Home Page of George Griener
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Home Page of George Griener
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George E. Griener ggriener@jstb.edu
Academic issues, including course syllabi, are posted under the ACADEMIC button above; more personal and pastoral topics appear under PERSONAL. According to the Mission Statement of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, a key goal of our academic work is "reverent and critical service of the faith that does justice." Translating faith into justice for the world in which we live is a precarious but unavoidable task. It presupposes reflection on the events which take place around us as a believing people or as a political body.
Wednesday December 30, 2008 Israel, Palestine and the Just War Principles of Proportionality and the Odds of Success There is an astonishing silence on the part of the world community -- political as well as religious institutions--in the face of Israel's recent and continuing attacks on the Gaza Strip. Not surprising but no less unconscionable is the total failure of the U.S. government to exercise a balanced approach to the region. It is not easy to tease out the application of just war principles in this decades long conflict, but there are two worthy of consideration: proportionality, and the odds of success in waging a military campaign. It would seem that the ferocity of the Israeli attack on Gaza would fail on the principle of proportionality as well as on the principle of the odds of success in assuming that a violent military attack would bring peace. Especially disturbing was Israel's attack on an academic institution, the Islamic University of Gaza. For a telling essay on the failure of nerve of academic leaders, cf. the essay Neve Gordan and Jeff Halper in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Wednesday August 6, 2008 63rd Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima. From Today's Headlines.......Texas executes a Mexican who had been denied the right to speak to Mexican consular officials at the time of his arrest. Salim Ahmed Hamdan is found guilty at legally questionable War Crime Trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And President George W. Bush, who had sanctioned the use of torture at Guantanamo, promises to raise concerns about China's human rights record. There is something tragically ironic about this juxtaposition of events.
June 19, 2008: Ret. Major General Antonio Taguba on US inflicted torture "The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted—both on America’s institutions and our nation’s founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend... ...After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account." Ret. Major General Antonio Taguba in a Preface to Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact, published by Physicians for Human Rights. (For more, http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2008/06/taguba-bush-adm.html) Monday July 7, 2008 Torture Not an Option The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in collaboration with Catholic members of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, has issued a study guide on the use of torture in the modern world. Earlier this year the President of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Francis George, had written to President George W. Bush asking for an end of the use of torture by the United States. To download a copy of the study guide, Torture is a Moral Issue: A Catholic Study Guide, Click Here. To see the letter by Cardinal George to President Bush, Click Here
Monday June 23, 2008 Las Vegas Casinos and Airport Departure Lounges “Jeremiah said: ‘I hear the whispering of many: Terror on every side.’” That was the opening line of today’s [June 22nd] first reading from the Prophet Jeremiah. And the Gospel opens: “Jesus said, fear no one.” Readings from the 12th Sunday of the year. Like the barely audible background noise one hears in Las Vegas casinos, generated to provoke players into more reckless gambling patterns, airports continue to replay again and again a message from Homeland Security that the current threat level has been raised to orange. Of course, it was raised to orange five years ago, in 2003, with precious little evidence since then that we are surrounded by terror. But the deliberate endless repetition strategically generates a subtle and sustained atmosphere of fear, which allows us acquiesce to policies and practices which, in our right minds, we would never countenance and which we would recognize as at odds with the deepest held principles that made us a nation.
Wednesday December 19, 2007 An Unlikely Axis The governments of the United States, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Iraq....share at least this in common: opposing a United Nations General Assembly sponsored moratorium on the use of the death penalty. The vote -- 104 for, 54 against, 29 abstaining -- came Tuesday. There is hope: the day before, New Jersey formally abolished the death penalty.
Tuesday November 27, 2007 Complex 2030--Nuclear weapons for the new century Ten years ago, in 1998, the 105 U.S. Bishop members of Pax Christi USA issued a statement rejecting nuclear deterrence and appealing for a treaty to outlaw nuclear weapons, as biological and chemical weapons have been outlawed. This was in response to a U.S. government program, Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program to upgrade the nation's arsenal of nuclear weapons. Now, a decade later, the U.S. Administration is pushing for a new investment of some $150 Billion in nuclear weapons, a project titled Complex 2030. The Department of Energy (DOE) has opened a second "comment phase" to hear public opinion about the project. For information on Complex 2030, see the World Policy Institute's study, COMPLEX 2030: The Costs and Consequences of the Plan to Build a New Generation of Nuclear Weapons. Click here. For links to Pax Christi USA, Click here. George E. Griener 11.27.07
Thursday November 16, 2006 17th Anniversary of the deaths of Elba Ramos, Celina Ramos, Ignacio Ellacuria, Ignacio Martin Baro, Segundo Montes, Amando Lopez, Juan Moreno, and Joaquin Lopez y Lopez on the grounds of the Central University of America in San Salvador, El Salvador at the hands of soldiers of the Salvadoran Military, some of whom who had been trained at the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, GA.
Monday November 5, 2006 Vatican official says death penalty for Saddam would be wrong
"Shake and Bake" and "we never torture prisoners...." While the Bush Administration expresses dismay at reports of prisoners being tortured at an Iraqi Interior Ministry prison in a Baghdad suburb, news continues to circulate of the "Shake and Bake" operation in which U.S. forces used white phosphorous weapons in Fallujah in November 2004, and that the U.S. government lied to its British allies when it denied using MK77 Napalm-like weaponry during the invasion of Iraq. The 1st Marine Expeditionary Force is cited as having used this horrific device. Moreover, the President and Vice-President continue to object to Senate proposed limits to the use of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency. November 15, 2005
Reformation Sunday October 30, 2005 News Services this weekend carried U.S. Pentagon estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties at the hands of insurgency forces since early 2004. The figure is close to 25,000. A sad, tragic commentary on the violence which has wracked Iraq in the last two years. However, a Johns Hopkins University study, the Lancet Study, of Iraqi civilian deaths as a result of U.S. and allied forces between January 2002 and September 2004 generated a figure close to 100,000 greater than expected. For details, cf. www.thelancet.com. November is frequently a time for remembering those who have died. In addition to mourning the 2,00 U.S. military personnel who have died in Iraq, it might be well to recall the 100,000 Iraqi civilians who perished as "collateral damage" in a war whose rationale and justification appear to have been fabricated by the government of the United States.
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