'Torture, Then And Now“Where is Richard Brown when we really need him?”
By Rev. Fred Morris
10/26/07 "ICH" -- --
The story of a young Foreign Service officer who risked his budding career to defend a principle and the honor of the United States
Intro: In the fall of 1974, I was being tortured by members of the Brazilian army in Recife, Brazil, led by officers who bragged about having been trained at the School of the Americas (then in Panama). When I was kidnapped from my home in Recife, (Time, November 18, 1974 and Harpers’s, October, 1975) on September 30, 1974, I did not expect to survive. Since the CIA-sponsored overthrow of the democratically elected president of Brazil, João Goulart, in April of 1964, hundreds of Brazilians had been “disappeared” by the military security forces in their ongoing war against “international Communism” and its alleged collaborators within Brazil.
I was not charged with any crimes, nor given access to an attorney, nor any form of “due process.” I was simply kidnapped and taken to a military installation where I was subjected to the same torture procedures we have recently seen illustrated from the Abu Grahib prison in Iraq, which should not surprise us, as those torturing me were trained by the US army. The reason for my abduction and torture was nothing more or less than my association with the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Recife, Dom Helder Câmara, one of the architects of the Second Vatican Council under Pope John XXIII that led to the people-oriented revolution within the Catholic Church. Dom Helder, then a world-renowned figure, thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and major figure in the Third World, was widely admired for his pursuit of non-violent solutions to economic and political injustice. I had been working with him in Recife as a United Methodist missionary for four years, seeking to improve relations between Protestants and Catholics in the Northeast of Brazil, even as I helped found and then directed a social service center in the extremely impoverished community of Caixa D’Agua. What surprised me, and clearly saved my life, was that the newly appointed US Consul in Recife, a young career Foreign Service officer named Richard Brown, whom I did not know personally, intervened on my behalf and, with the support of the US Ambassador in Brasília, John Crimmins, then the senior career diplomat in the State Department, was able, after four long and desperate days and nights, to get the Brazilian government to honor the Vienna Convention, which required that any signatory country permit consular access to any foreign national arrested and/or imprisoned for whatever reason.'
Lees verder: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18627.htm
Zie ook: http://www.soaw.org/
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