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Torture, Then And Now
“Where is Richard Brown when we
really need him?”
By Rev. Fred Morris
10/26/07 "ICH"
-- -- The story of a young Foreign
Service officer who risked his budding career to defend a
principle and the honor of the United States
Intro: In the fall of 1974, I was being tortured by members of
the Brazilian army in Recife, Brazil, led by officers who
bragged about having been trained at the School of the Americas
(then in Panama). When I was kidnapped from my home in Recife,
(Time, November 18, 1974 and Harpers’s, October, 1975) on
September 30, 1974, I did not expect to survive. Since the
CIA-sponsored overthrow of the democratically elected president
of Brazil, João Goulart, in April of 1964, hundreds of
Brazilians had been “disappeared” by the military security
forces in their ongoing war against “international Communism”
and its alleged collaborators within Brazil.
I was not charged with any crimes, nor given access to an
attorney, nor any form of “due process.” I was simply kidnapped
and taken to a military installation where I was subjected to
the same torture procedures we have recently seen illustrated
from the Abu Grahib prison in Iraq, which should not surprise
us, as those torturing me were trained by the US army. The
reason for my abduction and torture was nothing more or less
than my association with the Roman Catholic Archbishop of
Recife, Dom Helder Câmara, one of the architects of the Second
Vatican Council under Pope John XXIII that led to the
people-oriented revolution within the Catholic Church. Dom
Helder, then a world-renowned figure, thrice nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize and major figure in the Third World, was
widely admired for his pursuit of non-violent solutions to
economic and political injustice. I had been working with him in
Recife as a United Methodist missionary for four years, seeking
to improve relations between Protestants and Catholics in the
Northeast of Brazil, even as I helped found and then directed a
social service center in the extremely impoverished community of
Caixa D’Agua.
What surprised me, and clearly saved my life, was that the newly
appointed US Consul in Recife, a young career Foreign Service
officer named Richard Brown, whom I did not know personally,
intervened on my behalf and, with the support of the US
Ambassador in Brasília, John Crimmins, then the senior career
diplomat in the State Department, was able, after four long and
desperate days and nights, to get the Brazilian government to
honor the Vienna Convention, which required that any signatory
country permit consular access to any foreign national arrested
and/or imprisoned for whatever reason.
To understand the import of this action by Richard Brown, we
need to recall that this was less than a year after the
CIA-sponsored overthrow and assassination of Chilean president
Salvador Allende (9/11/73) during which two young Americans were
murdered by the Chilean security forces without any protest at
all from the US government, along with perhaps as many as 20,000
Chileans. The Kissinger administration, which spanned the
presidencies of Richard Nixon (who resigned in August of 1974)
and Gerald Ford, was a strong supporter of the Brazilian
military, as it was providing a favorable climate for US-based
multi-national corporation investments. Outcries from human
rights organizations were ignored normally by Kissinger,
certainly one of the major war criminals of history, responsible
for the genocidal bombings of the civilian population in
Cambodia that killed more than a million people, not to mention
the horrors of Vietnam.
In this context, for a junior officer of the State Department to
raise a stink because one insignificant US citizen in Recife
because of his concern for human rights and the good name of the
United States was more than remarkable. It was heroic.
Because of his efforts, and the support he got from Ambassador
Crimmins, late in the afternoon of October 3, 1974, the fourth
day of my imprisonment, Richard Brown was allowed to see me.
A couple of hours earlier, my torturers took me to my cell—from
the torture chamber—and had me take a bath and put my clothes
on. (I had been allowed only my shorts since my kidnapping four
days earlier). I was then taken across town to another military
installation in Jaboatão, after being threatened that I should
not relate to Mr. Brown any of the horrors I had been subjected
to during those four days, as I would be returning to their
tender care after meeting with him.
On arriving at my new “quarters”, I was placed in what I later
discovered was a guest room for officers. After the previous
four days, when I was either being tortured by beatings or
electric shock (recall the photos of Iraqi prisoners with cables
attached to various parts of their bodies, including their
genitals), being allowed to sleep only for short periods of time
on a concrete floor, when my torturers got tired and needed to
rest, I was nearly overcome with the accommodations of the room:
a real bed, real chairs, a pitcher of ice water and glasses. (My
cell had only a concrete floor.)
