http://www.streetprophets.com/story/2005/11/25/173426/97(streetprophets is a dailykos community)
Abu Ghraib: Hell House of the Religious Right
by sendtoscott
Fri Nov 25th, 2005 at 14:34:26 PDT
Abu Ghraib is an ongoing Hell House of the Religious Right. Hell Houses are a technique used by conservative Christian churches in North America to proselytize by demonstrating what awaits those who do not submit to salvation. According to these conservative Christians, when your savior sheds blood and dies for you, he owns you (you are "bought with a price"), and torment is not a result of specific sins on your part, but is due to your failure to actively submit to salvation (there is no neutral ground, as both Bush and Jesus say, you are either for us or against us):
As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
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Iraqis caught up in Abu Ghraib are also caught up in this same mindset. The Religious Right believe that they saved Iraqis through shedding their blood, therefore they own the Iraqis, and their torment is fitting punishment for their failure to actively and fully submit to their saviors. There can be no neutral Iraqis - they must either actively submit to their American saviors by explicitly cooperating, or they deserve punishment. It is the failure to submit, not specific bad acts on the part of Iraqis (or sinners in general), that justifies punishment. An omniscient God does not need to torture to obtain information, and neither do they. Torture as just and moral punishment for failure to submit is the heart of all evangelical "hellfire and brimstone" beliefs.
Anyone familiar with James Dobson's writings about raising children can see the conservative Christian view on beating people into submission. In addition, the usefulness of pain to `break' nonbelievers and make them open to conversion can also be seen in the evangelical conservatives' reaction to the Indonesian tsunami (scroll down a bit), a situation where everyone believes innocent people suffered and thus cannot be dismissed as merely punishing `terrorists'. They saw it as an opportunity for converting Muslims. After all, "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise" . This mindset can also been seen in the popularity of the Left Behind series of books, which delights in descriptions of God punishing those who did not submit, without regard to any specific sins on their part, and in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (see this for an explicit comparison with Abu Ghraib). That film is being reenacted in Abu Ghraib, where one victim was asphyxiated in a crucifixion-like pose.
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The responsibility of the Religious Right for Abu Ghraib goes up the chain of command from there. According to Christianity Today, they "were significantly involved in drafting policy memos that created the permissive climate in which the abuse of prisoners occurred". Billmon writes that the team of lawyers who wrote the Pentagon's treatise on presidential torture powers was led by Mary L. Walker, a "devout Christian" and co-founder of Professional Women's Fellowship, an offshoot of Campus Crusade for Christ. Walker also worked to "shield Air Force headquarters from public criticism" for failing to control an epidemic of sexual assaults at the Air Force Academy. Note that some of the torture at Abu Ghraib qualifies as sexual assault. This is the same military institution that faced complaints about preferential treatment for conservative evangelical Christians, where cadets faced "a heavy and sometimes offensive emphasis on evangelical Christianity". The Air Force is currently being sued over a recruiter in New Mexico being instructed to use Jesus Christ as a recruiting tool.
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...The key element that binds Christianism with Bush Republicanism is fealty to patriarchal leadership. That's the institutional structure of the churches that are now the Republican base; and it's only natural that the fundamentalist psyche, which is rooted in obedience and reverence for the inerrant pastor, should be transferred to the presidency. That's why I think Bush's ratings won't go much below 25 percent; because 25 percent is about the proportion of the electorate that is fundamentalist and supports Bush for religious rather than political reasons. They are immune to empirical argument, because their thought-structure is not empirical; it is dogmatic. If the facts overwhelm them, they will simply argue that the "liberal media" is lying. ... the GOP(:)...it's a fundamentalist church with some huge bribes for business interests on the side, leveraged by massive debts. So all criticism is disloyalty; and disloyalty is heresy. The facts don't matter. Obey the pastor. Or be damned.
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Another conservative (particularly among Biblical literalists) belief that would enable torture is the belief that genocide is acceptable when it benefits "God's people", such as the conquest of "The Holy Land" (which the literalists consider to be absolute fact and morally justified). Once they've accepted the morality of genocide against nonbelievers, what will stop them from torture? Once a war has been deemed a literal Crusade, all bets are off.
more.... 
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