The rules of religions against torture

`There are certain acts that a follower of Jesus simply cannot accept. Here is one: A Christian cannot justify the torture of a human being."

That statement, written by David Batstone of Sojourners, a progressive Christian magazine, is not literally accurate. President Bush, a man who says Jesus changed his life, signed a ban on torture last year while suggesting that as commander in chief during the war on terrorism he might not follow it chapter and verse.

Rayleen Nuñez reads Christian requirements differently than the president. The South End resident's Episcopalianism, buttressed by what she calls the peaceful traditions of her Canadian aboriginal heritage, made her one of 325 Massachusetts residents, and 9,150 people nationally, to sign their own antitorture manifesto.

"If you go all the way back to Judeo-Christianity, `Thou shalt not kill' is one of the big ones," says Nuñez, a retired community activist. "And `thou shalt not torture,' to me, is in there."

After years of wrenching introspection over US government policy -- a conversation that introduced a new vocabulary to American discourse such as Abu Ghraib and rendition -- the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a Washington-based umbrella group of religious organizations, is rounding up signatories for a multipoint statement, "Torture is a Moral Issue." The gist of its exhortation is a prohibition of any and all "inhumane interrogation."

The campaign is also encouraging religious believers to pin down members of Congress and their challengers in next month's elections on various policies related to torture, although spokesman Richard Killmer says the campaign lacks the resources to tally the stands of every candidate.

The White House has found some limited religious support for at least some of its antiterrorism stands. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Baptist body in the country, condemned the US Supreme Court decision in June outlawing military tribunals for prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. The high court said the tribunals violated the Geneva Conventions and US law, but Land argued that terrorists who don't serve in nations' armies don't merit those protections.

On Tuesday, Bush signed into law new rules on interrogating detainees and prosecuting suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, though opponents promised a court challenge, because the law denies detainees the right of habeas corpus.

Signatories to the antitorture statement are not limited to Christian churches. Anwar H. Kazmi, a director of the Islamic Society of Boston, came to the United States from his native Pakistan in 1969. From that time, he recalls chilling stories told by Iranian friends of SAVAK, the Shah's secret police.

"I had heard stories of people having gone through torture," he says. Recent cases -- for example, the Canadian government inquiry finding that a Muslim citizen had been sent by American authorities to Syria and tortured there, based on botched Canadian intelligence -- awoke the old horrors in the back of Kazmi's mind.

"Concern for your fellow human beings is, to me, the essence of Islam [and] religion," he says.

He cites a line from the Koran that whoever kills one person unjustly acts as if he kills all humanity. Kazmi says there are also traditions in which Prophet Mohammed commends kindness, and condemns cruelty, even toward animals. "If you to act in this manner toward animals," says Kazmi, "how can you do these kinds of things to human beings?"

The fact that it is fellow Muslims who are among the victims of torture by his government remind Kazmi of the tug he feels between two worlds. He still has family in Pakistan, he says. "Then all my children were born here. I have grandchildren here. . . . It's like having two branches of your family, the paternal and maternal, and you want them to be on the best of terms."

Russ Vernon-Jones, an Amherst Congregationalist, says that he would share the organizers' sentiments if they were secular, "but I was particularly interested in signing as part of a religious group, because I think Christianity in particular has been misused as part of the public discourse" by conservative believers.

For Vernon-Jones, Democratic leaders who sat in the shadows as Republican senators led the fight against rewriting the Geneva Conventions bear some moral blame, though he understands the fear of being tarred as soft on terrorism. He contrasts the current political environment with "the way Christ treated with respect those who were outcasts in their societies."

"To me, there's a statement there about the dignity and sacredness of human beings," Vernon-Jones said.

Whether that statement will remain an expression of morality or become a lever to move government policy is one thing on which the various signers don't agree.

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