Syrian "rebels" slaughter Catholic priest

Christian martyrdom is not only an ancient phenomenon.

On Sunday, June 23 the Syrian priest François Murad was killed in Gassanieh, in northern Syria, in the convent of the Custody of the Holy Land where he had taken refuge. This is confirmed by a statement of the Custos of the Holy Land sent to Fides Agency. The circumstances of the death are not fully understood. According to local sources, the monastery where Fr. Murad was staying was attacked by militants linked to the jihadi group Jabhat al-Nusra.

Father Francois Murad,
martyred in Syria

This  was a deliberate attack and targeted murder. The jihadists (read: al Qaeda) brutally beheaded Fr. Murad and posted  an explicit video of the killing. More info: Syrian Jihadists behead Catholic priest

This will not deter the Obama administration from pushing ahead to supply military assistance and materiel to the Syrian "resistance," which is completely dominated by al Qaeda. In fact, Secretary of State John Kerry has already pushed for the United States to directly bomb Syrian government targets.

 Helping the Syrian rebels would be like helping Frank fight Jesse over who would run the James gang. The murder of this priest is a tiny harbinger of the kind of bloodbath to come if the Assad regime falls.

What we need to unlearn

Some thought-provoking stuff from the Paducah district of the Memphis Conference of the UMC, one essay by the district superintendent and the other by the district's lay leader.

First to be published was the Rev. Sky Sky Lowe McCracken's essay, "Things for United Methodist preachers to unlearn..."

Then Susan Sadler Engle's essay, "Things for United Methodist laity to unlearn — from a layperson’s POV"

Supreme Court and same-sex "marriage"

Opinions are abounding on the consequences of the Supreme Court's rulings issued yesterday on the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and its dismissal of a defense of California's Proposition 8 (a ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage (SSM) in California).

In the DOMA case, the Court struck down Section 3 of the law but left the rest of the law intact. The struck section forbade federal recognition of same-sex couples as married, reserving it for only male-female married couples.

In the Prop 8 case, the Court ruled that the challenge to a lower court's ruling invalidating Prop 8 had no standing before the Court because the plaintiffs were private citizens who had no standing to mount the challenge. This left the lower court's ruling unaffected and Prop 8 remains therefore overturned by the lower court.

So what is the potential effect on the United Methodist Church? According to our Book of Discipline, which is our canon law, UM clergy will not perform any type of ceremony validating same-sex "marriage," no matter where performed or under what name they may be called. Furthermore, such ceremonies may not be performed on any UM Church property, no matter who officiates, Methodist or not.

I hope to post a thorough response soon, but for now, here are some links that I commend to you.

UM Reporter: "US Court rulings impact same-sex couples"

My own relevant post, "State should do weddings, Church marriages"

"A secular argument against same-sex marriage"

"IRS could revoke non-profit status for religious institutions over same-sex marriage"

"The Supreme Court’s Marriage Decisions by the Numbers," by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which says nothing much has changed as the result of either ruling.

"Justice Anthony Kennedy's contempt" at Politico

"Marriage Is Dead And The Church Is Next," at National Catholic Register

"The Impact of Today’s Gay Marriage Decisions," by Constitutional Law Prof. Ilya Somin.

And don't overlook, "The Case for Polygamy" at Daily Caller

"Gay lobby’s next target: Benefits in all 50 states" at The Hill

Git yer tinfoil hat on, folks

Ok, this is going to be a very unusual post for me because the topic is UFOs. So get your tinfoil hat on and take a ride.

This all started when I was searching YouTube for national-security related vids when a search result caught my eye, entitled, UFO Alien Disclosure by Canadian Minister of Defense May 2013. (Apparently this video is not embeddable.)

The former Canadian defense minister in question is Paul Hellyer, who served in that role (equivalent to the US secretary of defense) in the 1960s. In this and other videos, he states unambiguously that UFOs are non-terrestrial craft, directed by extra-terrestrial, highly intelligent beings. That makes Mr. Hellyer the most senior person I have ever heard of who claimed this.

(I personally lean toward the side of the scientists who say that the odds of human beings having come into existence are so incredibly remote that concluding homo sapiens is alone in the universe is quite reasonable.)

