Slavery: still evil

A shocking story:

A New York woman who lives in a 34-room, 30,000-square-foot mansion is facing a federal criminal charge related to her employment of an illegal alien who allegedly served as a domestic servant in a “forced labor situation” that included her working 17-hour days, seven days a week, and sleeping in a walk-in closet.

Acting on a tip received by the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, federal immigration agents last year removed the servant from the 12-acre estate (pictured below) on the Mohawk River in Rexford, a hamlet 20 miles north of Albany.

A subsequent criminal investigation determined that the woman--who barely spoke English and came from the Kerala state in India--was paid about 85 cents an hour during the 67 months she worked for Annie George and her husband (who died in a plane crash in mid-2009).

One of the problems of not working to solve the problem of illegal immigration is that these sorts of situations in which the immigrant is exploited and abused can flourish. But the answer to the problem is complex, as we all know. In the meantime, at least we can all agree that this kind of domestic slavery is clearly evil.

Rick Santorum and torture

Rod Dreher today has some interesting quotes from Andrew Sullivan regarding Rick Santorum's rather public dissent from Church teaching regarding torture. Rod writes:

I hope the moderator of tonight’s debate asks Rick Santorum how he squares his support for torture with his Catholicism. How does one hold the line on contraception, but ignore the line on torture?

I agree that this is a question worth asking. Both torture and contraception are defined as morally evil by the Church; how can one embrace the first and reject the second, while insisting that one is a faithful Catholic?

We must be careful not to be cafeteria Catholics in our voting, whether we line up on the left or right side of the cafeteria line. Evil is evil, and while there are sometimes prudential questions about the rightness or wrongness of certain wars or military actions, there are no prudential justifications for committing and supporting the evil of torture.

It's torture when they do it

(Cross-posted at And Sometimes Tea.)

The medical group Doctors without Borders is leaving detention facilities in Libya over allegations that they were being used to facilitate the continued torture of prisoners:

Medicins San Frontieres pulled its staff out of detention facilities in a Libyan city yesterday after witnessing more than 100 cases of torture against inmates by the revolutionaries that overthrew Col Muammar Gaddafi.

MSF said it was withdrawing staff because it was effectively keeping prisoners alive so that authorities could continue to torture them. [...]

Christopher Stokes, the General Director of MSF, said the scale of torture in two detention centres in the city of Misurata was accelerating despite repeated pleas from the organisation for mistreatment to stop.

Some of the 115 inmates among the 1,500 strong prison population that MSF staff treated after torture were beaten so badly they could not stand, had suffered kidney failure and bore signs of electric shock.

Hundreds of prisoners, many of them black Africans, also told the organisation of suffering torture.

Mr Stokes said MSF medics feared that their work could be used to sustain the process of torturing prisoners. "When you patch people up and then they get taken back to be tortured again in the same evening, you become part of the process," he said.

"We have protested and in some cases they have said they will stop but in other cases they say it happens everywhere, like Abu Ghraib. If anything, the number of cases has been accelerating."

Poor Mr. Stokes appears not to realize that it's not fair to bring up Abu Ghraib in this context. The prisoners at Abu Ghraib were only being subject to enhanced interrogation, enhanced detainment, and enhanced violation of human dignity. It's perfectly obvious that these prisoners in Libya are actually being tortured, because it's always torture when someone other than Americans is doing it.

You see, what matters is not whether rubber hoses, electric shocks, beatings, cold cells, waterboarding or some similar method is employed. What matters is whose hands are on the other end of the rubber hose, the electric switches, the sticks or rods, the climate control settings or the flood of merciless water poured out to cause controlled drownings. If those hands belong to citizens of any nation in the world aside from the United States of America, then what we're talking about is clearly torture. But if those instruments are being employed by patriotic Americans keeping America and her allies safe from terrorism, then all of a sudden we just don't quite know what we're describing. Prisoner discomfort? Enhanced interrogation? A little splash of water on the face--quite nice, actually, considering that the prisoner may still be dripping salty perspiration into open wounds from the last bout of Congressional-approved enhanced chatting with a hostile detainee he just endured...er, experienced. In any case, it's not torture, because good red-blooded patriotic Americans don't torture people.

It's amazing to me how clear it is that torture is what is being alleged and what is being described in detention centers in Libya, when nobody could quite seem to see it happening in our detention centers, under our watch. Such loyal, patriotic myopia is also quite good in noticing specks and even planks protruding from the eyes of citizens of other nations, while utterly ignoring that our straining to see these things and avoid seeing our own similar defects has made us morally blind.

