The [Redacted] Report, With Adam Driver and Annette Bening: A Film That Presents Itself As Questioning The Questioning of 9/11 Suspects. . . Is, Indeed, About What’s Left Out And Questions Not Asked

Redaction oriented promotion for the film "The [Redacted] Report"

The promotion of the film, “The Report,” originally titled “The Redacted Report” (note the emphasized deletion) has been interesting in the way that it stresses what has been left out, the redactions.  In a clever bit of advertising promotion for this Amazon Prime feature (Vice Studios is also a producer) editions of the New York Times arrived in November with a wrap-around special section, looking like a newspaper section, titled “Truth Matters.” It was rendered almost entirely unreadable because the majority of the text appearing there was blacked out with redactions.  All you could supposedly make out on that section’s front page that it was something about the “White House, . . the Constitution,  . . .violations, . . etc.” 

. . .The back of the special section furnished a quote from Variety: “ . . by the time it’s over the movie feels like something this country needs [i.e. to know?] now more than ever.”

A few days later the New York Times Arts section slathered on more enticement for the scandal-revealing film by running an article officially telling readers that something had been left out of the film, see:  The Report’ and the Untold Story of a Senate-C.I.A. Clash Hollywood Left Untold- `The Report,” about a 9/11 torture inquiry, omits a crucial episode.  By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, Published Nov. 15, 2019, Updated Nov. 16, 2019, or if you want the Times internet headline for the same story, The Adam Driver film dramatizes a contentious investigation into post-9/11 torture. But it leaves out a tense episode that could have buried the results altogether.

That Times story on the first page of its Arts section tells us that the “crucial episode” omitted about the “9/11 torture inquiry” that “could have buried the results” of the “contentious investigation” altogether was that the report was the subject of “a pressure campaign to keep the report under wraps” that included James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, citing a classified assessment and telling members of the Senate Intelligence Committee that release of the report “could lead to riots, attacks on American embassies and the killing of American hostages overseas.”

The big reveal, the hook based upon which the two Times headlines for the article were written, is that there were efforts to suppress that report, however, the whole movie is organized around tension involving efforts to suppress the report and its information. . .  And, despite what the two Times article authors claim, there is something very similar to their cited “episode” included in the film. . .  But having read the Times article (the internet version of the Times article includes the “teaser” trailer promoting it), you might be lured into thinking that, when you see the film, that you’ll know everything about what was left out . .

Is that so?  Not quite!  That’s why I am writing this article.

First, I don’t want to spoil things for anyone: See the film.  It has great performances, including by Adam Driver as the report’s chief investigator and Annette Bening as Senator Diane Feinstein, along with superb performances of many supporting actors like Jon Hamm.  The film also deals with very important issues.  You can feel good about the fact that they are issues that frequently don’t get the attention they should.  Indeed, they are issues that there are continual efforts to bury, just as the film is about attempts to bury the titular report of the title.

See the film, but see the film bearing in mind some of the points we’ll make in this article.

The film is docudrama.  Docudrama’s have a great advantage communicating in that they can synthesize complex stories for the public that could otherwise be exceedingly difficult to understand.  As human beings, our minds organize around narratives, stories that can be told around a campfire.  But when docudramas put their composite or narratively simplified characters up on the screen we lose sight of reality.  When blanks get filled in for the sake of moving the story along, we are likely to forget to ask questions about how those blanks could otherwise have been filled in or ought to have been. 

In the case of the film “The Report,” although it asks questions about how 9/11 suspects who were tortured were “questioned,” it doesn’t ask all the questions that are there to be asked despite the feeling that the film gives that it covers everything.  The film doesn’t ask questions about how a number of blanks that it fills in should have been filled in.

Before we get to those blanks and the questions that weren’t asked, let's look at a list of the many facts and issues the film does address.  The list makes the film appear almost seditious in the amount of criticism it is willing to direct at our government’s intelligence agencies.  Much of what is set forth on the list below is discernible by watching the trailer, but not all of it:

