The “I” Word

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

06/12/05

"The spirit we have, not the work we do, is what makes us important to the people around us."

Am I the only one who's shocked by this? And if not, why aren't we hearing an outcry about it.

It may seem a little naive, I realize, to claim to be "shocked" at the obvious. After all, I've gone to graduate school. I've taught at all levels of the educational system. I've been around the world a couple times. I am, in other words, a living example of what is now a rather sizable segment of the current population. I'm not an isolate, not ghettoized, by any means. By this time, given that kind of background, that kind of experience, I should be a little jaded, a touch cynical. A "realist," I think they call it.

But I am also part of the generation who were taught to fear Communists, who were trained to hide under school desks or sit on the floor in darkened basement corridors to protect ourselves from nuclear attack, who were told lurid tales about Russian gulags. And who, most of all, in my case, learned that when the godless Communists came, they would take down the crucifixes on our schoolroom walls and destroy our religion with them. We prayed public prayers for "the conversion of Russia" after every Mass, in fact.

These people, these barbarians, these Communists, wanted to impose a way of life on us that went to the core of the American dream and ate out the heart of the Catholic faith. They believed in the common ownership of goods rather than good old Yankee capitalism with its ethic of "rugged individualism" -- the notion that if you worked hard enough you could get anything you wanted. They considered religion "the opium of the people," the way you got a people to offer up hard times in this world as the will of God for you and so be content to wait for good times in the next.

Laugh now, if you will. But those were very real and present horrors then. Especially the part about the suppression of religion.

We were prepared to do anything to avert such a fate, to destroy such an enemy. We built bombs big enough to destroy the globe. We sent thousands of young Americans into the jungles of Vietnam to block the advance of the Red Tide and brought thousands of them home in pine boxes. We had defeated the Germans. We would defeat the Russians, too. Whatever the cost.

We were a Messianic people. We did no wrong, and we destroyed the Darth Vaders who did. We were international heroes. If you were a citizen of the United States somewhere else in the world, you were, indeed, received with flowers and cheers. Drum roll, please.

Then we won the Cold War, became the world's only Super Power, set out to make the rest of the world just like us, and began immediately to lose -- our international image and our integrity. Our president told us that it was all because people were jealous of us. "Some people hate freedom," he said. And, apparently, some people believed it.

Then, in May, Amnesty International, the world's most reputable human rights organization, released its annual report on the state of human rights around the world. That's where the shock came in.

Amnesty International, founded by British lawyer Peter Benenson in 1961, functions as a kind of watchdog organization of volunteers whose purpose is to monitor and evaluate the practice of Human Rights around the globe as defined by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Human rights are in retreat worldwide, this year's report states, and -- most disturbing of all -- the United States bears most of the responsibility for it. Citing routine abuse of detainees, detention without trial, fishnet roundups of men labeled "enemy combatants" without cause, and U.S. attempts to circumvent both domestic and international bans against terror, the report is a scathing indictment of U.S. dishonor and international lawlessness.

What's more, the report says, U.S. actions, imposed by the military but sanctioned by the government, justify repression, dictatorship and abuse by oppressive regimes everywhere. Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International explained, "When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a license to others to commit abuse with impunity."

The U.S. war on terror, Amnesty International argues, has been used as an excuse for "murder, mayhem and abuse of women and children" from one end of the globe to the other.

The U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the report goes on, "has become the gulag of our times."

President Bush, of course, dismissed the report as "absurd." Vice President Cheney said he was offended. Now what are we to make of that? Irene Khan is quick to answer. If our allegations are false, she said, open up the detention centers and let us look. "Transparency is the best antidote to misinformation," she said. Not a likely event.

So now people are marching in the streets from Indonesia to the Middle East, in every Islamic country on earth, not because they fear the Soviet Union or Russia. They are marching because they fear the United States.

They are as sure that we are coming to destroy them as we once were that the Communists were coming to do the same to us.

