Waterboard an A-rab for Jesus (Laurance Vance)

Laurence Vance on pro-torture "Christians":

In a recent column, Eric Margolis labeled the Republicans as "America’s champion of war and torture." Those are some harsh words – harsh but true.

The recent release of the Bush torture memos and the revelation that the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times and Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times before Bush claimed that we don’t torture has elicited a predictable response from conservative Christians who think the Republican Party is the party of God: silence.

It is also no surprise that a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that of four major religious traditions in the United States (white evangelical Protestant, white non-Hispanic Catholic, white mainline Protestant, and unaffiliated), white evangelical Protestants are more likely to believe that the use of torture against suspected terrorists can often or sometimes be justified. In fact, the more often people attended church, the more likely they were to justify torture.

A similar poll commissioned last year by Faith in Public Life and Mercer University reported that almost 60 percent of Southern evangelicals believed that torture was often or sometimes justified.

When the Spanish did it, it was torture. When the Japanese did it, it was torture. When the Germans did it, it was torture. When the Khmer Rouge did it, it was torture. But when waterboarding was done by Americans under a Republican administration, it suddenly became an "enhanced interrogation technique."

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