    •    9/11 scared people, made people scared it would happen again, so they would accept the crossing of boundaries that people wouldn’t accept before, many of them.  CHECK!
    •    People in the intelligence community actually foresaw that 9/11 was coming, but, somehow, those available insights were ignored allowing 9/11 to happen.  Decisions were specifically made not to investigate beforehand matters about the 9/11 events that would soon thereafter take place.  CHECK!
    •    Immediately following 9/11, huge amounts of increased funding flowed as a result thereof into the military-industrial-surveillance complex, with a virtual blank check going to the intelligence agencies included in that flow. For instance, just a small for instance, the unqualified private contractors who concocted methods of torture were paid over $80 million.  CHECK!    
    •    9/11 suspects were tortured by the U.S. government. CHECK!
    •    Torture is reprehensible and morally wrong (or at least most watching the film would concur). CHECK!
    •    Torture by the United States government is illegal. CHECK!
    •    When the United States government engages in such illegal torture, it creates a greater likelihood that members of our own military will be subject to similar treatment, while our country simultaneously loses the ability and grounds to prevent and object to it. CHECK!
    •    Those who are properly trained in our government know quite well that there are reliable, productive interrogation techniques that much more competently get information that don’t involve torture. CHECK!
    •    Coercion, including using torture, does not work to get information. CHECK!
    •    Coercion, including using torture, yields false and undependable information. CHECK!
    •    The CIA that conducted such torture had a long, long, decades long knowledge that torture does not work to get information. CHECK!
    •    Torture sometimes kills suspects putting whatever information they potentially had out of reach. CHECK!
    •    The government’s switch over from interrogation techniques capable of yielding valuable information to torture techniques that wouldn’t work made it seem almost as if the government didn’t actually want real information.  CHECK!
    •    That if the government actually knew torture didn’t work (as apparently it did), it was even more illegal. CHECK!
    •    The CIA was making its plans (in November of 2001) to torture people before it had identified suspects from which it wanted any information.         
    •    Coercion, including using torture against suspects means that it becomes almost impossible to thereafter legally prosecute those suspects; thus it immunizes them from legal consequences. CHECK!  (That raises questions about what is actually intended with respect to the actual disposition of such individuals.  CHECK!) 
    •    The United States tortured people who had no connection in any way to attacks on the United States, and people whose potential for providing information was deceptively exaggerated– That included exaggerating to say that Abu Zubaydah with whom the torture program was initiated, had connections to top al-Qaeda leadership. CHECK!  The film notes that, of at least 119 people identified as having been tortured, more than one quarter of them should never even have been detained. CHECK!
    •    Torturing people creates hostility towards the Unites States generating new enemies.  CHECK!
    •    The Unites States Government lied to the public issuing statements that were false saying that its torture programs has been successful in obtaining information that prevented attacks. That included Dick Cheney falsely claiming on television that torture led to the capture of Osama bin Laden backed up by false statements of former CIA director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Mukasey.  CHECK!
    •    That Public Relations people advising the CIA wanted (e.g. the misinformation in the film “Zero Dark Thirty” that the CIA helped make) President Obama’s popular bin Laden raid connected to information obtained by torture even before and when there was never any ability to manufacture such links.
    •    The United States Government, for about as long as it could, attempted to cover up just about all of the above, including the titular “Report” of the film about all of this.  That suppression could include character assassination of the messenger.  It included lying within the government and suppression of internal dissent within the intelligence agencies. CHECK!
    •    The CIA reportedly destroyed, so as to make them unavailable, tapes of its torture sessions (The destruction is what launches “The Report”’s investigation), so that we cannot now know and witness for ourselves the kinds of statements the CIA interrogators attempted to coerce the people it tortured into making and, further, we cannot see the responses the tortured individuals provided. The tape destruction was something that Gina Haspel (now CIA Director) was directly responsible for.  CHECK!
    •    There are serious questions about the CIA spying on the congressional oversight investigations of CIA activities. That included unauthorized searches of the investigators’ computers. CHECK!    
    •    That those in the government responsible for such actions were promoted, not punished or held to account and that includes Gina Haspel, one of those at the CIA most responsible, who was promoted to become the head of the CIA under Trump.  The film’s end cards say “No CIA officers have been charged in connection with the actions outlined in the report.  Many were promoted. One became Director of the CIA.”  CHECK!

That’s a long list.  And the New York Times article provided assurance that the producers provided “an annotated script” documenting the facts incorporated into the film. (The Times article noted some only very minor liberties with the facts that it says were taken.)  So what did a film that accurately includes all this leave out?  What questions did the film fail to ask, filling in its docudrama blanks in such a way that could go unnoticed?

According to the Times, the film’s “heroes and villains are sketched in black and white.”  Maybe, but are the “villains” supposedly sketched as “black,” sketched in the right shades of black?  Are those shades as black as they should be?  Because we don’t know a lot of things for sure, we can only speculate about how black those shades should be.  That’s hard to do in a docudrama format, but it is a question that deserves asking.

The film’s trailer shows how the film conveys that those wearing the black hats in the film were acting with the intent “to gain intel and save American lives.”  Even as they are shown to be mendacious and deceiving, incapable of recognizing their own sadism, the film allows those wearing its black hats to be seen as essentially misguided and/or perhaps incompetent.  The Times even manages, in its discussion of the film, to back up the idea of this incompetence of government officials by finding an `independent expert,’ Edward Peters, author of a history of torture, to say that those in charge of the nation’s torture program were incompetent to the level that they were “so ignorant of the history of torture,” that they didn’t actually know that they were, without question, torturing people.  Really?: The advantage of being `inexpert’ about torture “history” when you are in charge running a torture program is that you have an excuse for failing to recognize when you are torturing people as your job?