They fear the loss of a culture, a lifestyle, a value system. They fear the destruction of their religion, the loss of their way of life, the violation of their women, and the enslavement of their children to decadence and destruction.

They fear exactly what we feared. And, like us back then, they are willing to do anything --anything at all -- to preserve it.

Surely we can understand that. Why are we so surprised? We did the very same things 50 years ago, only worse. We armed the globe. We threatened the existence of the planet. We sent thousands of our best into the rice paddies of Vietnam, young and wrapped around with explosives, who never returned.

From where I stand, the shock of becoming what we say we hate is at least as bad as fearing it. Amnesty International says it all: We are the new gulag. You and I.

Why aren't we all shocked? Why -- instead of simply insisting that it is unpatriotic to say the obvious -- why aren't we all saying stop?

Comments or questions about this column may be sent to: Sr. Joan Chittister, c/o NCR web coordinator at the address below.

According to the notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Convention, Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia approached Benjamin Franklin outside Independence Hall when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, and asked, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded,"A republic, if you can keep it." Previously, in 1755, Franklin had said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

I consider myself a patriot. I love what America has stood for among the nations of the world. It has never attained perfection, it has always had further to go, but we have made progress toward our ideals. I must clarify, however, that I do not hold the welfare or security of this nation above the welfare and security of the other nations of humanity. I was brought up to believe we cannot separate America’s welfare or security from the welfare or security of the other nations. We live together on spaceship earth; our fates are intertwined.

I am concerned, terribly concerned, that we are in the process of losing much of what has made our nation great in our eyes, and in the eyes of the nations of the world. I am concerned that our liberty is being taken from us, or surrendered by us, in the name of temporary safety; and that the point is approaching where we might not be able to get it back.

What does this have to do with religion? You, after all, have come for a church service, not a civics lesson. I want to be very cautious this morning, so I will begin by trying to establish what all this has to do with religion, and then, on that basis, to lay out my concern for our nation and what I believe we should do to “keep” our republic. You, of course, are free to agree or disagree with any of this. My responsibility is to lay it out clearly; yours is to decide whether or not you agree, and in either case, what to do about it. We will have a time after the service to explore conflicting perspectives.

This is, of course, not a Buddhist, nor Hindu, nor Pagan, nor Baha’i gathering. Unitarian Universalism emerged out of Christianity which emerged out of Judaism. I believe my concerns this morning are deeply rooted in our religious tradition.

The prophets among the ancient Hebrews were people who felt compelled to speak out when they believed their nation was going wrong. The prophets were never part of the establishment – they were the outside critics. We know from the Hebrew Scriptures that the prophets had two types of concerns. Some were concerned about the faithfulness of their people to prescribed religious practices; others focused their attention not on rites and rituals, but on how the people were or were not living up to the covenant they believed had been established with the “Most High” to be a highly moral community.

The Prophet Isaiah, for example, declared that the concern of the Holy was not with sacrifices:

The Prophets valiantly stood up to royalty and tyrants, and to those who supported the status quo. They were not generally popular.

This week I saw the superb Starlight Theater production of Jesus Christ Superstar. Jesus did not preach religion for religion’s sake. As with the earlier prophets, the emphasis of his ministry was not on rituals but on how people treated one another - on compassion and love and justice. This was the emphasis of those who followed Jesus, until the church was co-opted by the Roman emperor who seduced its leaders with temporal power. Time and again, people of courage would emerge from among the believers and proclaim that Jesus’ church was not supposed to be about power but about love and justice. They were disregarded, killed, or themselves seduced by power, as Martin Luther was.

The founders of this nation knew the downside of the linking of religion and power and clearly set out to separate them. There are those who try to dismiss Jefferson’s term, “A wall of separation,” but it is clear from the debates at the Constitutional Convention that this is precisely what the founders sought. That did not mean that religion was irrelevant to the nation, but that a certain distance was essential. That distance worked to religion’s advantage: it kept religion free to critique government, and it is not coincidental that religion is stronger in America than in those nations with established churches.