Positions of The Republican candidates on torture and related issues

It has been quite some time since I've posted anything on this blog; life has simply been busy, but I hope to remedy things as the 2012 election season heats up.

For today, I'd simply like to post the position of the various Republican candidates on the issue of torture/enhanced interrogation and related issues. I'm drawing my summaries from various sources, so I'll include a selection of links at the bottom of the post.

The candidates are listed in alphabetical order.

Gingrich: Has been quoted as saying that waterboarding is something America shouldn't do. Believes that Guantanamo should remain open until the terrorists disappear.

Huntsman: Opposes waterboarding; calls Guantanamo an "imperfect solution" but criticizes Obama for breaking his promise to close it.

Paul: Opposes torture and waterboarding as illegal and immoral; opposes Patriot Act; thinks Guantanamo should be closed.

Perry: Says he opposes torture but approves of enhanced interrogation which includes "any technique" used to save American lives. Supports keeping Guantanamo open.

Romney: Favors enhanced interrogation techniques and will not say whether waterboarding qualifies as such a technique. Has said Guantanamo could be doubled in size if needed.

Santorum: Voted to renew Patriot Act. Would continue using Guantanamo for terror suspects. Says that waterboarding is effective. Said John McCain didn't understand how enhanced interrogation works, that the object is to break a man so he will become cooperative.




Some sources:

http://news.yahoo.com/republican-candidates-torture-182900893.html
http://www.issues2000.org/default.htm
http://jon2012.com/index.php/issues/foreign-policy-terrorism
http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/06/3356005/positions-of-the-republican-candidates.html
http://www.ronpaul.com/2009-05-21/ron-paul-on-the-glenn-beck-program-with-guest-host-judge-andrew-napolitano/
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57323716-503544/cain-bachmann-say-they-would-support-waterboarding/
http://www.issues2000.org/Mitt_Romney.htm
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55140.html

Waterboarding doesn't save lives

From the Coalition for Clarity Facebook page, Sean Daily shares an article from Forbes:

It’s now widely known that claims made in previously secret memos about the efficacy of so-called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques – such as that it was from waterboarding Abu Zubaydah that the so-called “dirty bomb” plot of Jose Padilla was thwarted – are false. Padilla was arrested in May 2002, long before waterboarding began months later, and the plot was uncovered using traditional interrogation techniques.

What isn’t widely known is how the insistence of decision-makers to persist with the coercive interrogation techniques and other mistaken tactics like the outsourcing of interrogations to foreign countries – ignoring the pleas of CIA and FBI professionals in the field – cost lives too. Besides the Limburg, there were attacks in London, Madrid, Bali, and Riyadh that might have been stopped if the professionals were listened to. And if leads were followed bin Laden probably could have been found years earlier.

So not only are Enhanced Interrogation Techniques evil, but they also don't work. Who could possibly have foreseen this?

Turns out, waterboarding doesn't save lives. Torture doesn't help fight terror. Evil, once again, has shown to be ineffective as well as wrong.

Sharing some posts about the death penalty

I've written two recent posts about the death penalty, in light of Governor Rick Perry's entry into the presidential race. They are here:

Death is irrevocable

and

Dead wrong: Rick Perry and the death penalty

Please feel free to comment either there or here about these posts.

Right?

You've probably already seen this:

An American former military contractor who claims he was imprisoned and tortured by the US army in Iraq has been allowed by a judge to sue the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld personally for damages.

The man, an army veteran whose identity has been withheld, worked as a translator for the US marines in the volatile Anbar province when he was detained for nine months at Camp Cropper, a US military facility near Baghdad airport dedicated to holding "high-value" detainees.

The government says he was suspected of helping to pass classified information to the enemy and helping anti-coalition forces enter Iraq. But he was never charged with a crime, and says he never broke the law.

What happened to this man? Here are some of the allegations:

In November 2005, when he was to go on home leave, Navy Criminal Investigative Service agents questioned him about his work, refusing his requests for representation by his employer, the Marines or an attorney. The Justice Department says he was told he was suspected of helping provide classified information to the enemy and helping anti-coalition forces attempting to cross from Syria into Iraq.

He says he refused to answer questions because of concern about confidentiality, and the agents handcuffed and blindfolded him, kicked him in the back and threatened to shoot him if he tried to escape. He was then transferred to an unidentified location for three days before being flown to Camp Cropper. [...]

He claims guards tortured him by repeatedly choking him, exposing him to extreme cold and continuous artificial light, blindfolding and hooding him, waking him by banging on a door or slamming a window when he tried to sleep and blasting music into his cell at "intolerably loud volumes."

But none of that is real torture, right? And the man was suspected of collaborating with terrorists, which makes it all good, right?

Right?