Things that make me crazy
i was driving back from a lunch meeting and listening to an interview on public radio international with two of the mothers of the american hikers that have been detained without charges for over a year in iran... the mothers had been allowed to visit their children in tehran in may and, at the time, made a direct appeal to the iranian government for their release without success...
nora shourd, the mother of sarah shourd, one of the detainees, was particularly distressed that her daughter had been kept in solitary confinement for most if not all of her time in prison and was suffering from severe loneliness and appeared to her to be clinically depressed... in so many words, mrs. shourd called her daughter's treatment torture and was appalled that, as a u.s. citizen, she could be subjected to such degradation and made to endure so much personal suffering when she had committed no crime...
as a parent, i would be equally outraged and absolutely beside myself with worry if one of my children was in a similar situation... in fact, i can't imagine any parent anywhere in the world who wouldn't feel the same... but i also couldn't help but think of the parents of all the detainees held by the u.s. in equally troubling circumstances, also without charges, not for one year, not for two years, not even for five years, but for seven, eight, nine and, for some, going on ten years... is anyone interviewing THOSE parents...? did the interviewer even mention that the u.s. is doing the very same thing, only a great deal more of it...? did the mothers bother to acknowledge that there are a lot of mothers around the world struggling with the same situation...? no... of course not...
makes. me. crazy.
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nora shourd, the mother of sarah shourd, one of the detainees, was particularly distressed that her daughter had been kept in solitary confinement for most if not all of her time in prison and was suffering from severe loneliness and appeared to her to be clinically depressed... in so many words, mrs. shourd called her daughter's treatment torture and was appalled that, as a u.s. citizen, she could be subjected to such degradation and made to endure so much personal suffering when she had committed no crime...
as a parent, i would be equally outraged and absolutely beside myself with worry if one of my children was in a similar situation... in fact, i can't imagine any parent anywhere in the world who wouldn't feel the same... but i also couldn't help but think of the parents of all the detainees held by the u.s. in equally troubling circumstances, also without charges, not for one year, not for two years, not even for five years, but for seven, eight, nine and, for some, going on ten years... is anyone interviewing THOSE parents...? did the interviewer even mention that the u.s. is doing the very same thing, only a great deal more of it...? did the mothers bother to acknowledge that there are a lot of mothers around the world struggling with the same situation...? no... of course not...
makes. me. crazy.
Labels: detainee rights, Iran, solitary confinement, torture, United States
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posted by profmarcus at
7/20/2010
