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Bob51
Seaman
Joined: 13 Jan 2005
Posts: 156
Location: Belfast
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 Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2005 7:00 am Post subject: Abu Ghraib will be remembered but what about Unit 731? |
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The world knows of Abu Ghraib but what happened at Unit 731 was a thousand times worse if comparisons made any sense. I only learnt about the Unit 731 vivisections by picking up old books in Hong Kong bookshops. How many people outside of Asia know of Unit 731?
And still Japanese courts whitewash the atrocious history.
Bob51
http://china.scmp.com/chitoday/ZZZROLYFZ7E.html | Quote: | Thursday, April 28, 2005
Unlikely alliance fails to sway Tokyo court over war crimes
Jing Lanzhi and Yoshio Shinozuka make an odd alliance. Mrs Jing's first husband died in horrific bacteriological warfare experiments on civilian prisoners in China in 1941; Mr Shinozuka, then a soldier in the notorious Unit 731, may have been the one who killed him.
"I was 15 years old when I joined Unit 731 and I was later sent to Harbin , in northern China," said Mr Shinozuka, now 81. "Of course I quickly learned what was going on in the camp, but we were all just following orders. We didn't feel bad about what we were doing because we had been educated to believe there was nothing wrong with it."
He is reluctant, however, to reveal exactly how many people he killed or how. "It is very hard to talk about these things, but I did the things they discussed in the testimony," he admits.
The court testimony has come from 10 Chinese plaintiffs whose appeal for compensation for the deaths of their relatives in germ-warfare experiments was dismissed last week by the Tokyo High Court. The court ruled that international law did not allow individuals to sue a foreign government.
It was hoped that Mrs Jing's graphic account in previous hearings of her husband's death in Manchuria would sway the high court in favour of a statement of remorse and redress. Instead, it refused even to recognise that her husband died at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army's Unit 731, infamous for tests involving plague, cholera, yellow fever, anthrax, typhoid mustard gas as well as live vivisections.
A lower court had refused to order compensation. But it had stated that the suffering inflicted on Chinese people as a result of the invasion and occupation were "historical facts that cannot be denied".
Mrs Jing's husband, Zhu Ziyang, was a member of the Chinese resistance. They were both arrested in July 1941. The next day Mrs Jing saw her husband "forced down onto his knees, wearing leg irons, his clothes in tatters and bloodstains all over his body and face".
Three days later, she saw him for the last time, hanging on a wooden cross.
She plans to appeal to Japan's Supreme Court. Mrs Jing appeared shattered by the latest court setback. "I can't talk about it any more. We didn't win and I'm tired of retelling my terrible experiences," she said.
Mr Shinozuka - who served 11 years in a mainland prison after being convicted of war crimes - also gave evidence to the court on behalf of the Chinese.
After the ruling he declared himself "ashamed to be Japanese".
"Everything she said is true... . I will continue to support the court case for as long as I live, " he said. |
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MrJapan
PO1
Joined: 27 Sep 2004
Posts: 465
Location: Chiba, Japan
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| Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2005 9:08 am Post subject: |
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That's a real good point... I accidentally ran across 731 over the net about 6 years ago... I asked MANY Japanese people about it and none of them had ever heard of it.. suprise 
About 3 years ago, I was looking around a video reantal shop.. and there was actually 2 VHS vids about 731 (in Chinese).. I was suprised that Japan let it in  don't know how many locals here bothered to watch it though. Can't find the vids now, but, interestingly, about 2 years ago, one of the doctors involved with 731 came forward and asked for forgiveness and that they Japanese government should be honest about it's past. Haven't heard what has happened to him though.
MJ |
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Me#1You#10
Site Admin
Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 6503
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| Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2005 11:48 am Post subject: |
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| I think, perhaps, it might be best for our collective global closure to establish an International Day of Sackcloth and Ashes during which every nation apologizes to every other nation for actual and/or perceived historical or ongoing transgressions with an exception, perhaps, for Iceland (which has always been too busy keeping warm to bother anyone else). |
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Bob51
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Joined: 13 Jan 2005
Posts: 156
Location: Belfast
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| Posted: Thu Apr 28, 2005 2:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Me#1You#10 wrote: | | I think, perhaps, it might be best for our collective global closure .... |
| MrJapan wrote: | I asked MANY Japanese people about it and none of them had ever heard of it.. surprise
...I was surprised that Japan let it in ...
MJ |
MrJapan, Me#1You#10, Unfortunately I don't expect there ever to be any "closure". People and politicians seem to behave much the same all over the world.
We hear that Japan has accused China of controlling and directing the protests. In Hong Kong the expat commentators write that China also has school textbooks with highly distorted accounts of history and Mao's excesses are not discussed.
I just received this email extract from a friend who monitors legal developments in China very closely. Makes some interesting points.
| Quote: | EVER since June 4, 1989, when the world's cameras embarrassed the Chinese government by recording the slaughter of unarmed protesters in Beijing, spring has been a sensitive period in Chinese politics. Public demonstrations of all kinds have been repressed as if they were vicious cancers. It is indeed news, then, that people have been protesting in the streets of Chinese cities about Japan's wartime past, its textbooks' reluctance to face history squarely, and its proposed accession to the United Nations Security Council.
Of course, the fundamental nature of these protests is different from that of the demonstrations of 1989, because they so far have had the tacit approval of the authorities. The protesters have incurred essentially zero risk, and suspense over the outcome has also been near zero. But even when protests are government-sanctioned, they still offer the Chinese people a rare chance to let off some steam.
If truth be told, however, China and Japan have much in common. China shares many of Japan's flaws and has yet to master some of its important strengths.
We Chinese are outraged by Japan's World War II crimes - the forcing of Chinese into sexual slavery as "comfort women," the 1937 massacre of unarmed civilians in Nanking, and the experiments in biological warfare. Our indignation redoubles when the Japanese distort or paper over this record in their museums and their textbooks.
But if we look honestly at ourselves - at the massacres and invasions strewn through Chinese history, or just at the suppression of protesters in recent times - and if we compare the behavior of the Japanese military with that of our own soldiers, there is not much to distinguish China from Japan.