There have been Unitarian and Universalist ministers who have placated the powerful and assured them of their virtue, and there have been Unitarian and Universalist ministers who have had the insight and courage to speak the truth to power: who have stood up for justice for all people, who have opposed wars, opposed slavery, demanded equal rights for women, insisted upon freedom of conscience, even when it was not popular. Some of us believe that speaking up against injustice or tyranny is one of the charges we accept with ordination to the Unitarian Universalist ministry. That is not to suggest that Unitarian Universalists are the only ones who speak out. Sister Joan Chittister is by no means alone among prophetic Roman Catholics, and there are leaders in most religious groups (Jews, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Muslims, and all) who believe that religious values are not just one-day-a-week things: that compassion and love and justice are relevant to our lives and should be to our government.

Which brings us to today. “A republic, if you can keep it,” said Dr. Franklin. It is amazing that we have kept it for more than 200 years. Our republic has not been without its challenges, but it has endured and much has improved: we have come closer to achieving the dream.

Our ancestors, in creating the constitution, anticipated, on the basis of history and their experience, how seductive power could be. They provided a way for people to respond to the potential of tyranny from the executive branch of government. Here comes the “I-Word” – impeachment was the remedy.

Historians tell us there has hardly been any administration in which impeachment has not been considered – at least in passing. Virtually every president has, in the eyes of some, come close to overstepping the boundaries of legitimate leadership and crossing into tyranny.

The recent revelation of the identity of “Deep Throat” carried many of us back 31 years to the near impeachment of Richard Nixon. Nixon saw himself more as a monarch than a President. Do you remember the Student Prince costumes in which he clothed the White House guards – briefly. I still remember the night one of his daughters was on the Tonight Show and referred in passing to her father’s “reign.” It was not just Freudian: it was indicative. Back in those days, it was hard to imagine an administration that would make his look good. John Dean suggests, in his excellent book, Worse than Watergate, that Nixon’s paranoia, which was always there, was exacerbated by the publication of the Pentagon Papers. The White House team really hunkered down and began seeing enemies everywhere. Secrecy became the order of the day, and lawbreaking to stay in office, to maintain power, was seen as a means justified by a greater end. Seymour Hersh suggests in the current New Yorker that “many people in government were outraged by the sheer bulk and gravity of the corrupt activities they witnessed in the [Nixon] White House. But he might have gotten away with it, was it not for “Deep Throat” and for a casual mention of the existence of tapes of White House conversations, which were under the supervision of Steve Bull, a college classmate of mine. [I always hoped Steve would turn out to have been “Deep Throat.”] When the tapes, in spite of a critical 18 minute hum, revealed the corrupt nature of White House discussions of governance, President Nixon saw the handwriting on the wall, and resigned before he could be impeached.

It is John Dean’s well-supported contention that nothing that happened in the Nixon White House begins to approach the level of betrayal of constitutional principles demonstrated by the present administration, but we’re not quite there yet.

There were some troubling questions about the Reagan presidency – the release of the hostages in Iran on the day of his inauguration, which inauguration might not have happened had they been released before the election. And then, perhaps not coincidentally, there was the Iran Contra scandal in which explicit legislation from the Congress was secretly disregarded. There were ultimately arrests and trials and some guilty verdicts, but the criminals are now rehabilitated and many are working for the White House. Reagan was too popular to be impeached – his Teflon was too effective – nothing stuck.

The Republican Party continued to smart from the Nixon debacle. Their visceral hatred of Bill Clinton paired with their control of Congress led to the ludicrous pursuit of his impeachment – initially because of alleged financial improprieties, but when those did not hold water, a fishing expedition revealed sexual improprieties and lies to cover them up. The majority of the American people never bought into Clinton’s behavior justifying impeachment – not even those who acknowledged his obstruction of justice in what most viewed as an extraneous matter. The Republicans in the Senate, as everyone knew from the start, could not get enough votes to convict. Clinton’s effectiveness as a leader was however compromised by the process.

