Obama: for or against torture?

It would appear that President Obama has till May 11 to decide whether he does, in fact, actually oppose the US military torturing prisoners… or if he would just rather not know what the US military does to prisoners.

On May 11, Clive Stafford Smith, Binyam Mohamed’s lawyer, director of Reprieve, will appear in court to be charged with the crime of telling President Barack Obama that the Privilege Review Board had redacted the whole of a memo Smith wrote to Obama describing Binyam Mohamed’s treatment in Guantanamo Bay. (See Glenn Greenwald’s interview on Salon Radio.)

For that crime, Smith may spend up to six months in jail: that is, for the crime of telling the President of the United States that a secret committee in the Pentagon did not want him to know exactly what had been done to Binyam Mohamed.

Obama’s preference with regard to torture is clearly and explicitly to do nothing – that was unfortunately clear from November 22, when he announced he would keep George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense in the position he had held for two years. That’s an improvement on the pro-torture policies of the Bush administration, certainly – as King Log is better than King Stork.

But merely deciding to do nothing – neither to authorise torture techniques, nor take steps to prevent ongoing torture (prisoners were still being tortured at Guantanamo Bay in February this year, as Binyam Mohamed – and the doctors who examined him on his return to the UK – can testify), nor to prosecute those who committed torture with President Bush’s authorisation – is a complex balancing act, absolutely dependent on no one pushing.

Many Americans who objected to torture under Bush appear content now to not push – not to ask why Obama did not act to stop torture at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere as from January 21, not to ask why Obama is not setting in motion an investigation of torture under Bush, not to ask why the current Secretary of Defense, who may be implicated in the torture of prisoners under Bush, has been allowed to retain his position into Obama’s administration.

It’s true: Obama is so much better a President and a man than Bush that it’s actually hard to compare them: and the US and the rest of the world dodged a bullet when McCain lost so comprehensively last November. (Two bullets, in fact: President Palin.)

But because Obama is so much better than Bush, he should be pushed harder. Now it’s come down to a decision Obama has to make: is he going to take the position that people should be prosecuted and jailed for telling him about prisoners being tortured by the US – and let that happen to Clive Stafford Smith and others at Reprieve? Is he going to ask to read the unredacted memo? Is he going to begin the investigation of torture in the US military that should have begun in 2004?

May 11th. Obama has a deadline.

Torture in the US military: why it still matters

Terry Holdbrooks served as a military police officer with the rank of Specialist in the United States Army between 2002 and 2005, attached to the 252nd Military Police, and later assigned to the 463rd MP company, a mobile deploying unit, based at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. From 2003 to 2004, he was deployed to Guantanamo Bay, where he served as a prison guard. This is a quote from an interview by the Talking Dog, on March 5th 2009:

In my case, a few squad leaders decided that I had shown too much interest in the detainees… I was not appropriately abusive or angry enough… I didn’t harbor “the right feeling”. So I was taken behind my barracks, and some blows were issued, pushing and yelling, a lot of profanity. I was told to “get my head on straight”… and asked why I was not with the program… I responded that it was “not my prerogative.”

At that point, my own squad leader separated me out from the others, suggested that they end this, lest they all get in trouble. I did not report this to my captain or sergeant… I felt that the pain was temporary, and that there was no reason to worry about this incident, so I let it go.

In social terms, I will say that I ended up effectively shunned or “excommunicated” from the others in the company, and we really did not talk much until we left Guantanamo and returned to Fort Leonard Wood. Things largely returned to “normal” at some point between when I left GTMO in 2004 and left the Army in 2005. Closer to 2004, when we returned, the platoons were redistributed again, and things were different, almost as if it was an opportunity to start over, and we were reunited with 1st platoon who had been gone in Qatar at that point we were gone in GTMO.

Which is why posts by liberal American bloggers justifying Obama’s decision to keep Gates on as Defense Secretary do not impress me at all.

Two days separation makes it safe

I don’t know whether it disturbed me worse: whether Rick Warren’s invitation was a classic mistake on the lines of “we’re BFF, I don’t need to vet him” or if Obama had Warren vetted and either didn’t care or approved of Warren’s beliefs about effective AIDS work, torture, and same-sex marriage.