This comparison haunts me. When I think of the forced labor in Japanese prison camps, I am reminded of forced labor camps in China, and also of the Chinese miners who lose their lives when forced to re-enter mines that everyone knows are unsafe.
Are the rights of China's poor today really so much better protected than those of the wretched "colonized slaves" during the Japanese occupation?
There was the Nanking massacre, but was not the murder of unarmed citizens in Beijing 16 years ago also a massacre?
Is Japan's clumsy effort to cover up history in its textbooks any worse than the gaping omissions and biased blather in Chinese textbooks?
China's textbooks omit the story of how the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950's was actually the disastrous failure of a harebrained economic scheme by Mao that led to the starvation of 20 million to 50 million rural Chinese.
No one really knows the numbers. Nor do we know how many were killed in the campaigns to suppress "counterrevolutionaries" during the 1950's, in the Cultural Revolution during the 1960's, or even in the Beijing massacre of 1989.
Yet we hold Japan firmly responsible for 300,000 deaths at Nanking. Does our confidence with numbers depend on who did the killing?
China and Japan both have blood on their hands, but they have important differences as well. Comfort women and others whom Japan has injured or insulted can sue either Japan's government or its big companies, and they can do this in either Japanese or Chinese courts. Japanese who want to can demonstrate in Tokyo shouting "Down with Japanese militarism!"
These things are very different in China. The Chinese government decides on its own whether to give modest compensation to the widows of dead miners. Ordinary workers and farmers are often in the position of issuing appeals to the very people who are oppressing them.
Families of Beijing massacre victims to this day have police stationed at their doorways, lest they misbehave. And demonstrators may shout only about approved topics.
Before we in China decide we are superior to Japan, we must address our own double standards.
Pu Zhiqiang is a Chinese lawyer. This article was translated by Perry Link from the Chinese. |
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Bob51
Seaman
Joined: 13 Jan 2005
Posts: 156
Location: Belfast
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| Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2005 1:46 pm Post subject: An article from Washtimes worth reading |
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A long time ago, Schadow recommended that I look at www.washtimes.com for alternative points of view. Finally got round to it and found http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20050428-095323-5549r.htm
I particularly appreciated Mr Greenberg's reflection
| Quote: | There also is a lesson for Americans. Whenever some injustice from our past resurfaces, the surest reaction from some will be dismayingly like the Japanese to mentions of the Rape of Nanking -- to dismiss, minimize or reduce it to an "incident."
But our own resentful reaction to Japan's moral amnesia should tell us something about the importance of re-examining the American past. That includes the treatment of interned Japanese citizens during the Second World War. And the long history of degradation of the American Indians. And the whole, peculiar institution of slavery, followed by the un-American, separate-but-unequal caste system known as segregation.
A great nation does not ignore its history, or whitewash it or pretend it never really happened, or brush it off as having occurred so long ago it should no longer matter. A great nation understands history cannot be skirted but must be faced.
A great nation seeks to work through its history, and resolve it, so its people will not remain forever vulnerable to the kind of questions that, if ignored, only fester.
A great nation understands, to repeat a truth that should not lose its force even if it has become a cliche, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Paul Greenberg is a nationally syndicated columnist. |
I had never heard of Mr Greenberg but then I had also never heard of Washtimes. Is he well-known as a commentator and has he already acquired a political label? The views he expresses would be deemed "liberal" in the U.K.
Bob51 |
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I B Squidly
Vice Admiral
Joined: 26 Aug 2004
Posts: 879
Location: Cactus Patch
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| Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2005 5:04 pm Post subject: |
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Bob51,
Paul Greenberg earned a Pulitzer in '69. His columns are syndicated nationally but he can't be lured away from his home in Arkansas. He's liberal in a 19th Century sense of the word.
The Washington Times was founded by the Korean wierdo, Sun Yung Moon but he's wisely kept his hands off the operation and it has become a respected alternative to the Democrat House Organ, the Wasington Post.
During my several years in Japan I was often confronted with the 'Americans are mongrels', there are no true Americans. I'd counter that there were; just like the true Japanese are Ainu. It shut them up everytime. It totally shattered that whole 'divine gift of the rising sun' thing.
_________________
"KILL ALL THE LAWYERS!"
-Wlm Shakespeare |
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Bob51
Seaman
Joined: 13 Jan 2005
Posts: 156
Location: Belfast
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| Posted: Fri May 06, 2005 7:11 am Post subject: |
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| I B Squidly wrote: | Bob51,
...
During my several years in Japan I was often confronted with the 'Americans are mongrels', there are no true Americans. I'd counter that there were; just like the true Japanese are Ainu. |
I B
Here's one for you: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0504/p09s01-coop.html
Just don't let your Japanese friends see it, they might give you a harder time than comparing Ainu with "true" Americans.
| Quote: | | Take the example of Harriet Jacobs, who was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813. She was sold at the age of 12 to James Norcum, who soon began making sexual overtures to her. |
| Quote: | | You do the math. Between 1850 and 1860, the number of blacks in slavery rose by about 20 percent. But the number of enslaved "mulattoes" - that is, mixed-raced slaves - rose by a remarkable 67 percent, as historian Joel Williamson has calculated. To put it most bluntly: Black slaves were getting lighter in skin, because white owners were raping them. It's really that simple |
I wonder what proportion of the rapes fell in the age band of 12 to 14 that we've been getting worked up about in a different thread?
Bob51 |
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I B Squidly
Vice Admiral
Joined: 26 Aug 2004
Posts: 879
Location: Cactus Patch
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| Posted: Fri May 06, 2005 7:47 am Post subject: |
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Bob51,
Furthering your research you might check the Webster-Ashburton Treaty and then check the southern Democrats who wouldn't fund it. You might also check the numbers and find that 90%+ of the Atlantic slave trade did not go to the US.
My granparents came long after the "Peculiar Institution" and couldn't participate in slave games. They'd been serfs. The Polish side escaped a wounded veteran of the Russo-Japanes War. The Hungarian side fled the Empire in 1890. It was this background the Nippers found repugnant.
13 year old brides were common in the 1800s. Hell, it's still legal in Arkansas if she's a cousin. If a couple married in Mississppi and divorced in Tennessee are they still brother and sister?...goes the joke.
_________________
"KILL ALL THE LAWYERS!"
