Amazon Co-Owns Deportation Airline Implicated in Alleged Torture of Immigrants
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
I would prefer that we do these flights under direct federal control (operationally and security-wise), but that’s mostly because I want the government to be directly responsible (for good and bad) for the outcomes rather than introducing layers of indirection that make unraveling problems more difficult.
I don't want to rehash all the arguments from the previous thread, but it's clickbait, none of the migrants were tortured. The author is referring to another even where they chartered a flight for CIA captives.
> A complaint filed last year to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties by a coalition of immigrant advocacy groups and the Texas A&M University School of Law details the harrowing experience of three migrants deported via Omni Air, alleging that ICE “is using The WRAP in a manner that constitutes torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment in violation of the Convention Against Torture.” The complaint is based largely on interviews with the deportees conducted by Towle. One man recounted that after being thrown to the ground and shot with rubber bullets, he was placed in a WRAP and loaded onto an Omni flight, where his body remained locked at a 40-degree angle for about nine hours. “It was so painful,” he said. “The position was very stressful on my body, my muscles were shot with pain the entire bus ride and flight back to Cameroon.”
> Two other men deported to Cameroon and interviewed by Towle recalled a similar experience on an Omni flight: “My lungs were compressed, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t sit up. I was immobilized,” said one. “My body was in so much stress. I shouted, ‘You’re killing me!’ I truly felt I was meeting my death in that moment. Six officers, three on each side, picked me up and carried me onto the plane. They plopped me down, like a load of wood, across a center row of seats.” A third man included in the complaint told Towle that he was placed in a WRAP and left on the tarmac as other prisoners were loaded onto a flight transferring them to their Omni-run deportation. “They attached a cord from a buckle at my chest to a buckle at my feet and they pulled my upper body down so my face was in my knees. I could not breathe well. I was completely immobilized.” He added, “The day I was put in The WRAP by ICE, I wanted to die. I have never felt such horrible pain. It was torture.”
That reads like Omni was indeed "implicated in alleged torture of immigrants" to me. How do you read it differently?
From "Definition of Torture Under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340–2340A"
The last sentence is the most important part, but the whole thing is relevant. Torture implies:
- That a public official is consenting to the infliction of pain and suffering
- The act is done to obtain information or a confession
- The act is done outside of lawful sanction
By this definition sterilizing people against their will isn't torture if you didn't do it to get info or at the behest of a politician. Maybe that's workable for our court system in the US that is responsible for the highest incarceration per capita in the world (more than the USSR at the height of gulag), but it's not workable for me.
The cruelty is absolutely the point. We think torturing migrants will deter them the same way we assume harsh prison sentences deter crime. It doesn't. We are inflicting suffering on sentient beings for no good reason. Conventionally known as torture.
Sorry, that was a long way of saying that legal != moral.
The immigrants being deported were allegedly mistreated during transport, that's true. That mistreatment can we likened to torture (I disagree with that part but for the sake of the argument) but the author bundles actual "legally defined" torture with what you call "moral" torture and that's were it becomes clickbait.
In a formal fashion:
- Group A was transported by C to be D
- Group B was transported by C to be E
- The headline claims A was E which is wrong unless D = E