For example: this interview in which Warren compares same-sex marriage to child molestation, incest, and polygamy; or Warren’s championing of Martin Ssempa, whose notion of fighting AIDS in Uganda is to burn condoms and preach abstinence – either of which should have been enough to eliminate Warren as a choice for this honour.

As Michelle Goldberg notes, same-sex marriage isn’t the only thing that one hopes Warren and Obama don’t agree on:

Meanwhile, while Warren says he opposes torture, he doesn’t treat the subject with anything like the zeal he accords gay marriage and abortion. As he recently told Beliefnet.com, he never even brought up the subject with the Bush administration, where he had considerable access. Just before the 2004 election, he sent out an e-mail to his congregation outlining the five issues that he considered “non-negotiable”. “In order to live a purpose-driven life – to affirm what God has clearly stated about his purpose for every person he creates – we must take a stand by finding out what the candidates believe about these five issues, and then vote accordingly,” he wrote. The issues were abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, cloning and euthanasia. Torture, apparently, is something that decent Christians can disagree on.

Was Obama genuinely ignorant of this? Was Warren’s selection just the first failure of the Obama administration to vet candidates?

Or did Obama know that Warren opposes effective AIDS campaigning in Africa, thinks torture is an issue that Christians can agree-to-disagree on, and that Warren is the kind of Christian homophobe decent people should want sidelined as a radical, not given this kind of central honour – and just not care?

Depressing interview

Lynndie England interviewed by Emma Brockes:

Lynndie England has lived in Fort Ashby since she was two, but when she appears, suddenly, in the car park, her outline is crooked with self-consciousness. She grew her hair for a while, but people recognised her anyway, so she cut it short again. …. When she got to Abu Ghraib, she was assigned to administrative duties and had no cause to be in the cellblocks, except that she was hanging out with Graner. She found the scene down there odd. “When we first got there, we were like, what’s going on? Then you see staff sergeants walking around not saying anything [about the abuse]. You think, OK, obviously it’s normal.” Graner, too, was initially disturbed, and is on record as having raised some objections. “When he first started working on that wing, he would tell me about it and say, ‘This is wrong.’ He even told his sergeant and platoon leader. He said he tried to say something. But everyone is saying it’s OK to do it and getting pats on the back.”

Remember, no one above the rank of sergeant was charged for any abuse in Abu Ghraib – even though techniques in use had been directly approved in the White House by Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft.

And while I’ll be delighted to be wrong, given that Bush’s Secretary of Defense is to remain in place for another year, I doubt very strongly that cleaning up the US military, cleaning out all those implicated in torturing prisoners, is going to be any kind of priority for Obama’s administration.

My Obama Wish List: 8

What’s next?

8 Give Joseph Darby the Medal of Honor.

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty, when serving in Abu Ghraib.

Not only because Joseph Darby deserves to be honoured for what he did: but also to send the clear message to Americans who support torture that Darby is a hero.

He deserves more from the US military than a personal letter from Donald Rumsfeld telling him to stop talking about how Rumsfeld outed him on the news while he was still serving in Iraq.

Okay, break’s over!

My Obama Wish List: 7

What’s next?

7. Investigate the Department of Defense for all those implicated in the torture of prisoners held by the US military.

Everyone who worked there during the Bush administration who could have known about the torture of prisoners before they read about it in the papers, must be investigated to discover if they did.

If they knew about the torture of prisoners and did not speak out, the minimum penalty exacted should be to be fired from their post and banned for life from any government employment: prosecution may follow. And yes, that includes the officers whose crime was “merely” to ignore the reports of lower-ranking soldiers that US soldiers were torturing prisoners. The more senior the position held, the more strongly an investigation should push for prosecution. Neither Donald Rumsfeld nor Robert M. Gates should be exempt.

Okay, break’s over!

Being persecuted: seeking asylum: filling a quota

I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time, but the truth is I don’t know where to start. With Jacqui Smith, Home Secretary, who said about a week ago: “In the 21st century no one in Britain should ever feel under threat of verbal or physical violence just because of their sexual orientation.” No. Move back four years or so.