-Wlm Shakespeare |
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Bob51
Seaman
Joined: 13 Jan 2005
Posts: 156
Location: Belfast
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| Posted: Sat May 07, 2005 9:53 am Post subject: |
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| I B Squidly wrote: | Bob51,
Furthering your research ... |
IB,
That's another fine mess you've got me into. The Britannica Online site has 26 detailed pages on the sorry history of slavery, most of which I had never heard of.
I was aware that the established churches had always found scriptural backing for this "peculiar institution", but didn't realise the extent of the codification across pretty much all societies starting as usual with the ancient Chinese.
At the risk of upsetting the fine moderators, here are a few tidbits from Britannica. For you, I'd recommend reading the full 26 pages, others can ignore this "geedunk" diversion.
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=9109538
Here we go:
On the regulations for "sexual access"
| Quote: | | It was not an axiom of the master–slave relationship that the former automatically had sexual access to the latter. That was indeed the case in most societies, ranging from the ancient Middle East, Athens, and Rome to Africa, all Islamic countries, and the American South. Places such as Muscovy, however, forbade owners to rape their female slaves, while the Chinese and the Lombards forbade the raping of married slave women. More problematic were sexual relations between mistresses and male slaves. Athens and Rome both put the slave to death, and Byzantine law prescribed that the mistress was to be executed and the slave to be burned alive |
Seems somewhat unfair since I assume the slave was in no position to say "no".
On killing your unwanted slave:
| Quote: | A major touchstone of the nature of a slave society was whether or not the owner had the right to kill his slave. In most Neolithic and Bronze Age societies slaves had no such right, for slaves from ancient Egypt and the Eurasian steppes were buried alive or killed to accompany their deceased owners into the next world. Among the Northwest Coast Tlingit, slave owners killed their slaves in potlatches to demonstrate their contempt for property and wealth; they also killed old or unwanted slaves and threw their bodies into the Pacific Ocean. An owner could kill his slave with impunity in Homeric Greece, ancient India, the Roman Republic, Han China, Islamic countries, Anglo-Saxon England, medieval Russia, and many parts of the American South before 1830.
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On the good Christian's Christian response to the evil of slavery:
| Quote: | Remarkably few people found the institution of slavery to be unnatural or immoral until the second half of the 18th century. Until that time Christians commonly thought of sin as a kind of slavery rather than slavery itself as a sin. When concern was expressed for slaves, it was for their good care, not for their unfree status.
Both slave-owning and slave societies that were part of the major cultural traditions borrowed some of their laws about slavery from the religious texts of their respective civilizations. Principles regarding slavery that proved to be either unprofitable or unworkable were among the first to be discarded. An obvious example is provided by the Old Testament law that Hebrew slaves were to be manumitted after six years (Exodus 21:2; Deuteronomy 15:12). A similar general recommendation that slaves be freed after six years in bondage was adhered to by many Islamic slave-owning societies; it helps to account for the ferocity and frequency of their slave raids, for they had a need for constant replenishment of their slave supplies. In Christian slave societies, on the other hand, the principle that the tenure of slavery should be limited was almost completely ignored. |
On shared tribulations:
| Quote: | | Once a ship was loaded, the trip, known as “the Middle Passage,” usually to Brazil or an island in the Caribbean, was a matter of a few weeks to several months. Between 1500 and the end of the 19th century the time of the voyage diminished considerably. That change was important, because death rates, which ranged from around 10 to more than 20 percent on the Middle Passage, were directly proportional to the length of the voyage. The ship captains had every interest in the health of their cargo, for they were paid only for slaves delivered alive. The death rates among the European captains and crew engaged in the slave trade were at least as high as those among their cargo on the Middle Passage. Of the slave-ship crews that embarked from Liverpool in 1787, less than half returned alive. |
Maybe that's enough in this forum. The material on the Britannica site is fascinating. I strongly recommend you read it.
Thanks for the pointers.
Bob51 |
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I B Squidly
Vice Admiral
Joined: 26 Aug 2004
Posts: 879
Location: Cactus Patch
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| Posted: Sat May 07, 2005 9:34 pm Post subject: |
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They may have died on the Middle Passage but the principal cause of death for crew members in the slave ships was their brief encounter with the west African coast. "El Vomito', Yellow Fever (and malaria) were inescapable and fatal. Ship captains limited contact with the coast as much as possible. They waited off shore till black war lords collected cargos ready to load and ship.
Forgotten in the history of the American colonies are the near million of indentured servants brought from England. If they didn't run off to the frontier their patrons had only seven years to work them to death in tobacco fields. Dutch farms on the Hudson were operated like feudal estates.
Australia's Botany Bay colony is an interesting study in sexual abuse where neither race nor slavery applied.
The first Africans in the colonies came by accident with an off course Dutch slave ship that put in at Virginia to provision. Sympathy for the blacks got them their freedom. Interbreeding was common splitting old Virginia families (including Washington's) into 'respectable' and 'poor' family branches. It would take another fifty to seventy years for 'racism' to take hold, a psychic bandaid for the abuses as slavery became entrenched.
There's an interesting contrast to be made between traditional slavery and European serfdom. Where a slave had intrinsic value a serf was merely an worthless adjunct to real estate.
Oh, 731, that's where we started. The US was complicit in covering up the Unit's activities to keep the research from the Commies. Its senior officers escaped war crime trials to become eminence gris in biology and die wealthy and unrepentant in their beds.
What a fascinating world we live in!
_________________
"KILL ALL THE LAWYERS!"
-Wlm Shakespeare |
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GenrXr
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 05 Aug 2004
Posts: 1720
Location: Houston
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| Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 6:01 am Post subject: |
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I would like to see an apology from the Vietnamese who skinned American POW's alive who were captured early in the war, before the evil sons of b*****s realized an alive American soldier was worth a lot more then a skinned dead one.
Fact is I could care less about an apology, rather just want to make sure we kill every evil person we ever encounter in the world.
Abu Guhrab was wrong. I agree they shouldn't of been putting underwear on the heads of our enemy, but to even begin to think of it as torture is beyond pale.
If we ever start skinning people and filleting them like fish then we have a problem.
_________________
"An activist is the person who cleans up the water, not the one claiming its dirty."
