The following is the text of a speech I gave at the Accountability for Torture Day in Salt Lake City, Utah on June 25. It’s not word for word, but I thought it was worth posting.
Thank you for showing up here today. I’m so glad to be with you. That may sound strange to say given the seriousness of the topic, but it’s true. This rally, and your presence, shows how far we’ve come as a country.
In 2003, I attended a protest against the impending invasion of Iraq at Utah State University. A handful of people showed up to support peace and about 200 people showed up to support war. Groups of them wore T-shirts that read “Bomb Saddam.” They yelled at us, they mocked us, they tried to take our microphone and stage away from us. We yelled back.
It was the beginning of a dark time for our country. Since then, we’ve watched, heartbroken, as our nation has gone down the strange path of illegal war, xenophobia, and torture. But now, today, less than a decade later, we can already see that our country is beginning to awake from the nightmare that has gripped it.
I feel more hope for an end to the war today than I ever have before. And I feel surer that those who put this country on this path will face justice in this life. To come to this event, and see you here, makes e believe that it will happen. And that makes me relived. It makes me happy and it makes me hopeful for the future.
Spending a year in Iraq as a soldier, I came to understand more fully that every act of violence has at least two victims: the person who commits the violence and the person who is on the receiving end of that violence. Both may be burdened and scarred for life, and both may eventually die of their wounds.
And so, when our country chooses a path of war and torture, we create twice the pain, twice the broken lives, and twice the destruction. When I think of this, I think of Spec. Alyssa Peterson, who was one of the first women to die in Iraq. I’ve told her story before, but I will keep telling it until everyone knows it.
I’ve never met her, but I feel very close to her because we have some important things in common. We are both Mormons who served as missionaries for our church. We both returned from those missions with a desire to serve our country, and joined the military. But Alyssa was exceptional. She was a gifted linguist who taught herself Dutch before going to the Netherlands as a Mormon missionary. She applied this gift to learn Arabic and serve her country as an interpreter and interrogator.
But when she got to Iraq, her country betrayed her. Alyssa was ordered to participate in an interrogation operation referred to as “the cage.” Our government refuses to tell us what went on in the cage, but from what we know it wasn’t good. Some accounts talk of men being stripped naked before female interrogators who would then proceed to mock the men’s genitalia. Some accounts hint at things much worse.
As Mormons, Alyssa and I were raised to believe that we are all children of God. We believe in the divinity of our bodies and the sacredness of our sexuality. And so I understand the betrayal she must have felt when she realized that her country was asking her to use that sacred sexuality and the divine feminine within her as a weapon to humiliate, defile and torture another child of God.
Weak and naïve men, thousands of miles away from any danger, acted out of fear and hate and ignorance and ordered Alyssa to abandon her morals, to defy here sense of right and wrong, and to rebel against her God.
Alyssa, however, was exceptional. She refused to do it. After only two days working in the cage, she complained about what was happening and utterly refused to serve. Shortly after that, she was found dead on her base in Iraq. The original story from the Army was that she died from a noncombat negligent weapons discharge. After a reporter dug deeper into the story, the Army declared her death a suicide. There is still is some doubt about that as well.
It is a shame that we do not know the full details of Alyssa’s story. It is a shame that we do not know what was going on in the cage that caused this exceptional woman such distress. It’s a shame that we have allowed our country to fall into this darkness.
Victor Hugo once wrote:
“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
For Alyssa’s sake and for the sake of all those how have been affected by torture and illegal war, we must prosecute those who caused the darkness. We must govern ourselves or abandon the experiment of self-rule.
One painful irony in all of this is that listed among those weak and naïve men who caused the darkness and betrayed Alyssa are several of her fellow Mormons. I have to admit that I’ve cursed their names in the past, and I’ve hated them. But, I want to suggest today that I was wrong in doing so.
As hard as it is, we must forgive all those who are accused of war crimes in our country. We must prosecute them in courts of law, but we must forgive them on a personal level first.
The reason for this is our focus must be on justice and not on vengeance or retribution. We can’t afford to hate the members of the Bush administration who authorized and ordered torture because that hate will be a barrier for the justice that we truly desire. Our struggle for justice will be long and hard, and hate is not a good long-term motivator. We must be focused on something nobler.
I’ve often wondered what I would do if I ever had the chance to meet Pres. Bush. Would I shake his hand? Would I snub him? Would I yell at him? But now, considering the task at hand, I know that if I ever had the chance to meet George W. Bush, I would embrace him as a brother. Because he too is a child of God. He is an American and he was my president. I forgive him for the pain his actions have caused me, and forgive him for the pain his actions have caused the world. Nevertheless, Justice demands he be held accountable for his actions.
And so today is a wonderful day, and I’m happy to be here. We’re all here together to make our country a better place. We’re here to ensure that future generations have a good example to follow. We’re here to demand justice for the countless victims of illegal war, indefinite detention, and torture.
I’d like to share one last thing with you. It’s a Mormon scripture from one of our canonical texts, the Doctrine and Covenants. I think it perfectly describes my motivations in calling for the prosecution of war crimes and I hope it will inspire others to take up the cause as well. It reads:
“We believe that the commission of crime should be punished according to the nature of the offense; that murder, treason, robbery, theft, and the breach of the general peace, in all respects, should be punished according to their criminality and their tendency to evil among men, by the laws of that government in which the offense is committed; and for the public peace and tranquility all men should step forward and use their ability in brining offenders against good laws to punishment.”
It’s my hope today, that we can all come together and use our abilities to bring offenders of good laws to punishment, and do it in a way that is free of hate and focused on peace and justice. Thank you.
Subscribe to my RSS Feed