Which brings us to today. As the evidence accumulates, questions are being raised about the impact of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” of the President, Vice-President, Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General (when he was White House counsel.) We appear to have lost the separation between the executive and legislative branches of government, and the judicial is not far behind. Without checks and balances, we will fail to “keep” the republic.

Former United States Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, who spoke at this church in 1987, is among the leaders of a group that is calling for the impeachment of the President and his cohort for their violations of the Constitution and for lying to the Congress and to the American people.

It is fair to ask, “Isn’t this just sour grapes? Do you know anything now that you didn’t know when the American people voted to elect George Bush to a second term?” I will pass on addressing the question of whether the proven vote fraud in Ohio perpetrated by the co-chair of the Ohio Bush campaign, doesn’t mean President Bush wasn’t really elected. The truth is there is nothing proven now that many of us didn’t suspect before, but what is new is the so-called “Downing Street Memorandum” about which you may know almost nothing unless you read a lot on the internet, but which does offer significant confirmation of our suspicions.

The American papers have done a pretty good job of burying mention of the Downing Street memo, which has been on the front pages of European newspapers, and was raised by a British reporter at the press conference this week at which Tony Blair was a participant with President Bush.

The memo is the official minutes of a briefing by Richard Dearlove, the head of Britain’s MI-6 to Prime Minister Blair and his top national security staff on July 23, 2002, before the President went to Congress seeking a blank check for war against Iraq, and 8 months before the invasion. It was published in Britain on May 1^st in the Sunday Times of London, and its authenticity has never been challenged by the British government.

In it, Dearlove, who had just returned from Washington, reports that the Bush administration is determined to go to war against Iraq using “the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.” The critical line is “But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” The facts were not there to justify it: they were being created to fit the case. Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary is quoted as saying, “The case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capacity was less than that of Libya, North Korea, and Iran.” [You can read the memo in its entirety on the internet at “http://www.afterdowningstreet.org.]

We know, of course, that the leadership team that President Bush brought into the White House had already publicly declared the need to get rid of Saddam Hussein before the President was chosen for his first term by the Supreme Court. According to former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill, war with Iraq was on the agenda of the administration’s very first meeting of the National Security Council; the problem was finding a justification. 9/11 helped a great deal. At one point, due to Administration misdirection, 2/3 of the American people believed that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in 9/11 and linked to Al Quaeda. Even with the President now having conceded those ties did not exist, a large percentage still believes it.

John Dean, in his book, Worse than Watergate, discusses Public Law 107-243 in which the Congress gave an almost blank check to the president to go to war with Iraq, something never done before. I say “almost blank” because there were two conditions: the President had to certify in a formal determination that:

1. Further diplomatic means alone would not resolve the continuing threat of WMD’s and

2. The military action was part of an overall response to terrorism including dealing with those involved in 9/11.

Dean refers to the “determination” that the President provided as analogous to “male bovine droppings.” The President quoted the Congress as having found that Iraq was aiding and harboring international terror organizations, that Iraq had WMD’s, that it was seeking nuclear weapons capability, that it possessed and continued to develop biological and chemical weapons. The Congress had “found” no such things. He was citing the Congress’ regurgitation of his assertions. If I tell you something, can I then use you as authoritative proof of it? We have, of course, learned that none of this was true, and the only basis for saying it was the reports purchased from Ahmed Chalabi and his associates who were paid over $27million to tell the administration what it wanted to hear. Having been convicted of bank fraud in Jordan, Chalabi had few good contacts in Iraq, and was in fact arrested by American authorities last year. He has somehow been resurrected and has been made interim oil minister and a deputy prime minister. Chalabi has very powerful friends in Washington.

The fact is that there were no biological or chemical weapons, there never was an attempt to purchase uranium and the alleged aluminum tubes for a reactor were never useable for that purpose, there were no missiles, no drone aircraft set to carry bacteria to America. It was all a fraud, perpetrated on the Congress and the American people. The response of the administration to the reality that its bases for going into Iraq were all false, is “Well, it’s good that Saddam Hussein is gone.” The question is, “Good for whom?”

