What does it mean to be a Christian in these times? The works of mercy knock on our door. The hungry, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner demand our compassion -- but more, they demand our action.

I am thinking of the prisoners especially as I prepare for trial in Washington, D.C., tomorrow. There are the 2 million men and women who crowd U.S. prisons -- many for nonviolent offenses. Then there are the tens of thousands shoved in the dark corners of the U.S.'s vast but hidden archipelago of "war on terror" detention. Guantanamo -- perched on the tip of Cuba -- is the most visible and the most vulnerable.

Since walking from Santiago de Cuba to Guantanamo as a work of mercy -- to visit the prisoners and appeal to the humanity of their imprisoners -- with friends in 2005, I have been particularly concerned with what has been called the "gulag of our time."

And so tomorrow, 35 of us go to trial for an action at the U.S. Supreme Court. On Jan. 11, a day that marked six years of torture and abuse at the U.S. Naval Base, 80 of us were arrested there. In the statement we read there, we explained that "We are here to bring their plight and the plight of all prisoners from this current war, to the 'highest court in the land.' We are here to make their suffering visible, to make their voices heard, to make their humanity felt." And we continued that after we were arrested -- many of us were taken into custody under the name of a Guantanamo prisoner. And in a new twist on traditional protest, we will continue to carry those names into the courtroom on Tuesday.

This act symbolically grants the Guantanamo prisoners their day in court, which the Pentagon has denied them for years. For example, Christine Gaunt, a grandmother and third-generation hog farmer from Grinnell, Iowa, will carry with her into the courtroom the name and the memory of Abdul Razzaq, an Afghani man sent to Guantanamo in 2003. She reflects: "Abdul Razzaq continually claimed his innocence. He died in Guantanamo in 2007 of cancer, leaving behind children and grandchildren. He never had a chance to make his case in a court. I will take his name to honor his right to justice before a proper court, a right cruelly denied him at Guantanamo."

Frida Berrigan is a member of Witness Against Torture and can be reached at frida.berrigan@gmail.com

Friday morning I posted about Bush legalizing waterboarding. That evening, Bill Moyers' Journal had a compelling and disturbing segment on the use of torture by U.S. forces. It was about the Oscar-nominated documentary film, Taxi to the Dark Side, directed by Alex Gibney who made Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. The Moyers segment includes excerpts from the film and testimony of prisoners falsely accused and tortured in Afghanistan and Iraq. Watch it.

Key quote:

Despite Rumsfeld's and Cheney's and President Bush's allegations that these guys are the worst of the worst, that they were all captured on the battlefield, recent studies of the whole compendium of the government's documents show that only five percent of these people were picked up by the United States. Only eight percent of them are accused of being members of the Al Qaeda. Over 90 percent of them were picked up by Northern Alliance or Pakistani forces in exchange for bounties.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is the Web editor for Sojourners.

Uncertainty about the consistency of conservative convictions was part of what killed the campaign of Mitt "Double Guantanamo" Romney, and it was coverage of the "suspension" of his campaign that nearly drowned out another important story yesterday.

Contrast that criticism of Romney with a familiar defense of George W. Bush: "Well, you might disagree with him, but at least you know where he stands." Though this faint praise could be applied to any number of universally condemned leaders throughout history, I keep running into people that sincerely mean it as a compliment, as if sincerity made up for bad choices--something I would think most conservatives would disagree with.

Well, if you want to torture this logic any further, know that waterboarding--or as the Spanish Inquisition called it, water torture--is legal according to the Bush White House. Under certain circumstances. Such as, whenever the president says so. The L.A. Times reports:

... in remarks that were greeted with disbelief by some members of Congress and human rights groups, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said that waterboarding was a legal technique that could be employed again "under certain circumstances."

Fratto said the nation's top intelligence officials "didn't rule anything out" during congressional testimony Tuesday on CIA interrogation methods, and he indicated that Bush might consider reauthorizing waterboarding or other harsh techniques in extreme cases ....

I've always assumed that our clandestine forces used torture either directly or by proxy--because of history that's well documented in places like Guatemala, Colombia, Vietnam, and elsewhere. What I don't usually expect is official admissions of torture. Perhaps a wink and a nod as plausible deniability is established. Perhaps official consternation when the underlings get caught operating outside of conventions that high officials themselves have called "quaint." What's especially troubling is that history demonstrates that with official sanction or not, whatever these forces are actually doing is often several degrees worse than official admissions--and viciously specific in contrast to the vague official pronouncements about "harsh techniques." So if they're legalizing actual torture techniques now, I'm even more concerned about what's actually going on in the cells and chambers that we're never meant to know about. For national security. Because our enemies hate our freedom.

