Earl Blumenauer: “Like you, I was horrified when the pictures at the Abu Ghraib prison first came forward, and then the additional…”

“Like you, I was horrified when the pictures at the Abu Ghraib prison first came forward, and then the additional admission of abuse, mistreatment, indeed, torture at the hands of people that we were responsible for. And it seems, Mr. Speaker, that this is not an isolated set of circumstances. Indeed, there are more stories coming out of torture and death of detainees, and of extraordinary rendition, where people the United States is concerned with, we allow them to be transported to other dictatorships where we know that they will be abused. I have been horrified as the stories start to come out, broadly reported in the press; and from Amnesty International, and the Red Cross. I, like you, my fellow Members of Congress, am horrified that the United States would be lumped into the same categories as countries that we are trying to encourage to honor human rights. Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia look to be countries where we have allowed people or sent them to be tortured. This took on a decidedly local flavor for me as press accounts came out that a shadow, perhaps illegal dummy, front company, Bayard Foreign Marketing, LLC, in my home town of Portland, Oregon, was used to transport these people.”