Religious Questions for the Republican Candidates

The New York Times' BILL KELLER wants to ask some interesting religious questions of Republican candidates. I think answering them for myself might be helpful, or at least fun. 

1. Is it fair to question presidential candidates about details of their faith?

Absolutely. Obama got such questions. 

2. Is it fair to question candidates about controversial remarks made by their pastors, mentors, close associates, or thinkers whose books they recommend?

Yes.  It is fair to ask the question, but stupid to think that anyone really agrees with everything that someone else says. The reason Obama was surprised by the Jeremiah Wright quotes was that he had not attended that church enough to know what "his" pastor believed. I find it funny that the quotes from Wright that gave Obama the most trouble I agreed with. 9-11 was indirectly caused by our foreign policy since WWII. "Chickens coming home to roost" fits the situation as I see it. 

3. (a) Do you agree with those religious leaders who say that America is a “Christian nation” or “Judeo-Christian nation?” (b) What does that mean in practice?

The early American founders were not Christians, although they claimed to be. If you define Christian as someone who says they are Christians, then we are a Judeo-Christian Nation. This question is often linked to other questions about supposed "dominionists"—usually misrepresenting what they teach and assuming that all dominionists agree. Most of the dominionists that people love to quote, the radical ones, do NOT believe that we are a "Judeo-Christain" nation. Most of them want us to be. This would require, in their view, a new constitution. Many of the "dominionists" would remove the "Judeo" part. There is some truth in the anti-dominist propaganda that has been appearing of late, but it is a minority position among dominionists. Gary North is a dominionist and he advocates that someone should not vote unless they swear an oath that they believe in the Trinity. The radical dominionists have absolutely nothing to do with Bachman, for example, she is a woman. 

4. If you encounter a conflict between your faith and the Constitution and laws of the United States, how would you resolve it? Has that happened, in your experience?

It would seem to me that such conflict is rare. As long as we are allowed to home school, and not forced to join the military, I can see few potential conflicts. There are such conflicts in other countries. But yes, if there is a conflict, one's faith, whatever it is, should come first. 

5. (a) Would you have any hesitation about appointing a Muslim to the federal bench? (b) What about an atheist?

I would appoint a Muslim, but probably not an atheist. Anti-social people with the medical condition of Asperger’s should not be in politics. So, no, I would not appoint Karl Rove to the Supreme Court. Most of the mass murders of the last century were committed by atheists or de-facto atheists. (My tongue is a little bit in my cheeck on this answer)

6. Are Mormons Christians, in your view? Should the fact that Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons influence how we think of them as candidates?

These are two separate questions confounded into one question. This is, to a degree, equivocation. Can an individual Mormon be a Christian? Yes. Can the Mormon Church be considered a Christian denomination? No. The Mormon world view is just too goofy. They think that "god" used to be a human being on another planet. As good Mormon boys and girls learn, "God once was as man now is." 

Their founders, and this has not been repudiated officially, think that there is a Mrs. "god" with whom god has sex and that this produces souls. Another founder thought that god the father had sex with Mary and the result was Jesus. I doubt I would vote for a person who wears secret magical religious underwear. 

7. What do you think of the evangelical Christian movement known as Dominionism and the idea that Christians, and only Christians, should hold dominion over the secular institutions of the earth?

I am aware of exactly one dominionist that holds this view—Gary North. No doubt there are others. I think that many Americans do not want serious Christians in politics, and that is their goal with this dominion meme. 

8. (a) What is your attitude toward the theory of evolution? (b) Do you believe it should be taught in public schools?

Which version of the theory are you talking about? My biologist friend Henrik and I had an interesting Facebook discussion on this. I will not repeat it here but the bottom line is that the way he defines evolution, I do not have much disagreement with it. For example, micro-evolution is clearly proven. The issue I have is a subset of evolution—materialism. No one can be a theist of any stripe and believe that. There are things apart from the physical creation. 

9. Do you believe it is proper for teachers to lead students in prayer in public schools?

Absolutely not, but then again I do not believe in public schools either. 

 Bill Kellers Questions are "making the rounds" in the blogosphere, here and here, for example. 

This is the post I wish I had written on these questions. 

There is another question Keller wants to ask Bachman that I will talk about tomorrow.

Secret Prisons

"The US has stopped running its global network of secret prisons, CIA director Leon Panetta has announced. 'CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites,' Mr Panetta said in a letter to staff" - BBC, April 9, 2009

Are you surprised that we have had secret prisons until 2009? Are you surprised that Panetta is lying and we still have these prisons? The Nation reports:

As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners.

