The nation's umbrella group for evangelicals has endorsed a statement that takes aim at the Bush administration's alleged use of torture in the war on terrorism.
Directors of the National Association of Evangelicals announced late on March 11 that they had endorsed a document called “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror.” The endorsement came at the board's March 8-9 meeting in Minnesota.
The document was drafted by a group of 17 theologians, ethicists and activists calling themselves Evangelicals for Human Rights. Baptist drafters include Union University professor David Gushee and Fuller Seminary ethicist Glen Stassen.
“From a Christian perspective, every human life is sacred. Recognition of this transcendent moral dignity is non-negotiable for us as evangelical Christians in every area of life, including our assessment of public policies,” the statement says. “We write this declaration to affirm our support for detainee human rights and opposition to any resort to torture.”
It also praises a revised United States Army field manual that bans several controversial methods of handling prisoners, such as beatings and sexual humiliation. The 2004 torture-and-sexual-abuse scandal at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad brought U.S. officials under global scrutiny for treatment of prisoners.
However, the document also takes direct aim at what it calls “loopholes” in some federal laws on terrorism-suspect treatment passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“…[D]espite the military's commendable efforts to remove itself from any involvement with torture, the current administration has decided to retain morally questionable interrogation techniques among the options available to our intelligence agencies. For some time it did so without any form of public disclosure or oversight,” the declaration says.
The document takes specific aim at the Military Commissions Act, which President Bush pushed through Congress and signed into law last October. The law prevents federal intelligence officials from being held to the same standards as military personnel in handling prisoners.
The NAE document faults the act for that position, as well as for preventing congressional or judicial oversight of CIA officials' actions toward detainees: “This could prove to be a recipe for cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees, without the Constitution's checks and balances so crucial for American justice.”
The declaration also faults the act for denying prisoners suspected of terrorist involvement many of the constitutional rights that Americans take for granted. For example, it allows prisoners to be held indefinitely without being formally charged in some cases and relaxes trial rules to allow hearsay and other evidence against suspected terrorists that would never be admissible in any U.S. criminal court.
The provisions “violate basic principles of due process that have been developed in Western judicial systems, including our own, for centuries,” the document says. “We see this as fraught with danger to basic human rights.”
NAE is an alliance of several different evangelical denominations and institutions, representing about 30 million individual members. It does not include the nation's largest Protestant body, the Southern Baptist Convention, which claims 16 million members and has historically es-chewed membership in ecumenical groups.
Richard Cizik, the NAE's Washington-based policy director, is among the statement's signers.