The Times softened any possible judgment that could be leveled against the black hats in the film even further, by supplying, in its film discussion, information that 60 percent of visitors to the International Spy Museum in Washington “voted in favor of torture” (in response to a survey the museum created) if “suspected terrorists . .  may know details about future attacks.”  This was after the Museum Curators provided “video clips in which the [torture] program’s architects defended it and opponents of torture denounced it.”

The Times discussion ends with a note (via quotes from Senator Udall, an author of the report) that the legacy of the report’s “grim record” is that it could serve a possible “warning” if “future leaders” are tempted to use torture again.  But here we have the two Times co-writers of the article, who just saw the film, inserting into their article that discusses these `warnings,’ theories about how maybe those wearing the film’s black hats were possibly not all that bad, that maybe these black hats were only `inexpert’ about torture history, and maybe these black hats were somewhat representative of the 60% of the visitors to the Spy Museum exposed to the pro-torture arguments offered by those in government running these programs who were inexpert in such history.

The real subject here is not intended to be how the New York Times recontextualized the black hats of the film into arguably normal people; the subject here is intended to be the unquestioned suppositions the film itself supplies, almost unnoticeably, concerning about how black the hats of the black hats in the film might actually have been.

The film, presupposing to know them, continually ascribes defensible, even admirable motivations to those who conducted and ran the torture program.  The film has the composite character that stands in for the Gina Haspel and who delivers her supposed point of view say that she justifies what she is doing because, in the aftermath of 9/11 “we are not going to get beat again.”  To her fictional credit, the Gina Haspel composite character, in later scenes, expresses exasperation when it is clear that torture is not bringing forth “the truth,” and she shows irritation with the idea that, when torturing people, you have to supply those people with the words you want them to say (your own “intel” on the subject) to get them to repeat it back.– In other words, she shows irritation that torture is only effective to put the words of your own script in their mouths.

Another stand in character for the torturers who presents the views of those favoring torture tells the investigators in an earnestly overwrought fashion that the report investigators don’t know what worked or didn’t, and that those engaged in the program who were doing these things are “trying to protect this country from people who want to destroy everything we believe in.”  One of the chief torturer concocters says that after 9/11 he “wanted to do something to keep people safe.”*

(*Somewhere herein we have to note that film often has its character's use, just as in real life, the euphemism "EIT Program"_-- Enhanced Interrogation Technique Program--  for torture.) 

It is towards the end of the film that these presumed motivations of the torturers get emphatically vouched for one more time by Adam Driver playing the film’s trusted protagonist, the report’s chief investigator when he is squarely asked: “If the CIA knew that torture didn’t work, why did they continue to do it?”

Driver’s character, Daniel Jones responds: “After 9/11 everyone was scared, scared it might happen again, and the CIA would be blamed if it happened again.  Or maybe they were ashamed: How come the most sophisticated intelligence agency on earth couldn’t keep its own people safe?”   

Actually, based on the film’s earlier revelations that the CIA knew torture didn’t work decades before, why did “the most sophisticated intelligence agency on earth,” in this instance, do it in the first place, let alone “continue” to do it?

Certainly, some of the people involved in conducting and running the torture program could have had such motivations as the film supplies, but to supply all of the top people running our intelligence agencies with such motivations, means that all of the top people at “the most sophisticated intelligence agency on earth,” if not simply sadists, had to be grossly incompetent and extraordinarily misguided, uninformed about the very things about which they are supposed to be expert.– Maybe as the author of the book on the history of torture says, because they don’t know their history?  How easy is this to presume, as is the film’s wont?

Even though the film emphasizes how the entire torture program never got any valuable information and although the film makes a brief reference to how over one quarter of the people tortured by the U.S. in its torture program “should never even have been detained,” it portrays a number of the key individuals being tortured mostly as if they are individuals who likely may be harboring just out of reach information that they are not giving up under torture.  We hear the suggestion that some of the tortured not giving information may “never be forthcoming or honest,” as if that was the point.  At another point, the torturers feeling stymied because they get no information, make out one of the men being tortured as seemingly crafty when they quote him as telling them that if they hurt him “he’d just make things up to get us to stop.”  We are similarly told that “KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] admitted he just told them what they wanted to hear to make it stop.”  The torturers in the film figure they are faced by `super-resisters’ who just give them stuff they already have, lies to make them stop, not the truth.  They decide they know about a man they are torturing only that “the truth is he’s lying.”

The film makes a big deal of the fact that those tortured just gave the CIA back information that the CIA already had.  As noted, the film included mention of how the only way to get more information from the tortured was to give the tortures more “intel” already in the hands of the CIA that the torturers could then extract from the tortured. This bounce back of information supplied by and already in the hands of interrogators is an inherent problem with torturing and coerced confessions.  It’s why everyone in these professions knows that coercion and coercive interrogation techniques are famous for yielding false confessions.  People are sent to prison for crimes the police want them to confess to in such situations, not crimes they actually commit.  (And, concomitantly, someone else is likely to go free.) 