After about an hour of waiting, during which I imagined all
sorts of things, fearing that they had made up the story about
my meeting with the Consul just to get me to dress myself in my
own clothes and that they were going to kill me—as I knew they
had other prisoners—the door opened and a Brazilian colonel
entered with Mr. Richard Brown. I can still recall the
tremendous thrill I felt on seeing him enter, as it was a clear
reminder of the existence of a civilized world “out there.”
Richard Brown began the conversation by asking me if I was being
well treated. Recalling the threats they had made before my
coming to this place, I said that all was well, while giving him
a quick wink with my left eye (the colonel was seated on my
right.) Mr. Brown immediately said in a very precise and
official voice, “Mr. Morris, I am here representing the
government of the United States of America and I want you to
know that if you have been mistreated in any way heads will
roll. And if you are mistreated after this meeting, more heads
will roll.” He was clearly speaking for the tape recorders we
both knew would be making a record of our meeting.
With that prompting, I related everything that had happened to
me since my kidnapping, starting with my clothes being taken
from me, the initial beatings and subsequent electric shocks,
sleep deprivation and psychological threats to me and other
threats aimed at my Brazilian fiancé. He took out a notebook and
for an hour and a half made copious notes of everything I said.
Then the door opened and we were informed that our interview was
over and Mr. Brown would have to leave. Before leaving, however,
he asked me if I had any marks on my body and I quickly removed
my shirt to show the bruises and scratches on my arms and back
from the many falls I had taken and pushed down my shorts so he
could see the purple bruises on my buttocks from the pratfalls
caused by the shock-induced contractions of my muscles as the
current was increased. Both wrists had scabs from the handcuffs
that held me in a standing position during the nights while my
torturers were resting.
Mr. Brown again stated for the tape recorders that if I
experienced further mistreatment, “heads would roll.” He assured
me that he would be back to see me the next day as he was being
ushered out.
He was not back the next day, but on Saturday we had another
meeting, at which he asked me to relate everything that had
happened to me since he had seen me. I told him that I had not
been mistreated any more, except for being kept up for several
hours after our initial meeting to give a deposition to my chief
torturer about “everything I had done in Brazil” since my
arrival in 1964. Then he returned every day until on October 16,
when I was taken to another military installation in the
neighboring city of Olinda and then, accompanied by Mr. Brown, I
was taken to my apartment to pack a suitcase of clothing before
being expelled. While in my apartment, Mr. Brown talked with me
quietly, in pig-Latin of all things, to confuse Major Maia, the
chief of the torture apparatus (and self-proclaimed graduate of
the School of the Americas) who was with us and who didn’t
understand that language. Brown asked me to go to Washington as
soon as I could and visit the members of Congress who had been
active in my case and ask them to write letters of commendation
to the State Department for the actions of Brown and Crimmins,
and ask that those letters be placed in their personnel files,
because, as he explained, Kissinger was very unhappy with the
way this event had upset the Brazilian generals and was putting
pressure on the Department to sanction Crimmins and Brown.
After spending the night sleeping on the floor of the Federal
Police offices in Recife, I was taken to the airport and put on
a plane to Rio, accompanied by an armed guard, where I was kept
in a cell at Federal Police headquarters for the rest of the day
and evening, until I was placed on the 11:00 p.m. flight to New
York, together with a letter from then-President General Ernesto
Geisel saying that I was being expelled from Brazil as a “person
prejudicial to national interests” and that if I ever returned
to Brazil I would be imprisoned for four years for violating the
terms of my expulsion. No formal charges were ever made against
me and I was never given any opportunity to present a defense.
As my oldest son was born in Brazil, it was a clear violation of
the Brazilian Constitution to expel me, as Article 100 says that
a foreigner who had a Brazilian child could not be expelled for
any reason.