Without offering here any opinion of whether Hellyer's claims have merit, in a different interview he gave he made reference to a book written by someone named Corso, an American colonel. Hellyer said that an American Air Force general told him that every word of the book was true. Hellyer said he had no way to assess the veracity of the book's claims personally, except that being a defense insider the language of the book rang true and that the contexts of the book were convincing.

It was easy to find the book on Amazon, especially since it is the only book that the late Lt. Col. Phillip Corso wrote. It's called The Day After Roswell. Since it was only $6 on Kindle, I downloaded it.

Again, I am not here affirming or debunking Corso's claims (he died in 1998 at age 83). But I kept  Hellyer's observations in mind about how the book read like it was written from an "inside baseball" perspective. And Hellyer is right.

Corso served as a White House member of the National Security Council in the 1950s and as deputy of the US Army's Foreign Technology Office in the Pentagon from 1960-1963. He claims in the book that his personal office in the Pentagon held the cabinet in which was stored the Army's files of what really happened at Roswell and some actual artifacts from the UFO that crashed there. Exploiting alien technology for mass production for military and later civilian use was his main job there.

At any rate, Corso says that all the services distrusted the CIA (Corso says that as an intelligence officer he knew the CIA was well penetrated by the Soviet KGB). But the part that stuck me as absolutely authentic and from someone who had truly "been there" was this passage:

This is so cogent, so authentic that it is what makes me think that whether Corso's UFO claims are objectively true, Corso was relating what he believed to be true. Accounts I have read by former Soviet spies confirm what Corso says about the deep suspicion the KGB and the Communist Party had of each other. (In fact, the Party, the Soviet army and the KGB were all highly suspicious and extremely competitive of each other.) Corso spends a lot of time explaining the politics of the multiple duchies inside the Pentagon and the strategies they all employed to "steal the bacon" from one another - much like their Soviet counterparts except without the Soviet's level of hostility. It was no different in Corso's years at the Pentagon than it was during mine there, 30 years later.

Final point. Here is what Corso says are the main exploitations the United States gained from the Roswell crash.

Project Horizon was the Army's plan for a permanent moon base that never got farther than the drawing board. HARP, despite its tinfoil-hat status today, was nothing more than a concept to send base materials to the moon cheaply. It did move from drawing board to testing, but no farther.

Not all these technologies were derived directly from alien technology. Depleted uranium was no alien invention, it was (and is) produced by nuclear-power plants as spent fuel. Army R&D realized that because of its extremely high density, solid projectiles made of DU, traveling at hypervelocity, would be devastatingly powerful at impact. This was ultimately affirmed during the Gulf War of 1991 and again in Iraq and Afghanistan by US tanks firing such rounds at a mile per second. But the reason DU was developed as a weapon, Corso says, was to shoot down UFOs.

Same with particle-beam weapons that work by focusing beams of electrons against a target. It was not a technology found on the Roswell craft. Hypothesizing that the craft was likely brought down by a lightning strike, which is a high-energy electron beam, research was oriented toward, basically, generating our own lightning. The whole point of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, in fact was to develop anti-UFO weapons for which defense against Soviet ICBMs was a happy bonus.

Whether you consider Corso credible or not, it is fascinating reading, especially if you already have some familiarity with the military or political subcultures of Washington, D.C.

Constitutional amendment would strip churches of rights under law

They are at it again, this time in the US Senate.

I wrote at length in 2011 of US Rep. Jim McGovern's (D.-3rd District, Mass.) proposed "People's Rights Amendment" to the US Constitution that would define "person" or any part of "the people," as the Constitution uses the term, to mean only human beings. 

That means, as McGovern stated explicitly, that any kind of corporation, including incorporated churches (which almost all are), would have no standing in courts as possessing rights under the law. So if, for example, your city government wanted 30 feet of your church's property to widen a road, the city can just show up one morning and start bulldozing. As the church is a legal non-entity regarding property rights, the legal doctrine of eminent domain would not apply. 

And your church would not be able to contest the taking in court since, as a Constitutionally-defined non-person, the church would have no legal standing to file a suit, anymore than could a bird whose nest was destroyed by the bulldozers.

Before you say I am going overboard, go to the 2011 post and read the analyses of Constitutional scholars I quoted at length, especially UCLA Law School Prof. Eugene Volokh, one of the most-frequently cited legal scholars in America (including by US Supreme Court justices). 