In 2004, the Syrian government arrested a young man, Jojo Jako Yacob, whose father was involved with the Yakiti Party – pro-Kurdish, anti-government.

“At one point I was put up against a wall and a handgun pointed at me. I was told that if I did not tell the authorities what they wanted to know they would shoot me dead. I did not tell them anything, I did not think they would shoot me.”

“The police officer then shot me in my upper left arm. At that point, I told them what they wanted to know as I believed that they would shoot me dead.” (Death sentence: gay Syrian teenager facing deportation)

In Ahdas Prison, by the Turkish border, this young man formed a relationship with another prisoner – but the guards found out and the prisoners were systematically beaten, for days or weeks – Jojo no longer remembers.

“This was all because I was gay. No questions were asked of me about my father’s political party or any other political activity. All the questions related to me being gay.

“I was also subjected to cold-water torture, where I was put in a room and buckets of cold water were constantly thrown over me. I could not remember what day it was or how long I had been in prison. (Death sentence: gay Syrian teenager facing deportation)

He woke in hospital: the doctor who was treating him told him that he had been in a coma for 20 days. He escaped from Syria, intending to get to the UK, which he had heard was a democracy and treated people with justice and fairness. In early 2005, huddled in the back of a freezer lorry, suffering from post-traumatic shock, he arrived in the UK.

Guantanamo Bay: show trials are evil

I’ve written before on why it was clear from the very beginning that the US was in breach of the Geneva Convention when the first prisoners were sent to Guantanamo Bay – even though we know so much more now than we did then. (Such as the fact that many of the prisoners are innocent kidnap victims.)

Guantanamo Bay is the visible oubliette in the US’s gulag archipelago: there are other prison camps round the world, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq (over 24 thousand prisoners held without due process, including at least 513 children who have been classed as “imperative threats to security”).

(Nevertheless, if you’re a UK citizen, please sign the petition to close Guantanamo Bay. What we can do is worth doing.)

(And all I want to say, any more, about the other current event is that I agree with Julia.)

Right now, the Bush administration has put on show-trials for five of the extrajudicial prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay. (There were to be six, but apparently Mohammed al-Qahtani, who has been held in Guantanamo Bay since January 2002, has had charges dropped because, it seems, it would be too obvious in a courtroom, that after six years of torture and solitary confinement he’s completely insane.)

The five remaining show-trial prisoners are:

• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
• Walid Bin Attash
• Ramzi Binalshibh
• Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali
• Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been an extrajudicial prisoner of the US since the beginning of March 2003. In March 2007, after over three years being passed from one secret prison to another, and six months in Guantanamo Bay as an official extrajudicial prisoner, he confessed to a shopping list of terrorist crimes (read the full list here). He’s known to have been tortured which puts the entire confession out of court, though not, of course, out of consideration at a show trial determined on condemning “al-Qaeda terrorists” to death. And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is also determined to be a martyr and has refused legal representation. (Shortly before his arrest, his children were kidnapped, and since his arrest they have been interrogated, held in extrajudicial detention, and made use of to get KSM to talk.)

Walid Bin Attash has been an extrajudicial prisoner of the US since April 2003. In September 2006, he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay. He presumably spent the intervening three years – over three years – in various secret detention centres. (His name appears in a HRW report from October 2004, “confirmed” as a prisoner of the US at an “undisclosed location”.) He too has confessed to a shopping list of crimes.

Ramzi Binalshibh has been an extrajudicial prisoner of the US since September 2002. In September 2006, he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay. A HRW report references evidence that he was tortured in a Jordan prison at least part of the time he was one of the US “disappeared”. He’s described as “uncooperative and unresponsive”, but apparently he too has confessed a list of crimes and been implicated by others in their confessions.

The above three all appear to have genuine connections with al-Qaeda – that is, they are implicated as involved in al-Qaeda by material evidence, not by confessions obtained under torture alone. Whether that makes them guilty of the charges brought against them is another question: whether they could be convicted in a court of law, after so long as extra-judicial prisoners and given the extreme likelihood that all confessed under torture, is still another.

Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, or Ammar al-Baluchi, is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s maternal nephew. After KSM was captured, his nephew spent time with Walid Bin Attash, and when Walid was taken by the US, so was Ali. He too has been an extra-judicial prisoner of the US since April 2003. He’s listed as a ghost detainee in a HRW report from 2005: he too was transferred to Guantanamo Bay in September 2006. There is no evidence linking him with al-Qaeda apart from the family link: he is accused of wiring money to the 9/11 hijackers in the US.

Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi is another peculiar case: he’s been an extra-judicial prisoner of the US since March 2003, in Guantanamo Bay since September 2006, and has been accused of sending money and credit cards and “Western clothing” to the 9/11 hijackers. But material evidence linking him to al-Qaeda appears to be either scant or non-existent.

Regardless of their actual guilt or innocence, the Bush administration’s determination to find them guilty and condemn them to death makes these proceedings a show trial, not justice. (Thanks to the treatment they received, no just trial may ever be possible.)

Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and John Ashcroft – and if those five, then George W. Bush as well – are all directly implicated in the decision to torture American extra-judicial prisoners – as well as George Tenet, then head of the CIA.

So all of these five prisoners (and many others) have been tortured with the approval and advance knowledge of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Ashcroft, and Tenet. Should the next administration decide to investigate and prosecute the crimes of the previous administration (as we all hope will happen) it is very clear that these seven powerful people could, if justice prevailed, find themselves in court on very serious criminal charges.

The first thing I thought of, when I heard that these show trials had been announced, was that the Bush administration had taken an unspeakably horrible means of insuring themselves against any real investigation of their crimes with regard to the extra-judicial prisoners tortured with their knowledge and approval: they intended to time the show trials so that the prisoners would be found guilty as close as possible to the first Thursday in November. When found guilty, the prisoners would be condemned to death.

The Bush administration would then announce that they would pass responsibility for carrying out those executions to the next administration: a bold move, because if Obama is in the White House next January (let’s hope) he might just refuse the poisoned pawn and prosecute the investigation, despite all the media and the Republicans would have to say about how Obama’s refusal to execute these prisoners proves him “soft on terrorism”.

But if whoever’s President next January executes the prisoners, this execution implicates them in the Bush administration’s crimes: and if the President commutes the death sentences to life imprisonment, where else could they be held but in Guantanamo Bay? And if Guantanamo Bay remains as the US flagship oubliette, what of all the other secret detention centres where prisoners can be held? If the next President accepts the poisoned pawn, the next administration is forced into accepting these crimes of the last as a given.

Even if you don’t accept this particular theory, but think the Bush administration is just putting these five on “trial” with the intent of looking like they accomplished something with their thousands of extra-judicial prisoners, so that Bush can claim he finished his disastrous reign by convicting people supposedly “responsible” for the terrorist attack on 9/11, it is still very important that the prisoners’ trials should be completed and the prisoners condemned before Bush leaves office.

But in order to do so, the trials must proceed with extra-ordinary speed. The JAG lawyers ordered to defend these five have proved themselves professionally responsible and honourable, determined to do their best for their clients – a lawyer’s duty – even in these unpromising circumstances when it has become clear that their superiors in the military, and the civilian hierarchy commanding the military, do not want these lawyers to do their best for their clients: they want the accused to be found guilty.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had already refused a lawyer to defend him. Now so have the other four. While agreeing with KSM’s reasoning that the trial is a mockery and there is no point having a lawyer since the court will find him guilty, that’s not as important as the need for the trials not to be completed until – we all hope – McCain loses the election, and – we all should hope even harder - does not get into the White House. (McCain, I have no doubt, will execute the condemned prisoners and continue the extra-judicial detentions without a qualm: there’s room to hope that Barack Obama will put an end to it.)

Via Sideshow, I discover there’s a reason why all five have rejected their right to a defense lawyer: though all five have been held separately for years, none of them allowed to talk to each other, but then, just when it’s most convenient to the Bush administration and the other criminals implicated in the torture and illegal detention of prisoners:

(EmptyWheel) Doesn’t seem that earth shattering at first; however, think through the dynamics to date and the blaring significance sets in. The US has assiduously kept the detainees separated and isolated all this time so that they could not communicate and have structural control from the top down and, then, out of the blue, viola! Right in the middle of the courtroom, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is blithely allowed to huddle them up like Favre does the Packers. When they break huddle, all of them, even the hesitant ones, suddenly want to dismiss their JAG/military lawyers that have been doing such commendable work under impossible conditions. Exactly at the point it is useful to help the US rid themselves of those meddlesome military lawyers that have been beating up their dog and pony shows.