On arriving in New York the next morning, I was met by my
brother, the Rev. Hughes B. Morris, Jr., a United Methodist
pastor from Nebraska, and the Revs. Paul McCleary and Lewistine
McCoy of the Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist
Church, who promptly took us to 475 Riverside Drive, the
headquarters of the Methodist mission enterprise, for which I
had been working the past 11 years. After about an hour of
conversation, they informed me that I had “resigned” from the
Board. I reminded them that on January 1, 1974, I had taken a
leave of absence from the Board. My first wife and I were in the
process of a divorce and as no missionary in Brazil had ever
been divorced before I did not want to embarrass the Brazilian
church, so requested a leave of absence, which was permitted for
up to two years for “personal reasons.” According to the rules
and regulations of the Board, I could “reactivate” at any time
within a two-year period simply by requesting that status, which
I did. They insisted that I had resigned, even though there was
no documentation and then, after a bit of embarrassed
conversation among themselves, without any further explanation
they gave me $1,000 in traveler’s cheques as a “hardship
payment” and ushered us out of their offices.
They had made arrangements for us to stay at a hotel for two
nights and that was the end of that. I was amazed that people
for whom I had worked for 11 years would sever our relationship
in such a cold way without any explanation, and equally amazed
that they did not even bother to have a doctor give me a
physical examination to see if I had any serious ailments or
injuries as a result of the torture. (In the 31 years since then
I have never been given any explanation for my being terminated
by the Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church
after my nearly 11 years of service and 17 days of
imprisonment.)
Since 1970 I had been a stringer for Time in Recife and they had
asked me to visit their offices in New York, which we did as
soon as the Methodists ushered us out. On my way back to Brazil
in 1970 I had had a chance encounter with a Time correspondent
who was on vacation and he suggested that I contact their
correspondent in Rio, Kay Huff. Kay was delighted to know of
someone in Recife who could speak and write fluent English and
asked me to be his stringer. This was not a significant
“employment opportunity” as they only paid $5.00 an hour when I
did any “fetching and carrying” for them, which didn’t happen
very often in those days as the magazine didn’t regard northeast
Brazil as a very important area for news. I had asked Dr. McCoy
of the Board of Global Ministries about the offer and we agreed
that it would be good to have this contact with the
international press, as Dom Helder, the archbishop I was to be
working with, was under a great deal of pressure from the
Brazilian army and his life had been threatened on numerous
occasions. We felt that this connection with the press could
provide some “life insurance” for him in case the army made any
more direct moves toward him.
The Time people in New York apologized for not meeting me at the
airport but said the Methodists had assured them that they would
be taking care of me. They wanted me to write the story of my
experiences for publication in the magazine, but I told them
that Major Maia had threatened me that they would torture my
Brazilian fiancé, Tereza, if I made any “unfortunate reports”
about my experiences in their custody and that I needed to await
assurances from Mr. Brown that she would not be harmed if I told
my story. They said OK, that I should go visit my family in
Nebraska, write up the story and as soon as I got the green
light from Richard Brown, return to New York and they would
publish it.
The next day my brother returned to Nebraska, as he had to
preach on Sunday, and I took the train to DC, where I stayed
with Carol and Kim Flower, friends from Recife where Kim had
been stationed with the State Department a couple of years
before. On Monday I went to the State Department, accompanied by
the Rev. Joe Eldridge, a United Methodist pastor who had been in
Chile from 1970-73, and who was organizing the Washington Office
on Latin America, a human rights organization sponsored by a
coalition of church groups concerned about the human rights
situation in the hemisphere. I had known Joe since we had been
together at a missionary conference in 1970 just before he went
to Chile and I returned to Brazil for my second term as a
missionary.
We went to the Brazil Desk of the State Department where we were
received by a young officer named Alex Watson, who years later
in the 1990s would become the Under-Secretary for Inter-American
Affairs. I asked him for the names of the members of Congress
who had been involved in my case as I wanted to express my
thanks to them. He opened up the file and looked at me as said,
“Who are you?” I said, surprised, “What do you mean?” He
replied, “These people have never been on the same list before
except at roll call.” He then produced a list of nine members of
the House and ten Senators who had been active during my
imprisonment. They ranged from Senators Kennedy and McGovern to
Senators Carl Curtis (R-NE) and Roman Hruska (R-NE); Henry
Belmon (R-OK); Sam Nunn (D-GA); Adlai Stevenson III (D-IL);
Charles Percy (R-IL), Tom Harkin (D-IA) and others. These and a
similar mixture of House members had come together because of
pressure from members of my family in Nebraska, Oklahoma and
Georgia and the United Methodist Church in a variety of places.