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Founder of Conservative Philosophy |
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Bob51
Seaman
Joined: 13 Jan 2005
Posts: 156
Location: Belfast
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| Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 10:01 am Post subject: |
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| I B Squidly wrote: |
Forgotten in the history of the American colonies are the near million of indentured servants |
IB
Talking of indentured servants and the world we live in, here is one of today's stories. Unfortunately, these stories are common in Malaysia and Hong Kong. About a year ago, a lady in Hong Kong was fined for ironing the hands of her domestic helper after a blouse was not ironed to her satisfaction.
| Quote: | Sri Lankan Maids Pay Dearly for Perilous Jobs Overseas
By AMY WALDMAN
Published: May 8, 2005
KEGALLA, Sri Lanka - The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class of wide-eyed women before her to clean it properly. If it smells, "Mama," as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their female employers, "will be angry and she will hammer and beat you."
Some maids being trained in Kegalla, Sri Lanka, will find brutal work conditions in the Middle East.
More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids.
"This is where you go wrong," the teacher continued. "That is how Mama beats you and burns you - when you do anything wrong."
Eighteen female hands took down every word, as if inscription could ward off ill fortune. Among the women, Rangalle Lalitha Irangame was struggling to keep up, haggard after a sleepless night in the hospital. Her 4-year-old daughter was sick with fever, a worrisome turn for any mother, but a cause for panic for one about to leave for years abroad.
After a year of thinking, 35-year-old Lalitha - who prefers that name - decided to trade her life as a Sri Lankan housewife for one as a Middle Eastern housemaid. After completing their 12-day training, she and her classmates would join a mass migration of women to the Persian Gulf's petro-lubricated economies, trading the fecundity and community of Sri Lankan villages for the aridity and high-walled homes of the Arab world.
Behind those walls the women risk exploitation so extreme that it sometimes approaches "slaverylike" conditions, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report on foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. But while attention has focused on the failure of countries like Saudi Arabia to prevent or prosecute abuses, the de facto complicity of the countries that send their women abroad has largely escaped scrutiny.
For developing countries, migration has become a safety valve, easing the pressure to employ the poor and generating more than $100 billion in remittances in 2003, according to a study by Devesh Kapur, an associate professor of government at Harvard.
More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids, according to government estimates. Migrant workers have become Sri Lanka's largest and most consistent earner of foreign exchange, out-doing all major agricultural crops.
In Saudi Arabia, the most common destination, they call Sri Lanka "the country of housemaids." In Sri Lanka they call the maids heroines.
Sri Lanka's government has become an assiduous marketer of its own people. With training programs like Lalitha's, it is helping to prepare what is by now a second generation of housemaids. It even provides a safe haven to shelter, hide and rehabilitate those women who return with broken bodies, lost minds or incipient children.
But it does little to publicize those abuses, protest against them or protect the women for fear of jeopardizing the hundreds of millions of dollars they send home each year.
The women's remittances have built homes, provided capital for businesses, and given the women themselves an enduring confidence. But those gains have come with incalculable hardships.
The women often leave indebted, work virtually indentured and have almost no legal redress against the sexual harassment, confinement or physical abuse they often suffer in the countries they adopt. With no absentee voting rights, they also have no political voice back home.
By one estimate, 15 to 20 percent of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit people trafficking schemes or prostitution.
Many housemaids who run away from their employers are kept in limbo at Sri Lanka's embassies because no one wants to pay their way home. Last year, after their plight was publicized, the government airlifted home 529 maids who had been living for months, packed as tightly as in a slavehold, in the basement of the embassy in Kuwait.
Hundreds of housemaids have become pregnant, often after rapes, producing children who, until Sri Lanka's Constitution was recently amended, were stateless because their fathers were foreigners. More than 100 women come home dead each year, with most deaths labeled "natural" by the host governments, although Sri Lankan officials concede they are powerless to investigate.
Back home, the exodus has reconfigured family life. Women dispense maternal love through letters, cash and cassettes sent home. Divorce, children leaving school, husbands turning to alcohol, and child sexual abuse have become routine byproducts of the women's absence.
Thangarasa Jeyanthi, 20, said she was beaten daily while working as a housemaid in Lebanon. She returned with burn marks, cuts and bruises and was put in a government shelter.
In Lalitha's class, nine of the women were mothers, all 40 and under, all prepared to give up everything for their children's future, including, for 2, 4 or 10 years, the company of the children themselves.
By the end of their 12-day course, they would learn how to dismantle a vacuum cleaner and say "toilet cleaner" in Arabic. They would learn, too, not to take the gold chain their employers would leave out as temptation. They would even be taught that in the Muslim countries they were destined for, they should conceal that they were Buddhist or Hindu.
Technically, they were women, all above 18. But in their shy smiles and the innocence of having come of age in a conservative culture, they were girls. Almost all of them, like Lalitha, had at least a 10th grade education, reflective of Sri Lanka's high literacy rates, but that had done nothing to improve their employment prospects.
Two of the girls had failed marriages, and saw going abroad as their only hope for supporting themselves and their children on their own. Three were hoping to secure a better marital match by earning a dowry larger than destitute parents could provide.
Four were newly married, hoping to escape from relatives' homes into their own. Three were the second generation of housemaids in their families - one even planned to take over her aging mother's job.
All were poor. In this hill country district, the poverty rate is 32 percent. Most men find only irregular work tapping rubber, earning at best $50 a month. Their only hope for climbing up, or avoiding slipping further down, is their wives.
The husband of one of Lalitha's classmates drove a rented motorized rickshaw, earning just enough to feed the family. Their house was literally sliding away, with no money to build a retaining wall or repay a bank loan that was well overdue.
His wife, S. M. R. Deepa Ranjanie, a bright-eyed 25-year-old poet, was determined to solve the family's financial crisis, but in leaving she also saw an escape. She had married at 16, had two sons, 9 and 4, then had seen the marriage sour. She was desperate to flee an abusive home.
Lalitha's husband, K. Weeratunghe, 41, worked when he could tapping rubber or felling trees. On some days the family had no money for milk. Their house was so meager that, to improve it, Lalitha decided to leave him behind - along with her daughter, Hiroshika Mihirani, 4, and son, Manoj Sandervan, 8.
