian Council and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. The Chinese authorities look upon unregistered congregations, such as those in house churches, as political subversives.⁴

This is not to say that nothing good came from the president's visit to China. As a showy consequence, the Chinese released nine house church leaders from detention during the weekend.⁵

Reprieve and Amnesty International UK conference on Guantánamo Bay torture. Yesterday eight survivors of torture and ill-treatment in Guantánamo Bay spoke at a conference hosted by the international human rights organizations Amnesty International and Reprieve, in the first of a three-day dialogue with the "largest-ever gathering of former Guantánamo prisoners and prisoners' families." From the conference news release:

The three-day conference in London, this Saturday through Monday, also brings together international legal and medical experts and leading human rights campaigners to inform and encourage action against torture and the practices that lead to it, such as secret detentions and renditions.

Amnesty International's Secretary General Irene Khan said:

"Denying meaningful access to those held in Guantánamo Bay is totally unacceptable. Guantánamo is just the visible tip of an iceberg of abuse, the most notorious link in a chain of detention camps including Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, prisons in Iraq and secret facilities elsewhere.

"Through the courageous testimonies of former prisoners and prisoners' families, our conference this weekend will highlight how Guantánamo has become the epicentre of a shadow justice system supported by the subversive use of prolonged detentions and the handing over of prisoners to countries known to practice torture."

Reprieve's Legal Director, Clive Stafford Smith, who is acting on behalf of some 40 Guantánamo Bay detainees, said:

"The conference begins on the 100th day of the prisoners' hunger strike. I recently returned from Guantánamo and have just received an unclassified statement from Shaker Aamer, the British resident and father of four British children.

"He writes that he has been so abused and humiliated that he wants the US military to stop force feeding prisoners and allow him to chart his own destiny and die. The British government should be ashamed of itself, refusing to lift a hand to help the ten British residents still being held there.

"At the conference, we will see the collateral damage of the Guantánamo experiment—the torture, the fatherless children, and the abdication of the rule of law."

For more information, visit the conference page at Amnesty International UK. It is shameful that we must go to offshore media sources to learn what our own government is doing, or isn't doing. Surely this is not the noble work of a "Christian nation."¹

1. In 1992 former Arkansas governor Kirk Fordice was taken to task for calling America "a Christian nation"; in 2004 the Republican Party of Texas caused more offense when it voted to reaffirm a plank in its platform disputing "the myth of the separation of church and state" and celebrating the United States as "a Christian nation." See Washington Times, June 13, 2004.

D'Toqueville turns in his grave. And you think you talk to your TV set now. Filmmaker Chris Hume at truthout.com went on a 6,000-mile cross-country trek to find out why on earth Americans voted for George W. Bush for a second term. The documentary that resulted—Red State Road Trip: A 60-Minute Documentary—goes on sale tomorrow. In the meantime, you can watch the trailer, or cheat your way through it by watching 5 days of this funny, touching, disturbing, jaw-dropping film about how the other half of America really thinks. Then you can scratch my head and I'll scratch yours.