(Methodists everywhere were upset at hearing that one of their
missionaries was being tortured by the Brazilian army).
Joe and I set out to visit as many of these persons as we could
find to thank them for what they had done for me and to
encourage them to continue to support human rights in Latin
America. We discovered that most of them did not know much about
the horrendous situation in Latin America, but having been drawn
into this reality by their support for me, they were interested
and many became supporters of this cause to greater or lesser
degrees. But all those we were able to meet with wrote letters
at my request to the State Department commending Richard Brown
and John Crimmins for their excellent work on my behalf and in
supporting the traditional American values of human dignity and
rights.
After three days in Washington, I flew to Chicago, where the
Rev. Martin Deppe, a classmate from seminary days, received me
at the airport and took me to Evanston, where, on Sunday I
preached at the First United Methodist Church in that city. Its
senior pastor, the Rev. Dr. Dow Kirkpatrick, had been a friend
for many years and had visited me in Brazil. He was recovering
from surgery at the time and had invited me to fill in for him
on Sunday.
Then I flew to North Platte, Nebraska, where my father, the Rev.
Dr. Hughes B. Morris, Sr., was pastor of the First United
Methodist Church. He, too, asked me to preach on Sunday. On both
of these occasions I discovered that simply sharing my
experiences under torture and how my faith enabled me to survive
was a powerful message that had a significant impact on the
hearers. There was a universal outrage to hear that I had
actually been tortured by the Brazilian military and even more
when I shared the news that the Brazilian torturers had told me
that they had been trained by the School of the Americas.
After about three weeks, during which I wrote down in great
detail all that had happened to me while in prison, I received a
phone call from Mr. Brown in Recife assuring me that he had
received word that Tereza would not be harmed if I spoke out, as
her father was a retired officer of the Brazilian army and it
was unthinkable to the Brazilian military that they harm his
daughter, no matter how crazy she was to want to marry an
American “subversive.” I immediately called Time and they urged
me to fly to New York with my story. So, on November 6 I flew
from North Platte to New York City.
On arrival, I want to the offices of Time in Rockefeller Center,
where I was received with a great deal of warmth and given a
desk with a typewriter and instructions to write up my story in
250 words or less. As I had a manuscript of more than 10 pages I
found that to be a bit overwhelming. Everything I had written
seemed so important to me that I didn’t want to cut out
anything. 250 words! What could I say?
After working for two days and getting a basic story down to
about three pages, the editor who was working with me began
making some suggestions. As we were talking about various
aspects of my experience, I mentioned to him that I had recited
the 23rd Psalm to myself each time they were dragging me from my
cell to the torture chamber and that this had been a significant
source of strength for me. To my surprise, he literally broke
out with goose bumps, got up and excused himself and went out to
talk with one of his colleagues. He returned in a few minutes to
say that he had gotten us another thousand words. Then he worked
with me for the next couple of hours to “tailor” the story into
the form that finally fit into the magazine in the two-page
article that appeared in the magazine the following Monday
(November 11, 1974, with the dateline of November 18. I have
never understood why Time always comes out a week before the
dateline, but it does.)
As the final deadline was at noon on Friday, November 8, I was
pretty much done and had a weekend in New York to spend by
myself. This was not a good time, however, as I was feeling the
backlash of my recent dislocation from Brazil. Before all of
this happened I had made a decision to spend the rest of my life
in that country and was really feeling exiled. Now I was alone
and unemployed with no idea of what the future held for me. And
at that time, I knew absolutely no one in New York.
As I had been doing some fairly serious photography during my
time in Brazil, I took part of the $1,000 I had received from
the Board of Global Ministries and bought myself a 35mm Pentax
and a dozen rolls of film. So on Saturday morning, which was a
beautiful fall day with the sky a sparkling blue, I decided to
wander around and take some picture. After graduating from
Seminary at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey in 1959, I
had done some further graduate work at Union Theological
Seminary in New York City, so I was familiar with the city and
the subways, etc. So I took a train down to the Battery and
entertained myself taking pictures of that area. Then I walked
up to the World Trade Center, which was in the process of being
completed, but which was not yet open. I walked into one of the
towers, which looked like it was ready, but was told politely
that the building was not open and that I could not stay. As I
walked out, I saw a group of about 20 women, mostly African
American and Hispanic, going into the other tower. Without
thinking much, I simply joined them and followed them into the
lobby, where they went straight to the elevators and boarded. I
stayed with them up to the 70th floor, as I recall. They were
going to the personnel office, apparently seeking employment in
the new buildings. As they turned left to go to the office, I
turned right and went to the other bank of elevators and entered
one and punched 110 and proceeded to the top floor of the WTC.