With no electricity, the home had a perpetual gloom. The walls were cracking, the windows glassless. In class, the women pored over pictures of the gulf's glossy kitchens, but at home Lalitha cooked on a wood stove in a room made of palm fronds.
The training she and the others attended had in fact been started in part because rustic village women's unfamiliarity with electric appliances and Arabic was exposing them to the wrath of frustrated employers.
The course was conducted by the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, a public corporation established by an act of Parliament in 1985 to both promote migration and protect migrants, two sometimes contradictory missions. It runs 22 training centers, including the one in Kegalla.
The traffic at the center was incessant. Mothers brought their daughters. Husbands brought their wives. Brothers brought sisters who had been left by their husbands. One woman came in to register with an 18-month-old baby still sucking at her breast, although she was too thin to give milk.
Many women had been recruited by a network of private agents, not always reputable, who trolled rural villages and town bus stands looking for new prospects. The agents earned commissions for each woman from both the foreign employment bureau and partner agents in the Middle East.
Lalitha's course Lalitha aimed to create competent maids, but also docile ones, who would serve out two-year contracts promising about $120 a month even if the pay
The reason for that message, analysts and officials say, is the competition from other poor nations, notably the Philippines, which together send hundreds of thousands of women abroad each year. Too many demands for housemaids' rights, the government fears, will simply prompt the gulf countries to seek housemaids elsewhere.
When it came to the prospect of abuse or sexual harassment, the teacher gave almost no allowance for the possibility that even good housemaids might be victimized, no acknowledgment that even a smelly cake mixer did not justify a beating.
The teacher, Kaluarachchi Chandra Malini, a 38-year-old former housemaid with erect posture and a brisk manner, taught the women how to turn on hot and cold water taps, how to run electrical appliances, how to navigate household hazards - the cleanser that could poison a child or the Clorox that could blind a maid.
More than that, she tried to prepare the women for the risks leaving their families entailed. Given the high incidence of fathers raping daughters with wives away, the housemaids were told not to entrust older girls to their fathers. An older lady was better, or even a home for girls.
Because Sri Lanka's divorce rate has climbed with the migration, the women should take the addresses of trustworthy neighbors to whom they could write asking whether husbands had fallen into drugs, drink or other women's arms. The trainees were warned not to send money to their husbands, lest they drink it away.
These pitfalls were already known to some of the women. One student, Disna, had as a girl seen her father drink away the money her mother had sent from abroad.
And Deepa's neighbor had just returned from Kuwait to find that while she had faithfully been sending money to her husband, he had not been faithful to her. Deepa, however, had studiously avoided going down the hill to learn this fact at first hand.
There seemed to be a national pact under way: with rare exceptions, the returning women did not reveal the worst of their experience, and the departing women did not ask. Sexual harassment and especially abuse were considered too shameful to discuss with husbands, relatives or neighbors.
But while the class steered from the worst, it was often literally in the room next door. One day a girl of delicate beauty, 21-year-old Niroshamie, came into the office, black tendrils curling around her face, X-rays in her hand.
The young scion of the Kuwait house where she worked had repeatedly tried to molest her, finally pushing her to the ground and breaking her wrist. She had to pay for the cast, work with it on for two months, then finance her own way home. She had returned to Sri Lanka with a wrist needing surgery and not a cent more than when she had left.
But the most gruesome cases were kept out of sight, quickly ushered from the airport upon arrival to the Sahana Piyasa, literally the Place of Relief, a shelter run by the foreign employment bureau.
The shelter gets two to three severe abuse cases a week, according to the officials who run it, and often many more. Some women are so badly injured they are carried off the plane on stretchers, or swathed entirely in bandages. Most cases never make the news, and they stay at the shelter until they heal enough not to shock waiting families.
Karunasena Hettiarachchi, who until recently was the chairman of the foreign employment bureau, said the government did what it could to protect women, but the very nature of the job made it difficult. In a house, as opposed to a factory, "there are no rules," he said. Sri Lanka's embassies had no power to investigate what went on behind private walls.
Agents, too, looked the other way, in part because no one wanted to cover the costs of a maid who did not serve out her contract.
Thangarasa Jeyanthi, 20 and emaciated, had arrived at the shelter from Lebanon one morning. She had a face as purple and puffy as a plum, eyes swollen shut, burn marks
The husband and wife she worked for had assaulted her daily, she said, speaking in the high, anguished voice of a little girl who cannot understand what she has done wrong. They had cut her with a knife, kicked and stomped on her, tied her hands with rope and denied her food. Her employer's mother had rescued her, taking her to the police. They secured five months back salary for her, and took her to the airport, where strangers moved by her appearance collected $232 for her.
"I never expected to be returned to Sri Lanka," she said. "I always thought only my dead body would come back."
The abused women struggled to reconcile the message of their training - that good behavior would make for a good experience - with the reality of their employment.
"I did all of my housework properly," said Sudarma Manilariatne, 27, who arrived at Sahana Piyasa in January with swollen, bandaged legs, a gash on her forehead and a fractured hand. "I do not understand why they did this." She had been beaten by her female employer, and was helped to escape the house by the employer's 16-year-old son, after receiving not a cent of salary. She wore a head scarf, which the shelter staff urged her to remove. The young woman refused and began to cry. For Sri Lankan women, long hair is a source of pride, its absence, a source of shame. Ms. Manilariatne's employer - her "mama" - had cut boy-short the hair that the maid's own mother had helped her take care of as a girl.
Fearful and Already in Debt
The training course was coming to an end. Ms. Malini, the teacher, was worried about Lalitha. She struggled with leaving her children for 12 days, Ms. Malini said. How could she go abroad? Lalitha, visibly upset over her sick child, physically ill herself on some days, insisted that little by little she was mentally preparing.
In class, the girls stared intently at photographs of airplane interiors while Ms. Malini provided last-minute tips. Do not wear black when you meet your employer lest you look too dark. Do not be frightened when you see only the eyes of the Saudi Arabian woman who meets you at the airport. Wear long sleeves and a wedding ring, even if unmarried.
Deepa's 9-year-old was crying in the mornings, knowing she was leaving. "We have to build a beautiful house," she told him, although the family's debts meant a new house was years away.