Well, as we used to say in the Army, "BOHICA!" - Bend Over, Here It Comes Again. U.S. Sen. Jon Tester (D.-Mont.), is sponsoring essentially the same amendment in the US Senate, though without the Leninist title McGovern gave his version. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), is co-sponsor.

Tester's web page about the amendment is here.

The full text of the resolution to Congress proposing the amendment is here: Tester's Constitutional Amendment.

Here is Prof. Volokh's commentary on the Tester amendment, with a key phrase boldfaced and super-sized.

The proposed amendment would authorize Congress, states, and local governments to, for instance, (1) restrict what most newspapers publish, (2) restrict what most advocacy groups, such as the ACLU, the Sierra Club, and the NRA, say, (3) restrict what is said and done by most churches, and (4) seize the property of corporations without just compensation. (It might also allow restrictions on the speech of unions, depending on whether they are seen as “corporate entities.”) 

Nearly all major newspapers and magazines are owned by corporations; the same is true of book publishers, movie studios, record labels, and broadcasters. Indeed, if you want such entities to be able to raise money for their operations through the stock market, you have to have them be organized as corporations. Likewise, most nonprofit organizations are organized as corporations — that, too, makes sense, since it makes sense to have the ACLU run as a corporate entity rather than as a sole proprietorship owned by one person, or a partnership owned by a few people. Churches are likewise often organized as corporations, sometimes with a special sort of corporate status. 

Under the proposed amendment, all these groups — as well as ordinary businesses — would lose all their constitutional rights. Instead of “strict scrutiny” for content-based regulations of the press or of nonprofit advocacy groups, Congress and state and local governments would be free to impose any restrictions they “deem reasonable.” 

And section 3 will do nothing to reinstate any such rights, because it protects only “the people’s” rights, and “the people” is defined in section 2 to expressly exclude corporations. Nor would section 3 protect corporate-run newspapers or advocacy groups on the theory that restriction those organizations’ speech would deny the constitutional rights of individual reporters or organization leaders. The government would still be freed to restrict those reporters and leaders from speaking using corporate resources, which is to say speaking in the pages of the newspaper or using the offices or assets of the organization. (After all, when corporations speak about elections — the thing that the Senators are, I assume, trying to stop — it is also individual managers who speak using the corporate form; but the argument for restricting such speech is that the managers should speak only using their own resources, not corporate funds.) 

So goodbye, First Amendment protection for the New York Times, CNN, the ACLU, the NRA, and the Catholic Church. Goodbye, any right to just compensation when a corporation’s property is taken — whether the corporation is a large business or a small mom-and-pop company. Goodbye, any rights to due process when a corporation’s property is seized. Goodbye, any protection for corporations (again, even small family-run businesses) from unreasonable searches and seizures, or excessive fines. That’s what Senators Tester and Murphy’s amendment calls for.

So: am I too paranoid, or not paranoid enough?

Here is Tester's own explanation:

Say No to Syria Intervention!

Secretary of State John Kerry leads the war faction in the Obama administration, insisting that American warplanes should begin bombing Syria right away.

In the past few days, the White house announced that it will begin sending military materiel to Syrian rebels. This decision comes in the wake of the administration's determination that Syria's ruling Assad regime had used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on the insurgents. This use constituted Assad crossing one of the Obama administration's "red lines," so named because crossing them would be seen as an intolerable act that could not be passively encountered by the United States.

International agencies estimate that the chemical attacks killed 100-150 people. As IBD puts it, "That's in addition to the more than 90,000 Syrians killed by conventional weapons that didn't seem to prompt any action."

Government Executive reports that Secretary of State John Kerry pushed hard for the United States to bomb key Syrian targets after the chemical use was confirmed.

On Thursday, President Obama confirmed what reports had been speculating for a few weeks: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons, notably sarin gas, on his own people, and tripping the president's "red line" that would rouse the United States to greater action. The response includes arming and training the rebels. It turns out that Secretary of State John Kerry also wanted the response to include an air strike on Syrian airfields, according to Jeffery Goldberg at Bloomberg View. 

According to Goldberg, Kerry's "vociferous" thoughts on the matter were not received well by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey during a meeting in the situation room last Wednesday.

(My own experience of working in the Pentagon from 1990-1993 is that the state department is considerably quicker to reach for the sword than the defense department.) The reason Kerry's push did not prevail is that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey made it clear that a few runs on target would do no good, that if the bombing was not be be merely symbolic, it would require a sustained, large effort of no short duration.

