A while back I was riding in the car listening to NPR when they re-aired a peabody award winning broadcast of “This American Life” a favorite show of mine produced by Chicago Public Radio. The broadcast was titled Habeas Schmabeas. Here is a description of the topic “Habeas Schmabeas” tackles…

The right of habeas corpus has been a part of our country’s legal tradition longer than we’ve actually been a country. It means that our government has to explain why it’s holding a person in custody. But now, the War on Terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that prisoners should not be covered by habeas—or even by the Geneva Conventions—because they’re the most fearsome enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes?

What followed was one of those gripping stories that makes you sit in your car outside your apartment for 45 minutes because you don’t want to miss anything by running inside. You can download the entire episode for free here. What I learned offended the American side of me, to hear about how the constitution is simply ignored or put on hold when it is deemed inconvenient to those in power. Don’t we write these rules specifically for hard times when we’d be tempted to abuse power?

From a Christian standpoint what distressed me even more was the de-humanizing abuse many of these prisoners are forced to undergo. Far from buying into the excuses that “this is a different kind of war calling for different kinds of tactics,” I am compelled to reflect on Jesus’ parable of the indebted prisoner who is freed only to turn around and put those who owed him money into prison. What does forgiveness look like in the midst of a world racked by terrorism? Would Jesus put a “temporary hold” on forgiveness in the face of terrorism declaring that new more modern tactics were needed to fight “extremism?” Or is forgiveness a form of religious extremism in itself? I certainly think so. If prisoners do indeed need to be held captive can it be done while still honoring their God-given dignity? Can their captors be committed to truthfulness and honesty instead of secrecy and deception?

We are often told that the world changed on Sept. 11th, that we now must operate in a “post-9/11″ mentality. Does that apply to being a disciple of Jesus Christ? Did being a Christian change on 9/11? Do we get to temporarily set aside things like forgiveness and loving our enemies in the midst of a world filled with terrorism?

OR are forgiveness and love the very ways Jesus taught us to fight such evils?