With the foreign employment bureau's registration fees to pay and new clothes to buy, she and the other women were borrowing money from anyone they could. Deepa had given the family's only valuable possessions as collateral. Her children would be without both their mother and the television they so loved, she said ruefully.
Deepa had failed the strict medical exam Saudi Arabia required of housemaids, and would go to the United Arab Emirates. Her fallibility was a leaky heart valve. She had had surgery once, and needed it again, but she was afraid even to take her medicine with her, lest her employers discover she was unwell.
To both save and escape her home, she would gamble with her life. "I was happier in the class," she said.
Dukkha, or suffering, is a word that colors the women's conversations and shadows their lives. When Lalitha went for the medical test every housemaid must pass before departing, her illness during class was explained: she was pregnant.
She faced a choice between a child she wanted and debts she could not pay. She did not believe in abortion, she said, but hers was a life with no room for error. She paid $27 to terminate the pregnancy, adding to the family debt and her own sadness.
Now Lalitha's agent seemed to be swindling her. He had promised a ticket, then not delivered it, then brought a visa that turned out to be fake.
As wrenching as it was to leave her children, shame was prodding her toward Saudi Arabia. She and her husband borrowed $398 from fellow villagers. The first repayment date had come and gone, and the lenders wanted her gone, too, and earning money.
She wanted to earn money, too, not least to keep paying for private classes for her 8-year-old son. "He is clever," she said of the boy. "I want him to climb up."
Lalitha had already taught her 4-year-old the alphabet, she said proudly. Her husband, who had finished only the eighth grade, noted that his wife was more educated than he.
Only her 8-year-old seemed to recognize the implications of his mother's departure. "Who will teach me when you go?" he asked. |
Saudi Arabia seems to produce this kind of behaviour. Is this Islamic in nature or just bestial?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/international/asia/08maids.html?[url]pagewanted=1[/url]
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Bob51
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Posts: 156
Location: Belfast
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| Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 10:03 am Post subject: |
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| I B Squidly wrote: |
Forgotten in the history of the American colonies are the near million of indentured servants |
IB
Talking of indentured servants and the world we live in, here is one of today's stories. Unfortunately, these stories are common in Malaysia and Hong Kong. About a year ago, a lady in Hong Kong was fined for ironing the hands of her domestic helper after a blouse was not ironed to her satisfaction.
| Quote: | Sri Lankan Maids Pay Dearly for Perilous Jobs Overseas
By AMY WALDMAN
Published: May 8, 2005
KEGALLA, Sri Lanka - The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class of wide-eyed women before her to clean it properly. If it smells, "Mama," as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their female employers, "will be angry and she will hammer and beat you."
Some maids being trained in Kegalla, Sri Lanka, will find brutal work conditions in the Middle East.
More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids.
"This is where you go wrong," the teacher continued. "That is how Mama beats you and burns you - when you do anything wrong."
Eighteen female hands took down every word, as if inscription could ward off ill fortune. Among the women, Rangalle Lalitha Irangame was struggling to keep up, haggard after a sleepless night in the hospital. Her 4-year-old daughter was sick with fever, a worrisome turn for any mother, but a cause for panic for one about to leave for years abroad.
After a year of thinking, 35-year-old Lalitha - who prefers that name - decided to trade her life as a Sri Lankan housewife for one as a Middle Eastern housemaid. After completing their 12-day training, she and her classmates would join a mass migration of women to the Persian Gulf's petro-lubricated economies, trading the fecundity and community of Sri Lankan villages for the aridity and high-walled homes of the Arab world.
Behind those walls the women risk exploitation so extreme that it sometimes approaches "slaverylike" conditions, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report on foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. But while attention has focused on the failure of countries like Saudi Arabia to prevent or prosecute abuses, the de facto complicity of the countries that send their women abroad has largely escaped scrutiny.
For developing countries, migration has become a safety valve, easing the pressure to employ the poor and generating more than $100 billion in remittances in 2003, according to a study by Devesh Kapur, an associate professor of government at Harvard.
More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids, according to government estimates. Migrant workers have become Sri Lanka's largest and most consistent earner of foreign exchange, out-doing all major agricultural crops.
In Saudi Arabia, the most common destination, they call Sri Lanka "the country of housemaids." In Sri Lanka they call the maids heroines.
Sri Lanka's government has become an assiduous marketer of its own people. With training programs like Lalitha's, it is helping to prepare what is by now a second generation of housemaids. It even provides a safe haven to shelter, hide and rehabilitate those women who return with broken bodies, lost minds or incipient children.
But it does little to publicize those abuses, protest against them or protect the women for fear of jeopardizing the hundreds of millions of dollars they send home each year.
The women's remittances have built homes, provided capital for businesses, and given the women themselves an enduring confidence. But those gains have come with incalculable hardships.
The women often leave indebted, work virtually indentured and have almost no legal redress against the sexual harassment, confinement or physical abuse they often suffer in the countries they adopt. With no absentee voting rights, they also have no political voice back home.
By one estimate, 15 to 20 percent of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit people trafficking schemes or prostitution.
Many housemaids who run away from their employers are kept in limbo at Sri Lanka's embassies because no one wants to pay their way home. Last year, after their plight was publicized, the government airlifted home 529 maids who had been living for months, packed as tightly as in a slavehold, in the basement of the embassy in Kuwait.
Hundreds of housemaids have become pregnant, often after rapes, producing children who, until Sri Lanka's Constitution was recently amended, were stateless because their fathers were foreigners. More than 100 women come home dead each year, with most deaths labeled "natural" by the host governments, although Sri Lankan officials concede they are powerless to investigate.
Back home, the exodus has reconfigured family life. Women dispense maternal love through letters, cash and cassettes sent home. Divorce, children leaving school, husbands turning to alcohol, and child sexual abuse have become routine byproducts of the women's absence.
Thangarasa Jeyanthi, 20, said she was beaten daily while working as a housemaid in Lebanon. She returned with burn marks, cuts and bruises and was put in a government shelter.
In Lalitha's class, nine of the women were mothers, all 40 and under, all prepared to give up everything for their children's future, including, for 2, 4 or 10 years, the company of the children themselves.