Secretary Kerry lost the debate that day, but the desire is out in the open: there is a powerful faction within the Obama administration that wants direct military action by the United States against the Assad regime.

My position is that no just rationale can be proffered for American intervention in the civil war, whether by supply, air campaign or boots on the ground. Such action fails to meet the standards of the two major influences that have shaped American military action since the country's founding: Just War theory and Realpolitik, or foreign-affairs Realism.

Realpolitik and the national interests

Realpolitik is the easier of the two to deal with, so I'll start with it. Realpolitik "refers to politics or diplomacy based primarily on power and on practical and material factors and considerations, rather than ideological notions or moralistic or ethical premises." The United States has (let us be thankful) not been skilled in its practice - both the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam War come to mind as two prominent, recent examples.

In Syria, however, even if the Obama administration was inclined toward Realpolitik it would find there is no upside for American power interests in intervention. Simply put, the outcome of the  civil war there is wholly immaterial to the national-security interests of the United States. The fight is not a fight between repressed Jeffersonian democrats and their cruel oppressors. It is a fight between what we may understand as a Stalinist regime in power and a fascist movement that wants to replace it.

There are no good guys in this war. It is not a war about repression vs. liberty. It is a war about who will do the repressing. As Atlantic Council managing editor James Joyner puts it, "Syrian Rebels Today, Syrian Taliban Tomorrow."

Radical Islamists now dominate the Syrian opposition. And you’re arming them. Reuters (“Syria’s Islamists seize control as moderates dither“):

During a 10-day journey through rebel-held territory in Syria, Reuters journalists found that radical Islamist units are sidelining more moderate groups that do not share the Islamists’ goal of establishing a supreme religious leadership in the country. 

The moderates, often underfunded, fragmented and chaotic, appear no match for Islamist units, which include fighters from organizations designated “terrorist” by the United States.

The Syrian resistance, such as it is, is dominated by foreign al Qaeda elements. If the resistance loses, Assad's Syria will become even more of an Iranian client than it already is. If the resistance wins, Syria will be a a Muslim Brotherhood client with a strong share of Saudi Salfism thrown in for good measure.

So what is the Syrian civil war really about? It is another round in the centuries-old conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims (in which Assad is ironically neither). Understand, the conflict between Sunnis and Shias is not a religious conflict, it is political. The Islamic-theological differences are actually rather minor. They dispute who should be authoritative in setting doctrinal standards for Muslims, but this springs from a centuries-old schism over Mohammed's successors as leaders of Islam. Islam itself is basically identical for both.

The center of Shia Islam is Iran, which named the United States the Great Satan in 1979 (Israel, by contrast, was only named the Little Satan). Al Qaeda began as a Sunni movement arising from the local jihad against the Soviet army declared by a Palestinian Sunni cleric living in Saudi Arabia. The occasion was the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Out of the Islamic resistance to the USSR, led by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, was born the organization that Osama bin Laden would use to form al Qaeda, whose hatred of all things American need not be explained further.

This history helps illuminate why both sides in Syria can each hate the United States as much (or more) as they hate one another. Whether the rebels prevail or Assad, neither outcome is inherently more desirable for the United States than the other. So simply from a Realpolitik point of view, there is no upside for the United States to intervene in any fashion.

There is, however, considerable downside, not least would be the expenditure of American blood and treasure to achieve goals that are unclear, mostly undefined, in a campaign of of indefinite duration, for no possible outcome that benefits the security of the country.

Syria Intervention and Just War theory

The failure of Realpolitik being understood, we may confront the moral issue with greater probity. The issue is simply stated: Does the violence and deaths of non-combatants in Syria justify the United States to kill Syrian soldiers (an inevitably civilians) and raise the level of violence there to even greater heights (there being no more violent or destructive military on the face of the earth than America's)?

That is really the central question of the use of force within the framework of Just War theory, devised by the Roman Catholic Church over the centuries between St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, who gave the theory its final polish. JWT, as I will short-type it henceforth, holds that there are only two circumstances in which war may be justly fought:

• Actual self defense against aggression
• To defend the innocent and otherwise defenseless against aggression

Catholic author Nicholas G. Hahn III says that Syria meets the latter criterion. In trying to rebut Senator Rand Paul's speech against intervention, Hahn writes,

Should Paul know anything about Augustine or Aquinas, he would know that war is sometimes necessary and a moral obligation. 