And if you think it's only "bad people" who get tortured, listen to the testimony of survivors.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is Web editor for Sojourners.

Yesterday I had the chance to attend a compelling panel hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Penn Press titled "Human Rights and the 2008 Presidential Campaign." The panel discussed a report released by CAPAF about the prominence (or lack thereof) of human rights issues in the 2008 presidential campaign.

The report's findings show that of the 2,253 questions that were asked in the Republican and Democratic debates through Dec. 27, only 5.1% of the questions posed to candidates dealt with human rights issues (CAPAF called their definition of what constituted a human rights issue "a generous interpretation" -- it included topics such as Darfur, torture, genocide in Iraq, and promoting democracy). This was in contrast to the 8.6% of questions about immigration, 10.7% on moral issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, and 18.1% about general personal politics and party values.

In the report, William F. Schulz, a CAPAF senior fellow and former executive director of Amnesty International, offers a possible explanation for this marginal attention:

Human rights issues have rarely, if ever, been a principal focus of political campaigns for President or even for Congress. This reflects the fact that human rights are often perceived to be matters involving people far away whose needs and interests have very little relevance to our own.

However, he argues that human rights issues, such as the genocide in Darfur and military torture, do in fact have an impact on us here in the U.S. and should be a more prominent focus in the current presidential campaign:

Many U.S. actions have colored the attitude of the international community toward America and thereby implicated U.S. national interests quite directly: the "unsigning" of the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court; the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; the denial of habeas corpus to certain prisoners; revelations regarding U.S. use of torture. Moreover, the continuing saga of unstaunched death and destruction in Darfur, Sudan, has cast a pall over the reputation of every country that has failed to stop it.

One might assume that human rights would have been more central to the 2008 presidential campaigns to this point than in years past given the relationship of human rights controversies to U.S. policy and interests—the fact, for example, that how the world regards this country can have a very direct impact on America's national security, and the need, in light of Iraq and Darfur, to clarify when in the future the U.S. should commit its blood and treasure to countering regimes that abuse human rights.

Here at Sojourners, human rights issues, such as the genocide in Darfur and human trafficking, are incredibly important. They are not issues that "have little relevance to our own;" instead, they are central to our mission as people of faith to follow Christ's example of fighting for and working with the poor, rejected, and forgotten.

Despite the disheartening findings of the CAPAF report, I think change IS happening. This shift in values, the desire to focus on ending and eradicating these huge moral issues of our time, is happening. As a member of the progressive faith community, I hear a lot of discourse about this movement that we see happening all across the country, this "great awakening," this spiritual revival that is sparking a social movement.

But you don't have to take our word for it. All of the panelists at the CAPAF event yesterday affirmed that change is happening, and that a lot of progress has been made just in recent months to make these human rights issues compelling national values. In fact, two of the panelists, Gary Haugen, president of the International Justice Mission, and Gayle Smith, co-founder of the ENOUGH! Project, specifically singled out people of faith as being leaders in bringing about this change.

"We're seeing some shift in terms of what values are all about, from values as a matter of personal choice to values as an expression of solidarity and global citizenship," Smith said. "There is the beginning in the faith community of a translation of values from, again, within the four walls of our homes to the far reaches of the globe." Smith cited the increase in attention to the genocide in Darfur as one tangible example.

Haugen agreed, saying that the religious community has contributed to "a broadening of issues to include human rights and international human rights" in the national conversation. He also talked directly about the impact faith had in the abolition and civil rights movements, and how the spiritual foundation of those movements provided a "very profound motivator for sustaining a prolonged, successful fight."

"Religion can be a conviction to force us to act on hard, painful issues. It is a very powerful, sustaining, motivating force," Haugen continued. A force that is having a clear effect again now, he said.

It's true that issues such as genocide and global poverty are big and seemingly insurmountable. But, as the event reaffirmed for me yesterday, ultimately we have the conviction and force to win this fight.

(You can watch the full panel discussion here).

Kaitlin Hasseler is the media assistant for Sojourners.

Overheard at the lunch table:

If Mukasey can't tell whether waterboarding is torture or not, maybe he should have someone do it to him, and then see what he thinks.

I'll have to respectfully disagree. Torture that doesn't leave any physical marks but can still cause permanent psychological damage is still torture. Therefore I oppose waterboarding for anyone - including presidential appointees and Fox News correspondents who after a few dunks think it's no big deal. They deserve the human dignity that comes with being created in the image of God. Them and everyone else.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler is the web editor for Sojourners.