When the elevator doors opened, I encountered the area
completely open but filled with paint cans and other
construction materials and equipment. So I spent the next 90
minutes enjoying being the first tourist to visit the building
and taking three or four rolls of pictures of the area from the
tower. Then I retraced my steps to the ground and continued my
personal tour of Manhattan.
On Monday morning I was at the hotel newsstand when it opened to
buy my copy of Time to see how the story came out. Then I went
to the offices of Time as they had requested, as they wanted to
plan some promotional activities around the story. This began a
whirlwind tour, starting with a 10-minute appearance on the
Today Show the next day, radio interviews and another TV
interview with public television. Then Time escorted me around
the US, to Chicago, Atlanta and other places, where I was
interviewed on talk shows, always presented as “former Time
correspondent”, which was an interesting promotion from being a
stringer in Recife. But I was never presented as “former United
Methodist missionary,” which was amusing and ironic in the light
of my recent termination from ten years of service with them.
All in all, I was interviewed on 27 TV programs around the US
and one trip to Toronto where I was featured in an hour-long
program in prime time called Man Alive on the Canadian
Broadcasting Network. I definitely got my “15 minutes.”
In December, Tereza came to the States and we were married in
North Platte, Nebraska by my father and then returned to
Washington where I began a contract job with the Library of
Congress to write a book for Senator George McGovern about the
first ten years of the Food for Peace Program (of which he had
been the first Director). I had been contracted for this project
because it called for using the Northeast of Brazil as a case
study to evaluate the efficacy of the program. I spent the next
five months working on this project which was then presented to
Senator McGovern. As far as I know it was never read by anyone
outside of the Congressional Research Service and its
conclusions certainly were never considered in future policies
of US aid to developing countries.
As I knew my work with the Congressional Research Service of the
Library of Congress was a limited contract, I had begun looking
for work even before that contract was finalized. However,
everywhere I turned I discovered that the doors were closed. The
United Methodist Church had put me on some sort of “list” that
meant that other religious groups were not interested in me. The
U.S. government had me on another list that made me pretty much
unemployable by any government agencies apart from the Library.
Foundations and think-tanks were reluctant to add an infamous
“subversive” to their payrolls. And in the secular world, my
resume after twenty-some years in the church did not thrill most
employers and, beside that, the recession of 1974-75 was pretty
deep and people with my kind of resumes were be let go in droves
to make room for recent college graduates who would work for
practically nothing. (I would have, too, if anyone had offered
me a job.)
After some 20 months of fruitless job-hunting, which did not
result in a single job interview (“you’re overqualified for
anything we might have”) and having “nickel-and-dimed” it for
all that time with speaking engagements in churches and
universities, where my human rights had some appeal, I grew
pretty desperate. I had been supporting myself and my new wife,
and making my child support payments to my former wife, by
putting together as many speaking engagements as I could. All in
all I spoke to more than 150 churches and universities during
this period, usually for expenses and an honorarium that rarely
exceeded $100, and I wrote a longer version of the Time story
for Harper’s, (October, 1975) which netted me the sum of $1,500,
which was an unbelievable amount to me at the time. But as time
moved on, interest in my experiences in 1974 waned and
invitations grew fewer and fewer.
Finally, SWEPCO, the Southwestern Petroleum Company, which
manufactures water-proofing materials and systems, with which I
had started an association in Recife just before I was expelled
from Brazil while on my “leave of absence” from the Board of
Global Ministries, offered me a job opportunity. Buddy Thomas,
their Vice President for international business, who had called
me in New York at the Time offices the day after my appearance
on the Today Show to see how I was doing, and who called me from
time to time to express concern for me, offered me the chance to
be their distributor in Costa Rica. He explained that they had
appreciated our relationship in Brazil and were looking for
someone to sell their wares in Costa Rica without much success
and said that if I wanted it he would name me as their
distributor in Costa Rica.
