Commander's Responsibility for the Delivery of Religious Support to the Detainees in the JAO: Accommodation of Religious Needs Balanced with the Necessary Security Concerns
Abstract : In recent operations, Regional Combatant Commanders (RCCs) have been tasked with new challenges in providing for the treatment, care, and accountability of detainees. Included in this tasking is the responsibility to insure detainees have the latitude to exercise their religious faith. This is an unfamiliar territory for many, and certainly not an art in practiced recent memory. These new challenges in relationship to religious support include understanding the boundaries set in the law of armed conflict, coming to terms with the definitions of detainees categories, religious support, and roles of providers, as well as understanding and tackling emerging concepts relating to enemy combatant detainees and the Global War on Terror. Headlines since 2002 have reminded us of the unintended consequences of what happens when we get it wrong. Remember the news stories of LT Saif-ul-Islam in Guantanamo Bay? We saw what happened when a chaplain trained at a tactical level, assigned to an operational staff, was given a role of great strategic significance.
A Time for Conversion: Chaplains and Unified Commanders
Abstract : The genius of the American system is that it ensures freedom of religion for those desiring to exercise their faith as well as freedom from religion for those without interest. The commander bears a responsibility for providing service members with the opportunity to freely exercise religion under the first amendment. Until recently, however, military leaders could ignore religious matters external to the Armed Forces with relative impunity. That is no longer the case, for religion on the operational level transcends the needs of military personnel. Indeed, unified commanders are faced with a pluralistic and volatile world where religion represents a significant force. It is clear in light of the increasing stakes that commanders should take religion seriously in using the range of tools available to them. Religious issues and their implications are examined by diverse staff elements, including intelligence, information operations, psychological operations, and unified command chaplains, who are the principal advisors on religious matters. Unfortunately, there are difficulties that undercut support by chaplains. Senior billets for joint chaplains are justified on the basis of advice they give to commanders, yet poorly formulated doctrine virtually ensures that commanders are provided with little guidance on what to expect from chaplains. The problem is exacerbated by a tendency of the service chaplaincies to produce senior officers who are more attuned to meeting the needs for free exercise and accommodation of religion than advising senior commanders on religious issues. The time for change is now. Three issues require speedy and dramatic improvement: doctrine and policy, expectation baselines for unified command chaplains, and personnel management and training.
Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948
The World War II era represented the golden age of radio as a broadcast medium in the United States; it also witnessed a rise in African-American activism against racial segregation and discrimination, especially as they were practised by the federal government itself. In this study, the author links these cultural and political forces by showing how African-American activists, public officials, intellectuals, and artists sought to access and use radio to influence a national debate about racial inequality. Drawing on a body of national public affairs programming about African-Americans and race relations, the author uses these radio shows to demonstrate the emergence of a new national discourse about race and ethnicity, racial hatred and injustice, and the contribution of racial and immigrant populations to the development of the United States. These programmes, Savage contends, challenged the nation to reconcile its professed egalitarian ideals with its unjust treatment of black Americans and other minorities. This examination of radio's treatment of race as a national political issue also provides important evidence that the campaigns for racial justice in the 1940s served as an essential, and still overlooked, precursor to the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, Savage argues. The next battleground would be in the South, and on television.