I narrowly missed being attacked with an axe last night on my way out of a cinema showing the disturbing film Rendition, about the practice, begun in the Clinton era, of the U.S. sending terrorism suspects to countries that allow torture as an interrogation technique. I managed to escape unharmed - mostly due to the fact that the axe was made of plastic and being wielded by a child who couldn't have been more than six years old, but whose parents had decided to fit him with a grim reaper mask for their trip to the mall. Given that I'd just been confronted with a fictionalization of the realities of rendition - which has its roots at least ostensibly in responding to violence - I was not in the mood to see the kid's Hallowe'en costume as innocuous. Our children are raised – like our forebears and ourselves – on the notion that violence is good, and that it can even be fun. At the very least, our culture does not nurture sufficient challenge to the idea that violence works. It was bleakly ironic that one of the characters in Rendition says that war is "the only way to freedom." He's an Islamic militant, but these words also find easy echo in the mouths of those who rattle sabers on behalf of Western interests in the Middle East.

Rendition is not a great film by any stretch. Its characters are mostly uncomplicated - Reese Witherspoon, for example, rarely seems more than mildly inconvenienced by the fact that her husband is being tortured in North Africa. But it would be a shame if the weaknesses of the film drowned out the wider questions it raises about the absurdity of the practice of rendition, and, wider still, the contemporary values that appear to endorse the use of horrific violence in response to perceived threat.

We know that torture does not produce results proportionate to its method. Indeed, it can simply pour fuel on the fire of ethnic conflict - never mind the fact that franchising it out to a second party because it doesn't fit our value system is morally nonsensical. Theodore Roszak may have spoken the prophecy of the age when he wrote that "people try nonviolence for a week, and when it does not work, they go back to violence, which hasn't worked for centuries." It is obviously a key task of this generation to tell a better story than the one that narrates the current dominant paranoid paradigm - wherein, as I wrote here a few weeks ago, the only way out presented is the arrogance through which everybody tries to destroy everybody else. This idea - that being right (or being perceived to be strong) is more important than doing good - is not true, in spite of its political appeal (or effectiveness as an evangelistic tool). But what alternative story can we tell that prioritises nonviolence over its opposite? In other words, what will a reformation of our culture's values regarding violence actually require of us?

Gareth Higgins is a Christian writer and activist in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For the past decade he was the founder/director of the zero28 project, an initiative addressing questions of peace, justice, and culture. He is the author of the insightful How Movies Helped Save My Soul and blogs at www.godisnotelsewhere.blogspot.com

In The New York Times story about the administration's secret authorization of torture, one sentence is particularly chilling: "With virtually no experience in interrogations, the CIA had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture."

Copying tactics used by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the former Soviet Union ... what does this say about our nation's trajectory? Since reading those words last week, I can't keep Bruce Springsteen's song out of my head. First, he echoes what many Americans might say in response to the secret authorization of torture:

Well I've got God on my side
And I'm just trying to survive.

But then he raises this question:

What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love?

Springsteen then concludes:

Fear's a dangerous thing.
It can turn your heart black you can trust.
It'll take your God-filled soul
Fill it with devils and dust.

Springsteen's words have me praying for our nation today: Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Brian McLaren's new book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope, was released last Tuesday.

I remember about eight years ago when then presidential candidate George W. Bush repeatedly claimed that he would restore honor to the presidency, soiled as it had been by our previous president's infamous affair. I remember hoping he would succeed. But a new kind of shame has come to the office and to our nation as reports surface about our government's secret authorization of torture. We all share in this shame.

Conservative columnist and blogger Andrew Sullivan expresses what many of us feel. He reminds his readers:

... my first response to reports of abuse and torture at Gitmo was to accuse the accusers of exaggeration or deliberate deception ... It struck me as a no-brainer that this stuff was being invented by the far left or was part of al Qaeda propaganda. After all, they train captives to lie about this stuff. Bottom line: I trusted this president in a time of war to obey the rule of law that we were and are defending.

Sadly, he laments, that trust was betrayed:

And then I was forced to confront the evidence. He betrayed all of us. He lied. He authorized torture in secret, and then, when busted after Abu Ghraib, blamed it on low-level grunts. This was not a mistake. It was a betrayal.

The word "betrayal," of course, recalls Moveon.org's Sept. 26 ad. Many considered the pun childish at best, politically unsavvy at least, or worse. There was a rush to condemn anyone who failed to condemn the ad. But Sullivan's use of the word strikes me as anything but childish.

Our nation's reputation, not to mention that of the presidency, has been dishonored by this betrayal of trust. Honorable people - conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat - need to follow Andrew Sullivan's example, coming together to express our grief and outrage about the political hypocrisy and betrayal to which we have been subjected by people we elected.

Brian McLaren's new book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope, was released last Tuesday.