At least the program is a success and we are safer as a result:

But according to the senior Somali intelligence official, who works directly with the US agents, the CIA-led program in Mogadishu has brought few tangible gains. “So far what we have not seen is the results in terms of the capacity of the [Somali] agency,” says the official. He conceded that neither US nor Somali forces have been able to conduct a single successful targeted mission in the Shabab’s areas in the capital. In late 2010, according to the official, US-trained Somali agents conducted an operation in a Shabab area that failed terribly and resulted in several of them being killed. “There was an attempt, but it was a haphazard one,” he recalls. They have not tried another targeted operation in Shabab-controlled territory since.

I have been pointing out the Obama presidency is Bush's third term. I do not think that from Bush's perspective he could have asked for a better Democratic successor in the foreign policy area:

This arrangement, as Scahill told me yesterday, is consistent with standard Obama administration practice: "they continue even the most controversial Bush terrorism policies by having some other government technically operate it so they can keep their fingerprints off it."  Indeed, the administration has even resorted to this playbook by using "torture by proxy" -- as we saw when the Kuwait government, with at least the complicity if not direction of the U.S., detained and beat American teenager Gulet Mohamed during interrogation sessions.  Just yesterday, a federal judge "reacted skeptically" to the Obama DOJ's demands for dismissal of a lawsuit (on secrecy grounds) brought by an American citizen imprisoned for four months in Africa, where "U.S. officials threatened him with torture, forced disappearance and other serious harm unless he confessed to ties with al-Qaida in Somalia." 

Obama has issued an executive order banning torture. This is why the administration still has these secret prisons. There the "suspects" can be tortured at will and the executive order does not apply.

Here is Salon's summary of an ABC report:

Worse still, the ABC report justifies the CIA program by quoting the anonymous CIA official as describing the program as "the logical and prudent thing to do."  ABC then helpfully adds that "senior U.S. officials have expressed concern that al Shabab may be trying to expand its terror operations beyond Somalia" and that " U.S. government officials worry that those lawless regions might become a safe haven for al Shabab and other terror groups."  There is no discussion -- zero -- of the illegal aspects of maintaining a secret prison, the dangers of allowing unchecked renditions of prisoners to Somalia hidden from international human rights monitoring, or the likely violations of Obama's highly-touted Executive Orders. 

I can see the left's skepticism when the left-leaning biases of the media are pointed out. Here ABC is following the CIA line. They must, if they want to be the next source of the "anonymous" leak. The point is not that ABC is leftist or rightist. It is leftist, but within the normal mainstream acceptance of the state-statism. It is a left leaning statist news organization. 

Salon concludes:

I Am Not a Number, I Am a Free ManThat's because "Serious Journalism" in Washington means writing down what government officials tell you to say, and granting them anonymity to ensure they have no accountability.  

Yes that is Journalism today in both the left-leaning and right-leaning media. The only way to get less filtered news is to watch Al Jazeera and Russia Today. Both are available streamed or on You Tube. I recommend that you add them to your programing choices. I am shocked to see myself write this, but that is just the way it is.

Are we operating Secret prisons? Yes.

Is the government lying about them? Yes. 

Are they illegal? Yes.

Does anyone in the mainstream media care? No. 

Torturers-Я-US

Today I will talk about the case of a Canadian citizen kidnapped by the US Government and sent to Syria. Here is the New Yorker’s description from 2005:

Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain was so unbearable, he said, that “you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.”

Since we do not want to torture suspects, we turn them over to governments that do torture. That way our hands are "clean." The New Yorker continues:

Most of the photos of this kind of torture are too graphic to use hereA year later, in October, 2003, Arar was released without charges, after the Canadian government took up his cause. Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador in Washington, announced that his country had found no links between Arar and terrorism. Arar, it turned out, had been sent to Syria on orders from the U.S. government, under a secretive program known as “extraordinary rendition.” This program had been devised as a means of extraditing terrorism suspects from one foreign state to another for interrogation and prosecution. Critics contend that the unstated purpose of such renditions is to subject the suspects to aggressive methods of persuasion that are illegal in America—including torture.

How does the CIA feel about these programs? 

Dan Coleman, an ex-F.B.I. agent who retired last July, because of asthma, scoffed at the idea that a C.I.A. agent was now having compunctions about renditions. The C.I.A., Coleman said, liked rendition from the start. “They loved that these guys would just disappear off the books, and never be heard of again,” he said. “They were proud of it."

Are you proud of it? Maybe you are, but I am not. Canada concluded that Arar was innocent. Canada was not proud of itself, and gave Maher Arar $10 million plus legal fees for Canada's part in the fiasco. Even more astounding for a government, the House of Commons unanimously apologized!

