Christian College Gives
Torture President Honorary Humanities Degree
By William Boardman
February 19, 2015 "ICH"
- "RSN"
- The American torture president and
self-professed Christian, George W. Bush,
gratefully accepted an honorary Doctor of
Humanities degree from the
Christian-ideology-based University of
Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas, on
February 11, in a “public” event that was
closed to most of the public. The only
direct media coverage allowed for the event
was by Fox News and the college public
relations team.Even
though it might have been headlined as
“Christians Honor War Criminal,” there were
apparently no national news stories about
the former president’s award. Five days
after the fact, the
Washington-insider publication The Hill
ran a short summary noting that Bush had
said, “Evil is evil.”
The European Court of
Human Rights has confirmed its judgment that
the Bush administration orchestrated a
global network of CIA black sites where
suspects were imprisoned and tortured, a
form of human trafficking for which Bush and
his associates have yet to be held
accountable. As the human rights
organization
Reprieve reported on February 17, the
corruption of Poland’s “justice” system on
behalf of the Bush administration
illustrates the sheer horror of the way the
U.S. handled people regardless of evidence:
In July 2014, the ECHR
had ruled that Poland “facilitated” the
torture, secret detention and unlawful
transfer of Abu Zubaydah, who is now
held in Guantanamo Bay.
Mr Zubaydah was flown
from a secret site in Thailand to
another CIA prison in Stare Kiejkuty in
northern Poland, where he was detained
and tortured during 2002 and 2003. The
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
(SSCI) detailed in its recent report how
Mr Zubaydah was subjected to torture
numerous times by the CIA, before the
Agency concluded that he was not a
member of al Qaeda at all. [Emphasis
added.]
“Christian values”
appreciated, but not clearly defined
Speaking to Bush in front
of the gathering to honor him, Hardin-Baylor
president Randy O’Rear told the
self-described “war president”: “We
appreciate your Christian values, integrity,
your love for family, your love for our
country, your boldness, and your strong
leadership.”
“Evil is real,” Bush told
the Baptist college crowd, without referring
to beheadings by Saudi Arabia,
assassinations by U.S. special forces, or
terror-bombing civilians in places like
Afghanistan or Iraq: “Evil is real. There is
no light grey. Murdering innocent people to
move a political point of view has been, is,
and always will be evil…. So one of the real
dangers is an isolationist tendency.”
Bush described his
father’s service in World War II, using it
to frame the success Japan has had moving
from an imperial, warlike culture to a firm,
democratic ally of the United States. Bush
did not mention Hiroshima or Nagasaki or the
incineration and maiming of hundreds of
thousands of innocent people. He did not
come close to suggesting that murdering
hordes of innocent Japanese to move their
political point of view toward democracy was
evil.
After destroying
Hiroshima, President Truman
offered thanks to God for the power to
kill indiscriminately, though he expressed
it more delicately:
It is an awful
responsibility which has come to us. We
thank God that it has come to us,
instead of to our enemies, and we pray
that He may guide us to use it in His
ways and for His purposes.
Obama has been attacked
for telling the truth about abusing “God”
At the February 5
National Prayer Breakfast, President
Obama didn’t mention any of the more recent
American slaughters of innocents when he
commented on “those who seek to hijack
religious for their own murderous ends.” But
he did follow that by saying with simple
factuality:
And lest we get on our
high horse and think this is unique to
some other place, remember that during
the Crusades and the Inquisition, people
committed terrible deeds in the name of
Christ. In our home country, slavery and
Jim Crow all too often was justified in
the name of Christ.
These are facts, and not
even the worst facts available. Christian
genocide against the native peoples of the
Americas was compounded by the missionary
arrogance of seeking to convert them to
Christianity to save their souls. How is
that less twisted thinking than any Islamist
currently on the loose?
Many of those attacking
Obama for tiptoeing close to principles
Jesus might actually embrace, commit the
sort of hypocritical faith cudgeling –
typically Islamophobia – that they blame on
Obama. It is as though, looking at Obama,
they are seeing themselves in a mirror. They
do not embrace what he later, sanely, said:
There is a tendency in
us, a sinful tendency that can pervert
and distort our faith…. And that means
we have to speak up against those who
would misuse His name to justify
oppression, or violence, or hatred with
that fierce certainty. No God condones
terror. No grievance justifies the
taking of innocent lives, or the
oppression of those who are weaker or
fewer in number.
In this context, Obama did
not mention the innocents still held in
Guantanamo, nor the innocents killed by
predator drones, nor the innocents bombed in
Iraq and Syria, nor any of the innocents
elsewhere falling victim to unbridled U.S.
military terror and Christian fervor.
Being honored for his
Christian leadership at Hardin-Baylor, Bush
made this effort to explain his success:
There are universal
truths that are essential to good
decision making. One such universal
truth … is that there is an Almighty,
and a gift of that Almighty to every
man, woman, and child on the face of the
Earth is a desire to be free.
This Christian
ex-president didn’t say that he exercised
his desire to be free by lying his country
into a devastating war and adopting a
torture regime that honored a technique
handed down from the Holy Inquisition:
water-boarding.
William M. Boardman has
over 40 years experience in theatre, radio,
TV, print journalism, and non-fiction,
including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary.
He has received honors from Writers Guild of
America, Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an
Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of
Television Arts and Sciences.