The film avoids asking whether there would be any reason, other than utter incompetence, for the CIA to engage in and persist in so many interrogations where the result was simply statements bouncing back the “intel” the CIA came to those interrogations equipped with.  And even though coercion is famous for yielding false confessions, no more than exactly the story the interrogator wants recited back, the film doesn’t ask to what extent that statements bouncing back to the CIA the CIA’s own “intel” were perhaps false, verifying what might have been false information furnished by the CIA.

Unfortunately, the result of such unreliable investigative techniques is that we don’t know what we don’t know.  For instance, some of what is not known and needs to be discovered is the basis of and at the core of the lawsuit by 9/11 families against Saudi Arabia for the Saudi government’s assistance of the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks.  Saudi Arabian involvement in 9/11 is not mentioned in the film.— The film briefly mentions FBI Director Robert Mueller as one of those in government who is apparently suppressing the reporting of torture (an FBI agent explains that things went nowhere when he told the FBI about the torture- “They briefed Director Mueller and told me to get the hell out of there.”)– And the 9/11 families have introduced in their lawsuit an affidavit submitted as testimony from a former FBI agent saying Mueller, as head of the FBI, was not appropriately interested in investigating “multiple, systemic efforts by the Saudi government to assist the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks,” and that “the record shows” Mueller “covered up evidence pointing back to the Saudi Embassy and Riyadh — and may have even misled Congress about what he knew.”

Throughout multiple administrations, the United States continues to have a very close relationship with Saudi Arabia–  That includes the entire extended time period during which“The Report” takes place.

The film certainly does not stress enough that, because torture increased the unreliability of investigations that needed to be conducted, there is much that we probably haven’t found out, and much that is difficult to presume we actually know.  Nonetheless, about some things, beyond the torturers’ motives, the film presumes to know– In what is probably intended to be one of the film’s hardest hitting dramatic moments, Adam Diver’s Daniel Jones protagonist says of KSM:

What they really did was make it impossible to prosecute a mass murderer like KSM, because if what we did to him ever came out in a court of law the case is over.  The guy planned 9/11, and instead of going to jail for the rest of his life the CIA turned him into a recruiting tool for a war we're still fighting.

What is remarkable in a sense, is that because the film is so methodically thorough, it makes what is left out obvious if you bring to it the kind of scrutiny we are engaging in here. It's a scrutiny the film invites given the way it revels in its wonkishly analytical delights.  The Guardian’s review of the film describes writer and director Scott Z Burns as having a “a fetish for competence porn (that’s watching hugely capable, incredibly smart people carry out difficult tasks with great aptitude)” which keeps the film on track as being about the thrill of dealing with the actual facts.

After I got to just about this point writing this article, I went hunting for reviews of the film.  So far I have found no review that points out the questions the film does not directly ask identified here.  Even an alternative press review such as the one in Counterpunch fails to pick this up.  Previously published reviews generally accept what the film communicates at face value.  The Rolling Stone review of the film actually reassures “Burns redacts nothing here” praising the film for its complete comprehensiveness.

Some of the most glowing reviews of the film hearken back to the film’s debut at the Sundance Film festival. Variety’s review of that time concludes, “`The Report’ is a galvanizing movie that, if handled correctly, many people will want to see. .”  Sundance is where Amazon immediately picked the film up for distribution for $14 million.

I don’t see evidence that Amazon is failing to give the film the support it deserves, but many of the reviews of the film since Sundance proclaim it to be bland, dull and plodding, something I would absolutely disagree with, at least for those, like me, who have a part of their brain that lights up and activates with Andrew Sorkin type engrams and receptors when properly stimulated.  The Rolling Stone review endorses that Burns is correct in believing “that the granular details of cerebral inquiry into issues of morality are more than enough to hold our rapt attention.”

Because Amazon is streaming the film at the same time that it is playing in theaters, there is no way to report, interpret or make sense of any boffo box office figures that could help attract attention for the film.
               
An article in the Intercept reviewing the film (“If It’s Gonna Come Out, It’s Gonna Come Out the Right Way”: Heroes of Torture Report Movie Are Lauded for Dodging Reporters) spars with one aspect of the film to make an interesting point about the film’s ambiguity concerning whether it  stands up for the ethics of whistleblowing and those who resort to taking issues like these to the press.  The Intercept article also snarkily notes that the film gives some credit to the work of a “New York Times national security reporter,” but that the reporter who actually broke the story was Ali Watkins, a reporter at McClatchy (who later did a “stint” at the Times).  The Intercept has a page up saying that it “welcomes whistleblowers.” Unfortunately, the Intercept may not be the optimal publication to praise whistleblowing since it has provided treacherous shoals for whistleblowers seeking safe harbor there– The Internet is developing a very questionable record of "outed" whistleblowers who came to them anonymously and in confidence, i.e. Reality Leigh Winner and Terry James Albury.

