Polygamists' Kids in Their Own Private Gitmo (THE NATION)

[JackRiddler]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080609/wexler

THE NATION
Law & Justice

Polygamists' Kids in Their Own Private Gitmo

A mass detention. Vague legal charges. Emotional abuse. Hostile overseers. This isn't Guantánamo--it's Texas. And the victims are children the state wants to protect.

By Richard Wexler

May 28, 2008

A little boy, maybe 3 years old, walks past row after row of cots arrayed in a sports coliseum in Texas, carrying a little pillow. "I need someone to rock me," he says. "I just want to be rocked, I want to find a rocking chair." Two adults, whose job is child protection, are following him. But they make no move to comfort him. They just follow him and write in their notebooks.

Other children, with their mothers, are jammed into a building dating to the 1800s, with no air conditioning and no indoor plumbing. Chicken pox quickly spreads; many children come down with diarrhea, some are hospitalized. At night, hostile overseers keep the women awake with their loud conversations and sometimes shine lights in their eyes.

(snip)

The physical conditions under which the women and children were held ultimately improved, but the emotional conditions deteriorated, as the children, even toddlers, were separated from their mothers.

Indefinite detention without meaningful hearings, inadequate defense counsel, standards of proof that range from low to nonexistent and, in most states, secret tribunals, may sound like the Bush Administration's war on terror. In fact, it's all standard operating procedure as part of America's war on child abuse. But mass detention is new. And now, with its raid on the compound of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Eldorado, the State of Texas has filled that last gap--complete with their own private Guantánamo.

A Texas appeals court ruled May 22 that the state had no right to take many of the children. But the children remain scattered throughout Texas, as CPS appeals the decision.

On one point, defenders of this indefinite detention are right. The issue on which this massive detention turns is not religion--the issue is alleged rape. But the allegations against the detainees at Guantánamo also are serious and real. There, the issue also is not religion but terrorism. What's happening in Texas may be worse than Guantánamo. For starters, the victims are children.

MORE AT LINK
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080609/wexler

[pop goes the weasel]

1. unfair to Texas

The living situation that the article describes was temporary. The children were put into regular foster situations as soon as possible. I know of one of the homes that about 100 ended up in. It is Baptist-run, and the directors have been going out of their way in the rural area they are in to find enough organic produce and goats milk to provide a diet similar to that which the kids have been raised on. So, really, the State did its best, and that best was a far cry from Gitmo.

[JackRiddler]

3. The article makes this point...

I snipped it due to the limited paragraphs rule. Read the article please.

The conditions are better than Gitmo - but the legal understanding under which mass and effectively detentions are conducted because of the suspicion of a few individual crimes is not. And these hundreds of children are all being traumatized for life, supposedly to determine whether a few of them were traumatized by their families.

The issue here is of rights, due process and when it is legitimate to use state force. Not whether Texas found enough Baptists and goat-milk providers to handle the imprisoned children. Gitmo also makes a big deal about how they provide Korans.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

4. and this doesn't traumatize children?

This cult exists for only one reason, to rape children and spawn more children to be raped in future.

Hell Joseph Smith invented this "religion" to convince his wife to let him fuck their teenaged maid.

[JackRiddler]

(dupe)

[JackRiddler]

6. If you're going to argue in this way...

No religion is immune. They were almost all scams from the word go. Are you seriously going to claim Scientology is less of a scam? And what's the difference between L.Ron and Paul? 1500 years? Do you think God spoke to guys in the desert and gave them orders to conquer this or that?

No religion should be immune, from logic. And from scrutiny and investigation for crimes by individuals. And from giving the rest of us due protection from religions and clerics.

But we have no established church and protection of rights and due process for a reason. Your emotional propaganda through the picture does not post-facto justify the government raiding and rounding up hundreds of people on the basis of - never forget - a faked phone call.

A faked phone call can get thousands arrested, if the caller knows the right hot-buttons to push. Think about it.

[pop goes the weasel]

7. the title is still unfair

The kids weren't being held in solitary. Their locations were and are known. The foster parents caring for them are not interrogators or wardens. The comparison to Gitmo is unhelpful. And it puts Gitmo in a much better light than it should be held in. Gitmo is not a foster home. It's a torture facility. Are we clear on that?

Texas did make huge mistakes in its intervention, and rushed in without a well thought out plan of investigation. But there are things, other than the allegations of sexual abuse, which likely spurred officials to act. There have been accusations by former cult members of psychological and physical abuse of infants, and there is a very strange discrepancy in the number of adolescent boys versus girls. I think it's that last one, the missing boys, that was really at the heart of the state action, and why Texas has been mostly intent with counting and identifying children.

[JackRiddler]

8. The main point of the headline - which I didn't choose -

is not about the conditions of imprisonment, but the fact that Texas like the Guantanomo system disregarded the rule of law, due process, the concept of individual rather than collective guilt, habeas corpus (proceeding on the basis of a fake phone call from someone out of state), protection against search and seizure except with probable cause and specific grounds, limits on detention before charges are brought... all the things that make up a constitutional republic with individual rights.

You think this is justifiable because this is a Mormon sect that does indeed condone and practice underage marriage and thus sex. Well, guess what, once rule of law and rights and basic limits on state power are overturned, next year it will be justifiable because the targets are ____________ (fill it in: eco terrorists, black radicals, immigrants, whatever the enemy du jour will be called).

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

2. and the mormon rape ranch is better?

That places sounds like Foca in Texas.

[JackRiddler]

5. Show evidence, please.

This is a country of individual rights. Individuals are indicted for crimes. There are no collective punishments.

This isn't about defending the Ranch, which I find ridiculous. It's about due process and constitutional limits on the state. Without which, you can be certain: they would not stop with the Mormon sect. The same treatment will sooner or later be accorded, with the same moral panic among large segments of the population, on black radicals (as it was with the MOVE bombing), communists, Muslims, eco-radicals and anarchists, immigrant communities...

[JackRiddler]

9. hmmm.... "rape ranch," sounds familiar. When did I hear a similar buzzword...

used to justify total state power without limits, in an international context I believe... ?

[Matariki]

10. "What's happening in Texas may be worse than Guantánamo"? Please.

When Texas Child Protection Service is raping boys in front of their mothers with broken phosphorescent sticks, then Richard Wexler can make assertions like this. Otherwise it's hyperbole and trivializes what's happened to people at Guantanamo.

[Wizard777]

11. Yes what's happening in Texas violates US Laws against Genocide.

This is A)6 Genocide to be exact. I disagree with the author of this piece. It has everything to do with their religion.

[Wizard777]

12. Yes what's happening in Texas violates US Laws against Genocide.

This is A)6 Genocide to be exact. I disagree with the author of this piece. It has everything to do with their religion.

[uppityperson]

13. Indeed. Hysterical hyperbole.

Trivializing what is happening at Gitmo this way is wrong.

[JackRiddler]

14. I'd point out that it's not a different society doing the one as opposed to the other...

This isn't the Andromedans running Gitmo, is it? It's the same country, can you imagine it produces comparable manifestations in different contexts? The two cases share an absolutist view of the State's mission and a disregard for due process in the face of a designated absolute evil.