"out of hand" is putting it mildly.
The saddest thing is such a terrible thing still happens and it's taken seriously by people like Glenn Greenwald who fights against them everyday while others cheapen it for political point-scoring.
This particular case is well known and where I live but it's not uncommon. Watch and read this with horror. Horrifying details are in the Salon article. These things are still happening today.
"Sister Dianna Ortiz (a US citizen) speaks of her ordeal in Guatemala after she was abducted and tortured.
She identified the leader of the gang which abducted her as a fellow citizen of the US."
Torture
TUESDAY, NOV 19, 2002 11:13 AM CENTRAL AMERICA STANDARD TIME
“The Blindfold’s Eyes” by Dianna Ortiz
An American nun who survived the torture chambers of Guatemala describes her ordeal and the fear and guilt that still haunt her.
...
Dianna Ortiz is one American whose relationship to torture is different. That’s because she was tortured in 1989, during a two-year stint in Guatemala as a young, politically unsophisticated nun from a Kentucky convent, teaching children to read in a rural province. She was abducted from a convent garden one morning by a U.S.-trained Guatemalan army captain, a police intelligence officer and their campesino torture temp, and installed in the secret basement of a police training institute called the Politecnica. (This was a regular site for torture conducted on orders of the military high command.)
They took Ortiz not because she was any kind of radical but simply because she was a garden-variety Catholic missionary working with the poor at a time when the military wanted to seriously scare the church. (Priests and nuns, human-rights workers, doctors, labor activists and randomly chosen campesinos had been tortured in Guatemala for decades, not so much to get information as to terrorize entire trades and populations.)
Ortiz was held for only 24 hours, unlike many other torture victims, whose ordeals last, incredibly, for months or even years. But those 24 hours resulted in a complete loss of memory of everything in her life prior to being tortured. She had to be reintroduced to her own parents, and she still has almost no memory of her childhood, her college years, how she became a nun, or her pre-torture friendships.
...
http://www.salon.com/2002/11/19/ortiz/
Here is the letter Sister Ortiz wrote to President Obama. Greenwald is well aware of such cases, he lives down here where we see the other side of US policy, even against our own citizens and nuns. She's not the only nun this happened to in this neck of the woods to keep our profits safe. Her letter to Obama is called "Blueprint for Accountability".
I'm grateful Greenwald won't shut up about torture, war, civil rights, etc... no matter how inconvenient the truth is. I stand with Greenwald and people like Sister Ortiz with no apologies. These aren't laughing matters, or the stuff of dishonest political points.
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