What we have not so far mentioned here is that “The Report” adroitly explores the intricate multi-factored balances and interactions between the different departments and branches of government (and yes the press as fourth estate), and how this affects and involves labyrinthian constraints on getting anything done.  I’ll have to leave it to others who were tracking the political players more closely to decide how fair Burns’ film is to them.  (Burns says he voted for Obama twice, but the Obama administration gets roundly knocked, as it apparently deserved to be.)

Burns probably has a multilayered appreciation for the sort of politics involved in getting such a project done that is informed by his own experience.  Investigation and writing of the torture report was initiated in 2007 and the film chronicles how it took seven years to surmount the impediments involved for a summary of the report to finally be released. Burn’s reportedly took five years and 20 drafts to complete his screenplay, starting his work after the release of the report.  Vanity Fair reports that it wasn’t an easy film to get made. The magazine's article informs us that, towards the end, the film:

went from having a 50-day schedule to a 26-day schedule, and its $18 million budget was slashed to $8 million. Even with Driver—arguably the hottest male movie star of the moment—as the lead, Burns told press, “getting Hollywood to get behind a movie like this was difficult.”

Eight million dollars to make an important film like this is a paltry sum.

Just as redaction and compromise were continually issues in getting the report out as the film depicts, so too, we might expect that redactions, the leaving of certain blanks to be filled in only by the more astute viewers, were important to getting the film made.  Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that it was made while redacting as little as it did.  The film is well worth seeing.

An Open Letter To Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons of The First Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Brooklyn Requesting A Sermon About Peace

I have what is now a many year tradition with Noticing New York, another blog I write (about real estate development in New York and associated politics), of publishing a seasonal reflection about the year on Christmas Eve.  (More about the Noticing New York tradition here.)  This year I deviated from my pattern of previous years to publish, as Noticing New York's seasonal reflection, a letter I wrote to Reverend Ana Levy-Lyons, our minister at our First Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Brooklyn, requesting that she deliver a sermon about peace.   There is a little bit more about my decision at Noticing New York.
Because the letter I wrote concerns topics that have been central to the concerns pursued as national issues here in National Notice, perpetual war, the environment and the climate emergency, wealth and income inequality, censorship and information control, I am also publishing my letter to Reverend Ana requesting a sermon about peace here in National Notice.  So, on this Christmas Eve, following a few days after the winter solstice and coming not many days before the day that officially starts our country's new year, may we all move forward to a more blessed future and I hope that I have written something that is worth passing along so that it may have some beneficial effect.

December 19, 2019

Re:  An Open Letter Requesting A Sermon About Peace

Dear Reverend Ana,

Last spring my wife Carolyn and I invested heavily in our congregation’s fund raising lottery trying to win the prize of choosing a topic for a sermon you would give.  We didn’t win.  Had we won, we would have challenged you with what you might not have found an easy subject, speaking about Julian Assange, American war crimes, and the U.S. pursuit of empire.  Our choice of subject would not have been be to vex you with its difficulty, but to ask you to speak to what could be such a simple concept: Peace.  If, these days, conversations about peace are avoided as difficult, what better than address that difficulty in a sermon?

Giving it some consideration, I think that making a worthy case for a sermon topic is a good a way to gain the prize of having you speak on a topic we care about, as good a way as investing in fund raising lottery tickets.  Therefore I will try.

Is peace a spiritual thing?  Is talk about our common humanity, our common bonds, and about surmounting the blindness that fractures our relationships a proper thing to address in religious terms?  I acknowledge I’m being obvious here.  What I just referred to is supposed to be basic and elemental to the great faiths.

I grew up in the Vietnam War era and I remember churches and church people taking the lead in saying that the wars we waged in Indochina were wrong.  These days we, as country, are more military extended than ever.  My oldest daughter is now about to be twenty-nine years old.  We had already started bombing Iraq when she was born in January.  The war in Iraq is just one of the perpetual wars that has continued essentially for the entirety of her life.  All of our wars are long now.  As formally measured by some, the War in Afghanistan, with its later beginning, has surpassed the Vietnam War as our country’s longest war.

These days the United States has been bombing nine countries, ten if you include, as we should, all of the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen, the other nine countries being: Mali, Niger, Somalia, Libya, and then, in the Middle East, it’s Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. We have 800 military bases in other countries.  With practically no comment or attention from us, President Obama opened new military bases across Africa.

A peace symbol hangs prominently in our Unitarian Universalist congregation’s sanctuary where our sermons are given.  We begin every Sunday service singing the words: “let peace, good will on earth be sung through every land, by every tongue.”  Christmas comes every year, and every year we evoke and extol, as is customary in the Christian tradition, the image of Jesus as the “Prince of Peace.”  In our congregation’s Weaving Social Justice Committee we have discussed the prospect of rededicating the side chapel within the sanctuary that is known as the “Peace Chapel” to that cause.  In our list of candidate films for the social justice film series we are working on we have films about the injustice of war. . .

 . . . But, by and large, we hardly ever actually say anything about peace or the need to end the  perpetual wars for which our country is now responsible.  Has there been any sermon in our sanctuary on the subject of peace?  I can’t recall one.

