Quakers Quitting on QUIT: Torture Wins, this time. And maybe next time, too.

I wish it wasn’t time to write this post.

But it is: Quakers are quitting on QUIT.

QUIT is — or rather was — the Quaker Initiative to end Torture. It began in the spring of 2005, with a call by Friend John Calvi,  just as the international scope, the vast evil plus the flagrant criminality of the U. S.  “War on Terror” torture  program — all this was becoming shockingly clear.

As detailed below, QUIT formally ended this week, on July 15, 2024.

Nineteen years.

We worked hard, we did stuff. We joined with others.  But in my view, we failed. At our most active and diligent, we didn’t really lay a glove on our three main targets.

Those targets were:

First, accountability for those responsible for the U. S. torture  program;

Second, moving American Quakers to serious and sustained witness for an end to torture, first under U. S. auspices, then as far abroad as we can reach. And

Third, achieving public awareness of the grave threat that public acceptance of torture created for our liberties and rights, not only we we began, in wartime, but in the future.

We failed, on all counts: those who planned & carried out the program are now long retired or passed on, unmolested.

Their quiet, even honored ends were the products of successive U.S. administrations, of both parties, which were determined to protect the program, its architects and almost all those who carried it out; and they did. Only a few low-level troops who took photos were disciplined.

And then,  we failed because U.S. Quakers almost unanimously refused to consider the leading we had discerned and were offering.

The failure was not instant. There was a short season of visibility for the issue, in which we held protests and conferences, lobbied officials, even picked up trash around a North Carolina airport connected to the program.

Numerous Friends meetings adopted minutes of support; some sent donations.

But the energy quickly dissipated. Large Quaker organizations ignored it;  one high Quaker lobbyist openly admitted the issue was too unnerving for the group to deal with. We could relate. And Meeting minutes were soon shown to be worth no more than the paper they were printed on.

I recall watching the crowd when John Calvi spoke of it to an FGC plenary: the fearful body language all across the hall was so “loud” it was as if he had been waving around an AR-15 with a bump stock: at the followup session for talking about followup, essentially no one showed up. At subsequent “interest groups,” we soon coined a phrase: “Torture in the title is guaranteed to draw a crowd — somewhere else.”

Then as time passed, the scattered QUIT cadre got older; I retired; health issues cropped up. One of my last efforts was to promote a 2019 movie about how government torture partisans in Congress and the CIA tried to “catch and kill” an exhaustive, damning Senate Intelligence Committee investigation. Called The Report, the film starred Annette Bening as the late Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Adam Driver as the chief investigator, Daniel Jones, who tracked the terrible truth through a million pages of once-secret files.

The Report told a chilling true story, with no real conclusion or happy ending: After all, torture was already illegal, a federal felony. Plus it was against international treaties the U.S. had long since ratified.

But deft legal maneuvers, and acquiescent courts made all this legalese a dead letter. And after years of work, the full report was almost killed, and then locked up by officials in the Obama pentagon, where it is to remain hidden for years to come — til all who might be implicated in its crimes are safely deceased, or forever, whichever comes first.

It was a good film, but it neither set records at the box office, nor moved the needle of public or Quaker opinion, which was firmly stuck (and remains) between total deep denial and near-instant forgetting.

There are still organizations which talk about and work against torture, and thank heaven for them. But domestically, the matter is essentially settled, in a status extremely favorable to its reappearance: president Obama ordered an end to torture in 2009. But he pointedly refused to “look back” toward any accountability for the program or its operators.

And so the machinery only awaits the determination of a new president, with cooperative legal staff and a tamed Justice Department, to flip the switch and start it up again, even aimed at U.S. citizens, with impunity for new perpetrators.

So sleep well, America. What could possibly go wrong?

Updated: The Quaker Initiative to End Torture- QUIT! is laid down July 15 2024.

The Quaker Initiative to End Torture- QUIT! was born in May 2005.  News of torture and minors kept at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay Cuba sparked Friends to action.  Five of us came together to educate Friends as to the history, policy, and practice of American torture.  Joe Franko, Scilla Wahrhaftig, Liz Keeney, Chuck Fager, and John Meyer gathered with John Calvi to form QUIT.

In short order QUIT! received minutes of support from seven yearly meetings and 23 monthly meetings.  We created a website, a listserve, and held four conferences- two at Guilford College in North Carolina, Ottawa Friends Meeting in Ontario, and Friends Center in Ben Lomond, California.  Presentations were made at yearly, quarterly, and monthly meeting all acrosscountry, plus a keynote at Friend General Conference Summer Gathering in 2011.

News of American torture was continually posted on our website and Facebook page to update information and keep news in front of all seekers.  This manner of outreach has been maintained even as in person teaching ended in recent years.

QUIT read the zeitgeist of Americans shocked by the overt use of torture and used this period of time to teach about this disturbing topic. Drawing people together to learn and teach about torture waned as the Bush/Cheney years faded.  Obama falsely assured that torture was ended, which people were more than willing to believe and take comfort in.  This resulted in less interest and less support for QUIT!

In light of the above, the board unanimously agreed to lay down QUIT!  We are well aware that the work is not done.  Details below reveal the staggering waste of life and other resources.

The founding members of QUIT! deeply appreciate the support we experienced in our 19 years of service.  Our efforts were met with gratitude and awareness of the toll such a subject takes on presenters.  Thank you for all this.