Aquinas quotes Augustine approvingly that a just war is "one that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects, or to restore what it has seized unjustly." Even the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in its 1993 statement, defined casus belli where force may be employed to "correct a grave, public evil." 

Perhaps Paul should also read George Weigel's First Things primer on how pre-emption is simply another word for defense -- and defense, after all, fits perfectly within the just war tradition.

Now, I have been reading George Weigel's tomes on JWT and related issues for many years and I join Mr. Hahn in my admiration for his insights. But Hahn and his ideological allies simply fail to make a case here. Here is why.

JWT conceptually exists in three parts:

1. Just cause for starting the war.
2. Just conduct of the war.
3. Just ending of the war.

Criterion 1 simply means a nation may not justly go to war for selfish gain hiding behind a smokescreen of moral language. That Mr. Hahn injected the word "pre-emption" into a discussion of moral necessity sort of gives the game away. Preemption (hit them before they can hit you) is not wholly without moral content but it is mainly a tactic of Realpolitik. Just whom would the United States be pre-empting? Assad? Al Qaeda? Iran? Russia?

Criterion 2 usually understood to mean that conducting the war may not be done more unjustly than the injustice sought to be remedied. This is not a matter of counting corpses killed by one side or the other and saying (as American critics of our entry into Afghanistan post-9/11 did) that we may not take more lives protecting the innocent than the number of innocent lives lost at the hands of the aggressors.

As my friend, Catholic cleric (and US Army War College graduate) John Krenson explained to me, if the cause is just and the objectives are just, then just conduct is the minimum violence necessary to attain the just objective. And that minimum violence might be very great, indeed.

This is known as the problem of the "Sanguinary Calculus," meaning how much suffering and death we may justly inflict in order to bring about the objective we desire. I would appeal to my readers to consider the years of American fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and ponder whether they give us any cause for confidence. Would we still be in Syria eight to 10 years from now?

Let us remember Douglas MacArthur's warning that, "Prolonged indecision is never a just aim of war."

The sanguinary calculus must also include American lives. I would like to hear advocates of intervention tell me the plea they give to their own children why they should join the Marines to go fight Assad in Syria and what they will say when their children are killed or maimed. (For the record, I thought that invading Iraq was clearly justified by JWT and my eldest son did fight in Iraq as a Marine. My second son is today an officer in the Air Force Reserve.)

Or is this moral crusade only to be fought by children of others? As there is no American national-security interest at stake at all, I believe I am justified in insisting that intervention advocates put their own blood on the line and not simply outsource their morality.

I have not yet encountered an intervention advocate explain exactly why Syria is a special case. If Syria is a "yes," why would North Korea be a no? After all, the Kims' successive regimes have literally starved to death millions of their own subjects. Does not that call more strongly for American direct action to rescue?

In fact, the list of places in the world where the US would be morally justified in mounting military action to defend the innocent is very long. But it would be impossible for us to do so. And that requires exercising another principle of war, distinction or discrimination. If not everyone, then who and why? If there is an especially compelling reason we should intervene in Syria and not Lower Zambezi, then let advocates make it. But they do not even attempt.

There is neither a strong moral nor national security case to be made for US intervention. Intervention fails both just war theory and Realpolitik.

Endnote: On the other hand, Foreign Policy's Daniel Drezner says that in fact the Obama administration has been engaged in Realpolitik in Syria and that the recently-announced plan to send arms to the rebels is the logical extension of it.

[T]his is simply the next iteration of the unspoken, brutally realpolitik policy towards Syria that’s been going on for the past two years.  To recap, the goal of that policy is to ensnare Iran and Hezbollah into a protracted, resource-draining civil war, with as minimal costs as possible.  This is exactly what the last two years have accomplished…. at an appalling toll in lives lost. 

This policy doesn’t require any course correction… so long as rebels are holding their own or winning. A faltering Assad simply forces Iran et al into doubling down and committing even more resources.  A faltering rebel movement, on the other hand, does require some external support, lest the Iranians actually win the conflict.  In a related matter, arming the rebels also prevents relations with U.S. allies in the region from fraying any further.

Unlike Mr. Drezner, I don't think the administration is clever enough for this.

Update: David Goldman in an Asia Times op-ed points out that there is no good end in Syria no matter what the Western powers do.

Father's Day