Warrior Message

Blumenthal has an interesting update on General Aimee Semple McBoykin in tonight’s Salon. I was aware that he was Cambones very own GI Joe, but I didn’t know until now that he personally went to Cuba to tell Miller to Gitmo-ize the mud-people over in Eye-Rack.

Saving Gen. William ‘Jerry’ Boykin seemed like a strange sideshow last October. After it was revealed that the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence had been regularly appearing at evangelical revivals, preaching that the United States was in a holy war as a ‘Christian nation’ battling ‘Satan,’ the furor was quickly calmed.

[…]

Boykin was not removed or transferred. At that moment, in fact, he was at the center of the secret operation to “Gitmo-ize” Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. He had flown to Guantánamo (known as “Gitmo”) in Cuba, where he met with the commandant of Camp X-Ray, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, ordering him to extend his methods to the Iraq prison system, orders that had come from Rumsfeld. While Boykin weathered his public storm, he remained the operational officer overseeing Miller’s new assignment.

[…]

Just before Boykin was put in charge of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and then inserted into Iraqi prison reform, he was a circuit rider for the religious right. He allied himself with a small group known as the Faith Force Multiplier that advocates applying military principles to evangelism. Its manifesto, “Warrior Message,” summons “warriors in this spiritual war for souls of this nation and the world … God has given us the stewardship and accountability of FAITH as our strategy for this time to mobilize an exceedingly great army.”

As the head of the Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, N.C., Boykin invited Southern Baptist ministers for prayer meetings that would be highlighted by demonstrations of Special Forces hand-to-hand combat and guided tours of the “Shoot House” and “Snake Room.”

Boykin staged a traveling slide show in which he displayed pictures of bin Laden and Saddam Hussein around the country. “Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army,” he preached. “Why do they hate us? The answer to that is because we’re a Christian nation. We are hated because we are a nation of believers.” They “will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus.” It was the reportage of his remarks at one such revival in Oregon that made him a subject of brief controversy. But public relations handling rescued him so that he could pursue his job, including turning up the heat at Abu Ghraib.

So, they sent this crazy, fucked-up Christian crusader to whip the Muslim heathens into shape.

Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick must be laughing hysterically right now, wherever they are. It can’t get any more absurd than this.

Can it?