I was not at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in June this summer, but I talked with people who went, and I looked over the multi-day program.  I was told and I saw that there were no sessions on the subject of peace.  Nor was anything said about the antithesis thereof, war, although we are deeply embroiled in wars to the point that they are inescapably always in the background our daily American lives.
 
Our congregation through its leaders including members of the social justice committee is now reaching out to other congregations in our city and to their social justice actors to coordinate collective activism on the issues important to all of us.  The importance of peace activism has not been mentioned in those discussions no matter that it is integrally related to virtually every other issue that is being discussed of common interest.  Has the subject of peace somehow been tagged as off-limits?  Is peace now too controversial to be discussed by and among religious communities?

Other social issues have attracted the attention of organizing Unitarians and have been the subject of multiple sermons. I understand and support that and among them are issues like the climate change chaos catastrophe emergency.  The climate emergency is an existential threat to all of humanity.  When the Democratic National Committee ordered that there be no debate focused on the single issue of climate change– the DNC actually forbade Democrats from participating in any such debate organized by anyone else– the case was made that the existential issue of climate is so fundamental that it is intertwines with and underlies virtually every other issue that’s important.  There are other issues like that; issues that are inextricably related to society’s other major issues.       

Our American wars together with the rest of our military interventions that stoke conflict in other countries are far too often wars which are very much about the extraction of oil and fossil fuels.  Moreover, overall our wars help keep in place the systems that continue to vandalize our planet, exterminating its ecosystems.  Further, the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, “the single-largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world,” and that the Pentagon is responsible for between “77% and 80% of all US government energy consumption” since 2001.  The US military is consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries, polluting more than 140 countries. Obscuring the reporting on this, the United States, which exempts its military from environmental laws, insisted on exemptions from reporting of the military emissions of all countries from climate agreements. The U.S., has itself escaped such reporting by exiting the Paris Climate Accord.

It is not clear, but these staggering figures about fossil fuel use probably don’t include the fossil fuel consumption related to the initial manufacture of weapons.  Consider also that replacement, or nonreplacement, of what is bombed, burned and incinerated also must entail substantial additional environmental costs.
                                     
It is not just greenhouse gas emission pollution that the military produces: In 2010, a major story that went largely unreported was that the U.S. Department of Defense, as the largest polluter in the world, was producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, and that just some of the pollutants with which it was contaminating the environment were depleted uranium, petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as Agent Orange, and lead, along with vast amounts of radiation. Following our bombings, birth defects reported in Iraq are soaring. A World Health Organization survey tells us that in Fallujah half of all babies were born with a birth defect between 2007 and 2010 with 45 per cent of all pregnancies ending in miscarriage in the two years after 2004.

Another thing we face that has been deadening to the human spirit has been the increasing “othering” of people who we are made to think are different from us.  Frequently now that’s immigrants from other countries who are black or brown.  Often that “othering,” as with Muslims, is stoked in ways that may cause us to support or tolerate wars in which those others suffer most and towards whom hostilities are often officially directed.  We may also forget how our wars and military activity push the flow of populations forcing people to migrate across boarders, as, for instance, with those leaving Honduras after our country helped bring about the military coup that replaced the government there.

Also basic and underlying so many of our problems are racial, income and wealth inequality with concomitant inequality in power and influence. These are things that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who practiced ministry through activism and activism through ministry, labored to eliminate.  Not long before he was assassinated, King also began to speak out against the Vietnam war saying the great challenge facing mankind is to get rid of war.  Before he did so, he carefully weighed cautions urged on him that as a civil rights leader he shouldn’t do so, that it would undermine support for his civil rights work, split his coalition, and that these issues should not be joined together.  But King concluded that the issues were tied together and decided that he would address them on that basis.

When King expressed his opposition to the war in his very famous “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence,” delivered in this city’s Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967, one year to the day before his assassination, he said he was “increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”  He spoke of the disproportionate toll that waging war exacted on the poor and spoke of the poisoning of America’s soul. . . So it is today.

War is profitable business.  It busies packs of lobbyists who know a great deal more about often secret budgets than we, as the public, will ever learn.  But that profit drains the resources of our society enfeebling our ability to accomplish so much else.  The Pentagon and military budget is about 57% of the nation’s discretionary budget.  If all of the unknowable black box spending that goes into the Military-Industrial-Surveillance Complex were included, that percentage could well bump up higher.  We spend more on military spending than the next ten countries combined (or seven, depending on the year and who calculates), and we spend much more than all the rest of the countries in the world left over after that.  Of course, much of that spending by other countries is on arms we supply making the world dangerous.

We may not fully know about or have a complete accounting of all the dollars we spend in these areas, but, in May of 2011 after the U.S. announced that it had killed Osama Bin Laden, the National Priorities Project calculated that, as of that time, “in all, the U.S. government has spent more than $7.6 trillion on defense and homeland security since the 9/11 attacks.”  Point of reference: a “trillion” is one million millions.