More than 1600 American soldiers have died, with thousands seriously injured; tens of thousand of Iraqi’s have died and no one can count the number injured; the electrical and water systems are still in chaos; most Iraqi’s have no work; most of the money we are spending to “rebuild Iraq” is being spent on constructing US military bases and lining the pockets of American war profiteers like the company which the Vice President led. There are no areas of the country where people are safe, except possibly the “green zone” in Bagdad – and being there is a calculated risk.

The American people, the Congress, and the United Nations were fed lies by the Bush administration in order to justify the occupation of a nation which had done nothing to us and presented no threat to us – as the Downing Street Memo points out, less of a threat than Iran, Libya or North Korea.

Abraham Lincoln, on February 18, 1848, denounced the proposition that a president should be able to decide whether it is necessary to initiate a preemptive war.

The corollary to our invasion is the international crime we are perpetrating by our use of imprisonment and torture. Until recently, the administration liked to quote the findings of Amnesty International in regards to how bad Saddam Hussein was. Now that Amnesty International has focused attention on our dark side, it has suddenly become an absurd and reprehensible organization. The claim is that Amnesty has swallowed lies told by people who hate us. It is safe to say that our victims now hate us, but Amnesty does not prepare its reports without ample verification. Apparently the administration has not seen the videotapes and pictures of torture, or the reports of the Red Cross inspectors or the FBI inspectors. It is well established that the CIA has been taking some prisoners to jails in countries where torture is openly performed. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld personally approved interrogation techniques which violate the Geneva convention. We are holding more people at Abu Graib prison than Saddam Hussein did. We have 520 prisoners at Guantanamo who have been held without charges for more than three years.

In terms of violations of the constitution, one American citizen, Jose Padillo has been held prisoner for more than three years without being charged because the administration has declared him an “enemy combatant.” He was arrested at Ohare airport on suspicion, but by the US Constitution, an American citizen cannot simply be labeled by the executive branch and denied his rights without a trial. He may be guilty, but no one has proven anything and that’s how it was supposed to go in America before the present administration came to power.

America, which used to be seen as the beacon of freedom, is now feared and despised around the world largely as a result of the actions of the present administration. We are less secure than we were six years ago.

Given the not so distant re-election of George Bush, isn’t it ludicrous to talk about impeachment? Remember Richard Nixon? He was re-elected and then had to resign with his tail between his legs. There is an interesting phenomenon called the “tipping point,” whereby an idea that has been floating “out there” suddenly catches fire and becomes dominant. According to the Associated Press yesterday, the President’s approval mark at this point has fallen to 43%, and Congress’ is at 31%. In spite of the hiding of the bodies of the dead soldiers, it is beginning to sink in that we are paying a terrible price for this evil adventure. Many Americans are beginning to realize that our nation is losing its soul in Iraq, and that the administration is responsible. We are mortgaging our children’s future through the massive debt we are accumulating, and for what?

And I have not even mentioned to USA Patriot Act and its incursions on our civil liberties.

Can we impeach George Bush [and we have to include the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General who have all demonstrably been part of the conspiracy]. Not today, certainly, but possibly a month from now, for six months from now. How would we get there? By talking to people and e-mailing people and raising the issue. Who knows which person we talk with will be the one that puts the issue over the tipping point?

Today, it is not the form of government which is at issue, but the way it is being implemented – or not. I believe we are at the edge of a precipice. It is our responsibility as citizens to do what we can to change the direction in which our nation is going.

I am not a prophet from ancient Israel. This has not been “the word of God.” These have been the words of a human whom you have charged with the responsibility of holding before you the moral issues of our time. I have shared how I see it. As I said earlier, and as you well know, you are under no obligation to agree with what I have said. If you believe me to be wrong, please tell me so I can learn.