Glenn Greenwald writes:
Ten American Baptists were arrested two weeks ago in Haiti on charges that they exploited the chaos in that country by attempting to smuggle 33 young Haitian children across the border without permission — either to bring them to a life of Christianity or (as some evidence suggests) to filter them into a child trafficking ring. National Review‘s Kathryn Jean Lopez is deeply upset by the plight of at least one of the detained Americans, Jim Allen, whom she contends (based exclusively on his family’s claims) is innocent. Lopez demands that the State Department do more to “insist” upon Allen’s release, and — most amazingly of all — complains about the conditions of his detention. She has the audacity to cite a Human Rights Watch description of prison conditions in Haiti as “inhumane.” Lopez complains that Allen
was waterboarded, stripped, frozen and beatenhas “hypertension,” wasshipped thousands of miles away to a secret black site beyond the reach of the ICRC and then rendered to Jordanallowed to speak to his wife only once in the first ten days of his confinement, and wasconsigned to years in an island-prison cage with no chargesdenied his choice of counsel for a few days (though he is now duly represented in Haitian courts by a large team of American lawyers).