Just the increase in the military spending in the last two years since Trump came in is as much as Russia spends on its entire military budget ($66 billion).  Similarly just that increase is greater than the entire military budgets of Britain ($55 billion) or France ($51 billion). 

Our fixated disposition to keep spending more is entrenched: Even Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts who promotes herself as a left wing progressive, voted in 2017 to increase the defense budget by $80 billion, surpassing the $54 billion increase requested by President Trump.  60% Of House Democrats voted for a defense budget far bigger than Trump requested.

Perhaps most disquieting and insidiously corrupting to our morality and our souls are the pretexts we adopt to justify going to war and to abide its horrors, particularly when we leave those pretexts dishonestly unexamined.  The public flailed and many among us continue in their confusion, unable to sort out that Iraq did not attack the United States or have weapons of mass destruction before the second war that we unilaterally and "preemptively" launched to invade that country.  Before our first Gulf War attack on that country there were no slaughtered `incubator babies’: That was just a brazen, cynically staged public relations scam.  Similarly, how few of us know and recognize that Afghanistan did not attack the United States on 9/11– We precipitously invaded that country because the government there was at that time asking that procedures be followed and proof furnished before it would assist in finding and turning Osama Bin Laden over to the United States.

The foreign country that was most involved in 9/11, and from where almost all of the men identified as the alleged 9/11 hijackers came, is Saudi Arabia.  Saudi Arabia is the country to which we are selling massive amounts of weapons (making it that world’s third biggest military spender) and it is the country with which we are deeply involved perpetrating war crimes against Yemen.

In the Vietnam War, our second longest war, it was the Gulf of Tonkin incident that, not being what it seemed nor reported to be, was the pretext for war.

Perhaps hardest and most challenging to our susceptibilities as caring people striving to be spiritual and attentive to justice are the pretextual manipulations to which we are subject in regard to what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman spotlighted as the selective distinguishing between “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims.  “Worthy” victims are those who, whatever their number, deserve our outrage and are a basis for calls for the international community to mobilize toward war.  “Unworthy victims” are those who can die en mass without attention or recognition like the tens of thousands of Yemeni children who have died for lack of food, water and medicine because of Saudi Arabia’s blockade assisted by the U.S..  Often, as with Palestinians removed from their homelands, these victims are blamed for their own victimhood.

Additional layers of pretext pile up when we encounter journalists and whistleblowers willing to be the messengers of war crimes.  We punish those messengers while, concurrently, there is no consequence for those who perpetrate the war crimes.  Often the perpetrators are promoted to higher office. That includes those who illegally torture others to coerce useless, undependable, and likely false “confessions.”  Thus we punish and torture Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning for exemplifying what Daniel Ellsberg called “civil courage.” Thus we vindictively send CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou to prison for disclosing his agency’s torture program.

Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s organization has published much that is embarrassing to the United States and those in power, much of it is particularly embarrassing to the U.S. military.  Wikileaks has never published anything that was untrue, but the truth of what it has published is disruptive to the official narratives of the war establishment. That establishment has been seeking vengeance against and to neutralize Assange since events in 2010 when in April Wikileaks published documenting gunsight video footage, under the title of “Collateral Murder,” of a US drone strike on civilians in Bagdad provided by Chelsea Manning.  The New York Times and Washington Post did not respond to Manning’s attempts to publish that same footage through them or other evidence of U.S. war crime in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Anyone who wants proof of the pretextual nature of the United States’ persecution of Julian Assange and of the ghastly and sometimes illegal, abuse of inordinate power against Assange should watch or listen to Chris Hedges June 8, 1019 “On Contact” interview with UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer (“On Contact: Julian Assange w/UN Special Rapporteur on Torture”- Chris Hedges is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church).  The attacks against Assange began with a highly orchestrated campaign of character assassination.  They have progressed to things far worse.  Both Assange and Manning (who was pardoned from a 35-year sentence after seven years of confinement that included the torture of Manning) are now being held in prison, no end in sight, for no crimes of which they have been convicted.  I think we have to agree with the criticism of this as psychological torture.  The continued torture of Manning is an effort to get at Assange even if that were to involve forcing Manning to lie.

The United States wants Assange extradited to the Unites States to be tried for the crime of practicing journalism that was unflattering to the United States government. Somehow we have the highhandedness to conceptualize this journalism to be treason although Assange is a foreign national. Assange faces no other charges. Under the laws pursuant to which the U.S. would try him, Assange, like the exiled Edward Snowden, would not be permitted to introduce any evidence or argument that disclosing illegal U.S. activity or war crimes benefits the public.  It’s said that the United States wants nothing more than a show trial and I think that must be considered obvious.

When Assange sensed in 2012 that trumped up charges in Sweden would be used as a subterfuge to transfer him to United States custody for such a show trial he obtained political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. For this, a British judge sentenced Assange and had him serve 50 weeks in a high security prison for “bail jumping”; that’s just fourteen days short of the maximum possible sentence, although the obviously trumped up charges for which Assange had posted bail were withdrawn, negating the original bail terms as a result.  A normal, typical sentence for bail jumping would have entailed only a fine, in a grave case, a much shorter prison sentence.