What about the ones who just disappeared? We will never know. It is the rare case that becomes public, and even then the publicity on the case in minimal. How much have you heard about these two cases? There was some on this case, but yesterday's case I had not heard about until National Review misreported it.  

At least we can be thankful that the US does not have secret torture prisons. Can't we? More tomorrow

US Citizens Tortured?

I was first aware of this case from reading National Review. The case was quite different than the snippet they talked about there. Andrew McCarthy wrote this:

Camp CropperI’ve been too busy to write about the ruling by a sharply divided three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit U.S. appeals court that former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld can be sued personally by two contractors who were detained in Iraq on suspicion of supplying weapons to insurgents. Were it to be upheld, the decision would be a disastrous blow against our armed force ...

McCarthy then quotes Rumfeld's attorneys at great length, here is part of it:

Today’s decision by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals is a blow to the U.S. military. According to two judges on the court, the judicial branch is best-suited to decide how to handle detainees captured and held in foreign war zones.

Naturally if you only quote one side's lawyers you are not interested in providing unbiased information. If I had not read it elsewhere I would not have known the full story. What is the major point they totally ignore? These "detainees" are US Citizens arrested and tortured without trial. I cannot imagine why they left that fact out of the post! 

Here is the full story:

Patriotism?Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, who worked for a private security firm in the Middle East country, were allegedly beaten and punished for months in 1996 ((sic) typo, it was 2006, two years after the Abu Ghraib scandal) at Camp Cropper near Baghdad before being dumped at the airport without charge.  ... The pair argue that their rights of 'habeas corpus' - the legal term for unlawful detention - were violated, and are seeking damages from 79-year-old Rumsfeld ... ...Vance and Ertel had been hired by Shield Group Security, an Iraqi firm who the duo believed were involved in some questionable dealings, including illegal bribery and other corruption activities. They flagged up their concerns to the U.S. authorities and began co-operating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation - and in early 2006 they were taken into custody and slung into Camp Cropper, the notorious holding facility for security detainees near Baghdad International Airport.... U.S. Circuit Judge David Hamilton wrote yesterday: 'There can be no doubt that the deliberate infliction of such treatment on U.S. citizens, even in a war zone, is unconstitutional.'

Yes this is clearly illegal. A US Soldier is told that he has to obey any legal order. But this order was not legal and they obeyed it any way. Rumsfeld is being sued because he authorized the rules that allowed detainees to be tortured. What was done to them? Since National Review quoted one side it seems fair to quote the other side: 

"The lights were kept on at all times in their cells."  "Their cells were kept intolerably cold, except when the generators failed.”  "There were bugs and feces on the walls of the cells."  "They spent most of their time in complete isolation."  They "had a concrete slab for a bed."  "Guards would wake them if they were ever caught sleeping."  "Heavy metal and country music was pumped into their cells at 'intolerably-loud volumes.'”  They "had only one shirt and a pair of overalls to wear during their confinement."  They were "often deprived of food and water."  They were "repeatedly deprived of necessary medical care"  "They experienced 'hooding.'”  They "were 'walled,' i.e., slammed into walls while being led blindfolded with towels placed over their heads to interrogation sessions."  

Of course torture like this is unusual. Isn't it? More tomorrow. 

Single Payer

A lot of Democrats want to move to a single payer system. My guess is that eventually we will. But there will be consequences. Here is one consequence from England:

Hip replacements, cataract surgery and tonsil removal are among operations now being rationed in a bid to save the NHS money. ... Examples of the rationing now being used include:

* Hip and knee replacements only being allowed where patients are in severe pain. Overweight patients will be made to lose weight before being considered for an operation. 

* Cataract operations being withheld from patients until their sight problems "substantially" affect their ability to work.

Why Is Our Health Care A Mess? All goods have to be rationed in some way. In a free market system the rationing is based on price. If you cannot afford a product you do not buy it. Most people are uncomfortable with this in the medical field. But our current system is not working precisely because health care is not rationed in America. Yes, we have copay and yearly deductible, but for many people they end up "eating" all the health care they can, because they are not paying the cost. (This is why I should not go to a buffet.)

No doubt you are expecting me to rail and rant about how awful rationing is, but it seems to me it is just necessary. If price rationing is off the table, and let’s face it, it is, then you have to ration in some other way, or eventually the whole system collapses. Since we do not ration either by price or waiting in line, we are proving this today—the main reason the government is falling apart is health care. The Government pays for over 50% of all medical bills; 25% of all government spending is health care. (This does not include VA hospitals.) Unless we adopt either a single payer system with long lines for treatment, and death panels, or adopt a free market approach, we will collapse. The middle ground we are on is actually worse than either of these options.