At that time the only thing I knew about Costa Rica was that it
did not have an army, which was a great attraction for both
Tereza and me. We were both homesick for Latin America and
frustrated and somewhat frightened over my inability to find
gainful employment in the United States, so we agreed to go to
San José and give it a whirl. Three wonderful friends loaned me
a total of $7,500 to enable us to get to Costa Rica and set up a
new business, so we loaded all our worldly goods, except for my
books, which we sent by mail, in our car, and set out to drive
to Costa Rica.
Our first stop was in Atlanta where we spent a few days camping
at Stone Mountain with my two children from my first marriage,
Jeny and Jonathan. While there I received a phone call from
Richard Brown—through the park ranger. He had called my former
wife, Carol, in Atlanta, and discovered that we were at the
campground and then he called the ranger station and they hunted
me down. When we finally connected, he began talking in a sort
of coded way, referring to the “big bull” (re: Kissinger), and
the little bulls (re: he and Crimmins); the market (State
Department), etc. In this round-about way he communicated that
Kissinger, who I knew from the press had been in Chile at a
meeting of Latin American military, was being pressured by the
Brazilian military to punish Crimmins and Brown for their
temerity in defending a “subversive” American in Recife. Brown
made it clear that he feared that the two “small bulls” might
well be headed for the “slaughter house.”
During my 22 months in Washington, I had established a warm
relationship with Les Whitten, who was the co-author of the Jack
Anderson column. I had at one point shared with him my concern
that Kissinger would “get” Brown and Crimmins for having
jeopardized his good relationship with the Brazilian military
and he had said that if that ever happened they would love to
“get” Kissinger. He implied that they had a lot of other “stuff”
on Kissinger and that this would be a good “peg” to hang it all
on. I had communicated this to Richard Brown and he was now
asking me to be prepared to contact Whitten if Kissinger made
his move. We agreed, all through our unsophisticated coded
language, that I would call him from wherever I was on the trip
to San José every third day (collect) to see what was happening.
As we drove to New Orleans, then Houston, then to the border of
Mexico and on down through Central America, I called him in
Recife every three days to see what was happening. Finally he
informed me somewhere in between El Salvador and Nicaragua that
the crisis seemed to have passed as Ambassador Crimmins being
the senior career diplomat in the State Department with many,
many supporters from his work and contacts over more than 25
years had turned out to be too big a fish (bull?) for even a
Henry Kissinger to fry.
I spent the next 12 years in Costa Rica working with SWEPCO as a
roofing contractor. In 1981, horrified by the “misinformation
campaign of the Reagan administration regarding Central America,
I founded the Institute for Central American Studies and began
publishing an alternative newsletter, Mesoamerica, which became
the premier publication for church and student groups in the US
that were opposing the Reagan policies in Central America. That
led to a number of speaking tours throughout the US in the
1980s, as persons who had heard me about Brazil were interested
in what I had to say about Central America. Needless to say the
Reagan administration was not pleased and our telephones in
Costa Rica were intercepted for years and I was regularly
harassed as I traveled. But Costa Rica is a democracy and there
was room to operate in opposing the policies of my country.
I didn’t see Richard Brown again for several years until once
while in Washington while on a speaking tour in the US talking
about the events in Central America, sometime around 1983 or
1984 I discovered that he was there and invited him to have
dinner with me, at which time I thanked him most profusely for
his intervention on my behalf.
He told me then that there had been a cost. The Brazilian
military made his life as miserable as possible for the
remainder of his two-year tour of duty in Recife and his next
assignment was not quite as much of a promotion as he might
normally have expected. However I observed later that he spent
several years as US ambassador in Uruguay before his final post
in Washington as a sort of roving expert on Latin America much
involved in seeking to expand commercial relations in the
hemisphere.