Britain was able to send police officers into enter the Ecuadoran Embassy to arrest Assange for “bail jumping” and then later hold him, without other charge for pending extradition to the United States, because of a change in the Ecuadoran government that was evidently CIA assisted, and as the United States was dangling financial aid for that country.  Assange’s eviction from the embassy, along with his being simultaneously stripped of Ecuadoran citizenship, was done without due process.
 
The persecution of Assange casts a long shadow to intimidate other journalists, whistleblowers and activists as they themselves are being intimidated about disrupting the preferred narrative concerning America’s militarily asserted empire.  Other providers of news simply lay low not reporting things.  As neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported it, you may not have heard about the recent scary SWAT style arrest of journalist Max Blumenthal by Washington D. C. police hours after he reported about the United States government funding of the Venezuela Juan Guaidó coup team.  Blumenthal was shackled and held incommunicado for an extended period. Not long after that the D.C. police went out to similarly arrest activist and journalist Medea Benjamin when she publicized the U.S. backing of coups in Venezuela and Bolivia.

With silenced journalists, will we, based on unchallenged pretexts, send our military into to change the government of Venezuela as there is talk of doing?  In Bolivia the coup we sponsored has been successful without that.  Meanwhile, there is talk of pretexts for military actions against Iran, Russia, North Korea.

Journalists who still show courage, are subject to exile, sometimes self exile, from their journalistic homes, to alternative media outlets, where, like Assange, they are likely to be less heard and will be more vulnerable. Journalist Tareq Haddad just announced that he resigned from Newsweek because that publication has been suppressing a story of his.  His story was about the whistleblower revelations of buried evidence that the supposed 2018 Duoma chemical attacks by Syrian president Assad on his own people was fairly obviously a concocted fabrication when it was used as a justification for the U.S. to bomb Syria.  Remember our bombings of Syria?  The was another in 2017. It was for such bombings of Syria the press declared that Trump was finally `presidential,' and, as the cruise Tomahawk missiles launched, MSNBC’s Brian Williams spoke of being “guided by the beauty of our weapons” using the word “beautiful” three times in 30 seconds.

The strenuous suppression of these voices like Assange's that would disrupt official narratives shows how the conduct of war has a tight moral link to the choices we make to speak out against war and against the suppression of the voices that oppose war.  In his sermon against war at Riverside Church that day one year to the day before he was killed, Reverend Martin Luther Kings Jr. said that, “men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war.”

King also said that, when assuming the task of such opposition, it was difficult to break free of the “conformist thought” of the surrounding world.  Indeed, with the complicity of a much more conglomerately owned corporate media than in King’s time, it seems as if there is a secularly consecrated catechism of what we know we as Americans are not supposed to say, what we must veer away from and avoid.  We subscribe with almost religious ferocity to the belief that American exceptionalism justifies all our actions in the world.  It feels, as if in our bones, that we know that to violate this proposition and say something else would create a rumbling disturbance in the force (you know, “Star Wars”).  Or is our silence, merely something less profound than that, just the equivalent of what we think would be an exceptionally super-rude topic to bring up at a family Thanksgiving or holiday diner?
                               
Dr. King correctly foresaw that there would be significant prices he would have to pay for speaking out against our country’s war.  He concluded that he had to do so, that he had to `break the silence,’ despite the prices he knew he would have to pay. He felt that doing so was the only thing he could do and remain true to himself and his causes.

Ana, I have no doubt that there would be prices you would have to pay if you spoke out for peace; if you spoke out against war.  I also acknowledge that there are prices our congregation could face.  Relatively recently the FBI has raided the homes of public nonviolent peace activists who have long, distinguished careers in public service.  (And the FBI has also been investigating nonviolent climate activists and Black Lives Matters activists.)  But I urge you to deliver a sermon about peace because it would be the right thing to do.  Perhaps it could go along with a rededication of our sanctuary’s Peace Chapel. And, perhaps,  if you would give a sermon like Dr. King gave against our wars, it might do more than just be a good thing in its own right: It might serve as a model for the ministers of other congregations who would follow suit.

Maybe, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s day, there can again be a time when people see the call for peace as a spiritual issue and our church’s, temples and congregations again take a lead role in calling for peace and an end to our wars.

Have I made the subject of peace sound as if it is complicated?  If so, I am sorry.  That can be a problem in itself.  At bottom, shouldn’t this all be so simple?  Peace, supporting peace, speaking out for peace. .  Something very simple.
 
            Last night I had the strangest dream
            I never dreamed before.
            I dreamed the world had all agreed
            To put an end to war.*

* From “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” by Ed McCurdy- 1950,
 a precursor of sorts to “Imagine” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono- 1971

 Sincerely,

Michael D. D. White