I’m an evangelical Christian. One complaint we often have of the mainstream media is they don’t understand or empathize with religion. They are just a bunch of hard-drinking, elitist, secularists and the worst of the worst are the so-called elite media such as the New York Times. As I have gotten to know more people on the left and in the media I have found this to be a myth. Frank Rich illustrates this, this morning.
Original Sin is often misunderstood. It is through a single act that actual sin and misery is transmitted by ordinary generation. It’s not that sex is dirty, but rather it’s natural. In order to break the cycle the supernatural is required. This is why conservative Christians make a big deal about the Virgin Birth and Catholics the Immaculate Conception. In Frank Rich’s column this morning he shows that he gets it.
The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.
Rich goes on to make a convincing case that it’s President Bush’s obsession with Iraq which makes the various evils not really various but banal.
The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.
In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.
But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.
Once you had the “truth” of the connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq there was no denying it. Original sin had happened and actual sin proceeded via ordinary generation. Many tried to stop this with the results that their memos were ignored or in the case of Secretary Rice’s assistant attempted to have those memos destroyed. Note that even if it was truly believed that torture produced good intelligence even that was ignored. The one good piece of intelligence we got was that even when the detainees were tortured they never made the connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Much has been made about what to do now. The problem is that many people do not appreciate the spiritual nature of the problem. In theology the answer to Original Sin is redemption and forgiveness. This was provided by someone who was brutally tortured. He said, “What good does it do to gain the whole world but lose your soul?” This is a time for all of us to see if we can find our souls again.