By the end of their 12-day course, they would learn how to dismantle a vacuum cleaner and say "toilet cleaner" in Arabic. They would learn, too, not to take the gold chain their employers would leave out as temptation. They would even be taught that in the Muslim countries they were destined for, they should conceal that they were Buddhist or Hindu.
Technically, they were women, all above 18. But in their shy smiles and the innocence of having come of age in a conservative culture, they were girls. Almost all of them, like Lalitha, had at least a 10th grade education, reflective of Sri Lanka's high literacy rates, but that had done nothing to improve their employment prospects.
Two of the girls had failed marriages, and saw going abroad as their only hope for supporting themselves and their children on their own. Three were hoping to secure a better marital match by earning a dowry larger than destitute parents could provide.
Four were newly married, hoping to escape from relatives' homes into their own. Three were the second generation of housemaids in their families - one even planned to take over her aging mother's job.
All were poor. In this hill country district, the poverty rate is 32 percent. Most men find only irregular work tapping rubber, earning at best $50 a month. Their only hope for climbing up, or avoiding slipping further down, is their wives.
The husband of one of Lalitha's classmates drove a rented motorized rickshaw, earning just enough to feed the family. Their house was literally sliding away, with no money to build a retaining wall or repay a bank loan that was well overdue.
His wife, S. M. R. Deepa Ranjanie, a bright-eyed 25-year-old poet, was determined to solve the family's financial crisis, but in leaving she also saw an escape. She had married at 16, had two sons, 9 and 4, then had seen the marriage sour. She was desperate to flee an abusive home.
Lalitha's husband, K. Weeratunghe, 41, worked when he could tapping rubber or felling trees. On some days the family had no money for milk. Their house was so meager that, to improve it, Lalitha decided to leave him behind - along with her daughter, Hiroshika Mihirani, 4, and son, Manoj Sandervan, 8.
With no electricity, the home had a perpetual gloom. The walls were cracking, the windows glassless. In class, the women pored over pictures of the gulf's glossy kitchens, but at home Lalitha cooked on a wood stove in a room made of palm fronds.
The training she and the others attended had in fact been started in part because rustic village women's unfamiliarity with electric appliances and Arabic was exposing them to the wrath of frustrated employers.
The course was conducted by the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, a public corporation established by an act of Parliament in 1985 to both promote migration and protect migrants, two sometimes contradictory missions. It runs 22 training centers, including the one in Kegalla.
The traffic at the center was incessant. Mothers brought their daughters. Husbands brought their wives. Brothers brought sisters who had been left by their husbands. One woman came in to register with an 18-month-old baby still sucking at her breast, although she was too thin to give milk.
Many women had been recruited by a network of private agents, not always reputable, who trolled rural villages and town bus stands looking for new prospects. The agents earned commissions for each woman from both the foreign employment bureau and partner agents in the Middle East.
Lalitha's course Lalitha aimed to create competent maids, but also docile ones, who would serve out two-year contracts promising about $120 a month even if the pay
The reason for that message, analysts and officials say, is the competition from other poor nations, notably the Philippines, which together send hundreds of thousands of women abroad each year. Too many demands for housemaids' rights, the government fears, will simply prompt the gulf countries to seek housemaids elsewhere.
When it came to the prospect of abuse or sexual harassment, the teacher gave almost no allowance for the possibility that even good housemaids might be victimized, no acknowledgment that even a smelly cake mixer did not justify a beating.
The teacher, Kaluarachchi Chandra Malini, a 38-year-old former housemaid with erect posture and a brisk manner, taught the women how to turn on hot and cold water taps, how to run electrical appliances, how to navigate household hazards - the cleanser that could poison a child or the Clorox that could blind a maid.
More than that, she tried to prepare the women for the risks leaving their families entailed. Given the high incidence of fathers raping daughters with wives away, the housemaids were told not to entrust older girls to their fathers. An older lady was better, or even a home for girls.
Because Sri Lanka's divorce rate has climbed with the migration, the women should take the addresses of trustworthy neighbors to whom they could write asking whether husbands had fallen into drugs, drink or other women's arms. The trainees were warned not to send money to their husbands, lest they drink it away.
These pitfalls were already known to some of the women. One student, Disna, had as a girl seen her father drink away the money her mother had sent from abroad.
And Deepa's neighbor had just returned from Kuwait to find that while she had faithfully been sending money to her husband, he had not been faithful to her. Deepa, however, had studiously avoided going down the hill to learn this fact at first hand.
There seemed to be a national pact under way: with rare exceptions, the returning women did not reveal the worst of their experience, and the departing women did not ask. Sexual harassment and especially abuse were considered too shameful to discuss with husbands, relatives or neighbors.
But while the class steered from the worst, it was often literally in the room next door. One day a girl of delicate beauty, 21-year-old Niroshamie, came into the office, black tendrils curling around her face, X-rays in her hand.
The young scion of the Kuwait house where she worked had repeatedly tried to molest her, finally pushing her to the ground and breaking her wrist. She had to pay for the cast, work with it on for two months, then finance her own way home. She had returned to Sri Lanka with a wrist needing surgery and not a cent more than when she had left.
But the most gruesome cases were kept out of sight, quickly ushered from the airport upon arrival to the Sahana Piyasa, literally the Place of Relief, a shelter run by the foreign employment bureau.
The shelter gets two to three severe abuse cases a week, according to the officials who run it, and often many more. Some women are so badly injured they are carried off the plane on stretchers, or swathed entirely in bandages. Most cases never make the news, and they stay at the shelter until they heal enough not to shock waiting families.
Karunasena Hettiarachchi, who until recently was the chairman of the foreign employment bureau, said the government did what it could to protect women, but the very nature of the job made it difficult. In a house, as opposed to a factory, "there are no rules," he said. Sri Lanka's embassies had no power to investigate what went on behind private walls.
Agents, too, looked the other way, in part because no one wanted to cover the costs of a maid who did not serve out her contract.
Thangarasa Jeyanthi, 20 and emaciated, had arrived at the shelter from Lebanon one morning. She had a face as purple and puffy as a plum, eyes swollen shut, burn marks
The husband and wife she worked for had assaulted her daily, she said, speaking in the high, anguished voice of a little girl who cannot understand what she has done wrong. They had cut her with a knife, kicked and stomped on her, tied her hands with rope and denied her food. Her employer's mother had rescued her, taking her to the police. They secured five months back salary for her, and took her to the airport, where strangers moved by her appearance collected $232 for her.