First the Cheney Administration sacked the military judge that had the gall to allow even a shred of due process to the detainees, and now they have effectively sacked the military lawyers that had the temerity to seek it. This was a knowing and intentional play to deny counsel. The US Administration knew what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would do, and they knew that, given the opportunity, he would command the other detainees to do the same. So the US made sure it happened, so as to suit their demented self serving convenience. In writing this post, I have found one other person (h/t to Siun) that has also realized what occurred, and it is none other than Anthony Romero, the Director of the ACLU; everybody should know and be ashamed of what has been done in our name.

This huge bit of legal depravity is of truly profound significance, I cannot emphasize that enough. It sure will go an awful long way to wedge out and marginalize the only lawyers actually doing their job in this whole mess, and will insure that a competent record of the torture will not be created (even if the detainees do mention it). It will also hasten the death penalty killing of these detainees that are prime evidence of the whole US torture scheme. Pretty much is one big eraser and obscurer of the legal hash the prosecution has made. Brilliant. But morally, ethically and legally craven and deplorable. This is the story from the Guantanamo arraignment last Thursday that should be being discussed and decried. This is the penultimate straw; the last straw will be the snuff films that have been facilitated and hastened by Thursday’s Gitmo arraignment shame.

Again I say: It is not a question of whether any of these five who have been put on show trial are in fact guilty or innocent. Nor is it entirely a question of whether my theory is correct, that the executions of these five will be handed to the next President to blood him with the crimes of the past regime, so that the chief criminals can relax without any worries that nasty questions may at some time be asked of them about their approval of torture and extra-judicial detention of terrorist suspects – or even about the decision to grossly violate the Geneva Convention for Prisoners of War, as long ago as November 2001.

These are show trials. Show trials are always profoundly wrong: they subvert and destroy justice. It is one of the nastiest ironies of the whole bloody business that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed may actually be guilty of some of the charges brought against him – may indeed be one of the co-conspirators behind September 11. But, thanks exclusively and entirely to the Bush administration’s treatment of him and other prisoners since he was captured, no court of law could possibly convict him. The train of evidence has been corrupted with torture, kidnapping, and long periods of extra-judicial detention. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed evidently thinks he serves the al-Qaeda cause best as a martyr, and he’s certainly right. The Bush administration may well provide him, because they want themselves to avoid prosecution, with the death he wants, and the martyr that al-Qaeda can use for a century.

This isn’t just wicked: it’s stupid.

Torture doth never prosper

Torture doth never prosper, what’s the reason?
For when it prospers, people call it “harsh interrogation”.

Yeah, it doesn’t rhyme. (I looked up “torture” and found exactly two rhymes for it, neither of them easy to work into a verse: porcher, scorcher.)

This is the reason why I will not join Slacktivist’s campaign Torture is wrong – but when torture advocates can with bland voice say “of course torture is wrong – we only want to hurt our prisoners a little bit, no scars! and deliberately humiliating them to make them confess doesn’t count as torture, you liberal hippy!” what good does it do?

“Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.”

When you hold someone prisoner, even if they are imprisoned legally and justly (which of course is not true of the extrajudicial prisoners who are being tortured by Americans), it is wrong to inflict on them severe pain and suffering, whether physical or mental. Trying to define “severe” is pointless: but given that the Geneva Conventions repeatedly argue that the standard should be to treat soldiers and civilians of enemy nations as well as you treat your own soldiers and civilians, “severe” should be held to the same standard: if you would object to having this pain and suffering inflicted on one of your own*, don’t do it to a prisoner. Because it’s torture. Even if, gestapo-like, you prefer to call it “harsh interrogation”, or demand to know how else “the terrorists” can be fought.

*However you define “one of your own”.