"I never expected to be returned to Sri Lanka," she said. "I always thought only my dead body would come back."
The abused women struggled to reconcile the message of their training - that good behavior would make for a good experience - with the reality of their employment.
"I did all of my housework properly," said Sudarma Manilariatne, 27, who arrived at Sahana Piyasa in January with swollen, bandaged legs, a gash on her forehead and a fractured hand. "I do not understand why they did this." She had been beaten by her female employer, and was helped to escape the house by the employer's 16-year-old son, after receiving not a cent of salary. She wore a head scarf, which the shelter staff urged her to remove. The young woman refused and began to cry. For Sri Lankan women, long hair is a source of pride, its absence, a source of shame. Ms. Manilariatne's employer - her "mama" - had cut boy-short the hair that the maid's own mother had helped her take care of as a girl.
Fearful and Already in Debt
The training course was coming to an end. Ms. Malini, the teacher, was worried about Lalitha. She struggled with leaving her children for 12 days, Ms. Malini said. How could she go abroad? Lalitha, visibly upset over her sick child, physically ill herself on some days, insisted that little by little she was mentally preparing.
In class, the girls stared intently at photographs of airplane interiors while Ms. Malini provided last-minute tips. Do not wear black when you meet your employer lest you look too dark. Do not be frightened when you see only the eyes of the Saudi Arabian woman who meets you at the airport. Wear long sleeves and a wedding ring, even if unmarried.
Deepa's 9-year-old was crying in the mornings, knowing she was leaving. "We have to build a beautiful house," she told him, although the family's debts meant a new house was years away.
With the foreign employment bureau's registration fees to pay and new clothes to buy, she and the other women were borrowing money from anyone they could. Deepa had given the family's only valuable possessions as collateral. Her children would be without both their mother and the television they so loved, she said ruefully.
Deepa had failed the strict medical exam Saudi Arabia required of housemaids, and would go to the United Arab Emirates. Her fallibility was a leaky heart valve. She had had surgery once, and needed it again, but she was afraid even to take her medicine with her, lest her employers discover she was unwell.
To both save and escape her home, she would gamble with her life. "I was happier in the class," she said.
Dukkha, or suffering, is a word that colors the women's conversations and shadows their lives. When Lalitha went for the medical test every housemaid must pass before departing, her illness during class was explained: she was pregnant.
She faced a choice between a child she wanted and debts she could not pay. She did not believe in abortion, she said, but hers was a life with no room for error. She paid $27 to terminate the pregnancy, adding to the family debt and her own sadness.
Now Lalitha's agent seemed to be swindling her. He had promised a ticket, then not delivered it, then brought a visa that turned out to be fake.
As wrenching as it was to leave her children, shame was prodding her toward Saudi Arabia. She and her husband borrowed $398 from fellow villagers. The first repayment date had come and gone, and the lenders wanted her gone, too, and earning money.
She wanted to earn money, too, not least to keep paying for private classes for her 8-year-old son. "He is clever," she said of the boy. "I want him to climb up."
Lalitha had already taught her 4-year-old the alphabet, she said proudly. Her husband, who had finished only the eighth grade, noted that his wife was more educated than he.
Only her 8-year-old seemed to recognize the implications of his mother's departure. "Who will teach me when you go?" he asked. |
Saudi Arabia seems to produce this kind of behaviour. Is this Islamic in nature or just bestial?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/international/asia/08maids.html?[url]pagewanted=1[/url]
Bob51 |
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Bob51
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Joined: 13 Jan 2005
Posts: 156
Location: Belfast
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| Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 11:24 am Post subject: |
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| GenrXr wrote: | I would like to see an apology from the Vietnamese who skinned American POW's alive who were captured early in the war, before the evil sons of b*****s realized an alive American soldier was worth a lot more then a skinned dead one.
Fact is I could care less about an apology, rather just want to make sure we kill every evil person we ever encounter in the world.
Abu Guhrab was wrong. I agree they shouldn't of been putting underwear on the heads of our enemy, but to even begin to think of it as torture is beyond pale.
If we ever start skinning people and filleting them like fish then we have a problem. |
"skinned alive" is a depressing topic to research, especially if you have any empathy with animals...
The only reference I found to Americans being skinned alive claimed the flaying, crucifixion and torture was carried out by a Chinese major:
| Quote: | | My Way, who was our leader - and I've used a code-name for him - was wearing a St. Christopher cross. The Red Chinese major who was in charge of the interrogation skinned him alive and crucified him in front of us, holding bayonets and knives to our heads, to make sure that we watched the torture, telling him that he would die as his Savior died. |
| Quote: | | T: As a prisoner of war in Cambodia, some of the teams that were assigned to interrogate us included Chinese officers. I watched in horror, as a 19-year-old boy, as a Chinese major skinned our captain alive and crucified him because he found a St. Christopher's cross on his neck. And that's where knives were held to our heads requiring us to watch this. I watched our platoon-leader suffer over days and die. |
| Quote: | A: You were also tortured by Chinese officers.
T: Yes, I was.
A: And do you want to tell us about that?
T: Oh, we -- I was beaten. When the captain was killed and skinned alive, I had - in one of our escape-attempts, I had hurt the Chinese officer - so, in my escape-attempt, when we were recaptured, my nose was broken during one of the beatings, and the medical officer took the skin of our dead captain and stuffed it up my nose, and he told me that, as I breathed, I would taste the smell of death.
A: You know, skinning alive as a practice is also used by the satanists, the satanic movement in this country and around the world, I guess. I don't want to go into details.
But do they - in the ones I've heard about, they start at the toe and the foot. Is that right?
T: That's right, yes, and any of the appendages.
A: Yes. And then they move on up.
T: Yes.
A: A tragic, horrible death, terrible things.
T: Suffered by one of America's heroes.
A: Beg your pardon?
T: Suffered by one of America's true heroes, that captain, special forces officer.
A: Yes. |
However, there may be a problem with verifying some of Mr Tatum's testimony. Help welcomed.
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