Who has “betrayed their mission”?

Inspired by Melissa McEwan’s post here on the film about rape in the Congo. The post and the film are good, bu there’s a big silence around the Congolese government’s stance on women’s reproductive rights. Abortion is illegal in the Congo, and health care following illegal abortion is frequently denied.

Amnesty’s international council voted in August 2006 to end the organisation’s former policy of “neutrality” on abortion in favor of supporting access to the procedure for women who have been raped, or whose health will be damaged if they are not allowed to terminate: and to decriminalize abortion so that a woman who has an abortion won’t be prosecuted for it: and to support access to post-abortion healthcare for women who get abortions in countries where they’re illegal. The change was address issues including the widespread use of rape in war zones like the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Since then, eight schools in Northern Ireland have closed or suspended their Amnesty groups and more than two thousand Catholic schools in England and Wales were also – in autumn 2007 – advised to sever their links with Amnesty, following instructions from their bishops. November 2007

Amnesty groups in UK schools write to prisoners of conscience in countries round the world. The adult responsible for the group will usually choose a country or a specific prisoner for the group to write to. These bishops evidently feel that Matthew 25:40-45 is one of those awkward bits of the Bible that Jesus didn’t really mean.

What Jesus really wanted, these bishops think, was for Christians to listen to these stories and wash their hands:

F: That day we were coming from Bukavu. When we reached N., some soldiers stopped the vehicle and made us get out. When soldiers stop vehicles like that, it’s to rob the passengers, but they often take the opportunity to rape the women too. I was with five other women, and we were all raped, there at the side of the road. Then they gathered us together again and told us that they were taking us to their commander. So, like that, we were led off to their camp in the forest. Since there were six of us, when we were presented to the commander, he made the first choice of which woman he would take. Then the other officers made their choice: each officer took a woman. When it’s the commander who chose you, the others can’t touch you. But when he’s had enough of you, he hands you on to others to rape you.

E: One day I went to the fields to gather some manioc leaves. I saw a man dressed in camouflage, the uniform that soldiers wear. That man chased after us. We ran away, but I fell and he raped me. … There were two other girls with me. … I fell over. I cried out and my friends ran off. No-one came to help me. … He hurt me. It was bad. … After he’d raped me he left me there. I got up and went back home. … I’ve only got my mum. My father isn’t with us anymore. … During the war my father fled. He hasn’t come back. …
My mother asked me, “Why didn’t you bring back the vegetables?” I burst out crying and I told her what had happened. Afterwards she said, “Come on, we’re going to see the doctor”. … The doctor said that since this man had raped me, I was no longer normal like the other girls.

Aid worker:

We listen to the women, try to help them psychologically, help them to get medical care, and we try to give them a small amount of money, because typically the soldiers who rape the women will also take everything they own, even down to their clothes and cooking pots. And many women have been rejected by their husbands and are left on their own to look after the children, to find shelter and food for them. Many of the children are badly undernourished. So we try to give them something, when we have it, so they can start up again on their own: a small amount so they can buy and sell food at the markets and make a little profit, or some seed or a hoe.

But there are many problems. Even though they say the war is over, I can tell you it is still here. There are many villages where the women are not assisted, are abandoned to themselves. And the women are scared. Our own workers receive threats too. Two weeks ago, as I was on my way to K., I was threatened by three soldiers who said that we exaggerate the rapes and tried to take the documents I was carrying. They are worried that we are divulging all their secrets. We are regularly called in for questioning. We don’t keep our files here. We send them to G., for security.

From Catholic News:

Kate Gilmore, exec of AI: “Amnesty International’s position is not for abortion as a right but for women’s human rights to be free of fear, threat and coercion as they manage all consequences of rape and other grave human rights violations.”

Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace:

To selectively justify abortion, even in the cases of rape, is to define the innocent child within the womb as an enemy, a ‘thing’ that must be destroyed. How can we say that killing a child in some cases is good and in other cases it is evil?

I believe that, if in fact Amnesty International persists in this course of action, individuals and Catholic organizations must withdraw their support because, in deciding to promote abortion rights, AI has betrayed its mission.

Who has betrayed their mission?

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’ They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Who?