The last time I saw Richard Brown was in early 2004, when a
mutual friend, Donald Ranck, who had been a Mennonite missionary
in Recife when I was there and who had become a very close
friend of Richard Brown as a consequence of the events
surrounding my imprisonment and expulsion, sent me an email
informing me that the Richard had retired from the Foreign
Service and was living in Casselberry, Florida, which was just
about three miles from my home in Winter Springs.
I immediately called him and invited him and his wife to come to
our home on a Sunday afternoon in February for a Brazilian
churrasco (barbecue). They came and we had a wonderful day
together, during which I took the opportunity to express to him
again how much I appreciated what he had done for me. I spoke
this mainly for his wife, whom I had never met before, as I had
already expressed my gratitude to him in our earlier encounter,
but I wanted her to know how much I appreciated what her husband
had done and how much I admired him for having done it.
Three of my children were present and they were duly impressed
at having Ambassador Brown actually there in our home, as they
had known of him from my conversations before.
He reiterated to us how his career had suffered because of his
actions and of the pressures he and Ambassador Crimmins had
received from Kissinger. However, this was overcome when new
people took charge of the State Department and he ended his
career on a high note and was not at all sorry for what he had
done, even though it had cost him. He said that he had felt that
the honor of the United States was at stake and that he could do
nothing other than protest the violation of my human rights and
work for my release.
It was a wonderful day and we celebrated with pictures and ended
with Brazilian abracos. Three weeks later I received word that
Richard Brown had had a massive heart attack in his sleep and
had died.
As we are now facing the horrifying spectacle of our president,
vice president, Secretaries of State and Defense and Attorney
General all making torture a “legitimate” weapon in our arsenal
against international terrorism, I ask, Where is Richard Brown
when we really need him?
Ambassador Joseph Wilson took a stand on the lies told to get us
into the war—and paid an incredible price for it. A few other
“whistle blowers” have appeared from the Pentagon and a few
other places. And most of them have been punished by a ruthless
administration that allows no dissent from within and little
from without. But we desperately need more Richard Browns from
within the establishment to stand up and say “no” to a passing
government that is sullying the name of the United States around
the world by making torture a policy of state.
My case, along with many others, is clear proof that our
military and intelligence forces have been engaged in nefarious
activities for many years. But never before have we had a
President who so cynically defends such policies. Earlier
presidents at least had the decency to lie about it. And never
was it defended by specious legal memos that effectively remove
the United States from the international community and make us a
rogue state.
On December 11, 1974 I was invited to testify before a
Congressional committee (Congressman Don Fraser’s Committee on
International Organizations and Movements of the House Committee
on Foreign Affairs) about my experiences in Brazil. In that
testimony I said the following:
“Torture brutalizes and dehumanizes not only those who are
tortured but those who torture, those who are intimidated by the
torture of others, and those who try to ignore the fact that
torture exists.
“It dehumanizes those who are tortured by treating them as less
than human and, in many cases, by forcing them into
less-than-human feelings and often into less-than-human acts. If
one is forced to betray friends, companions and family through
torture, as many are, the psychological and spiritual damage may
be irreparable, quite apart from the permanent physical damage
that often results.
“It dehumanizes those who torture. In addition to the
psychopathology induced and encouraged in those who practice
torture, persons and governments who resort to torture, for
whatever motives, betray their social contract with their fellow
humans and effectively secede from the human community.
“It dehumanizes those who are intimidated. Churchmen who cease
to proclaim the gospel in its fullness out of fear; students who
cease to make the search for truth their vocation out of fear;
journalists who give the public less than the truth for fear of
reprisal; workers who, through fear of repression, are not
allowed to organize to defend their interests; politicians who
can only rubber-stamp authoritarian proposals from dictatorial
regimes, for fear of the consequences of more independent,
conscience-led actions—all these and in fact the whole community
of man share in the dehumanization caused by torture.
“Torture dehumanizes those who try to ignore it, saying it is an
“internal affair” or a passing phase. Such indifference dries up
the wellsprings of human sympathy and compassion and breaks the
social contract of the world community to be concerned for the
whole family of man. Civilization and freedom are not built, and
cannot be maintained, by those who assume the posture of
indifference.”
I continue to be involved in Latin America. From 2002 to 2004 I
was the Director for Latin American and Caribbean Relations of
the National Council of Churches of Christ of the USA. Today I
am the President of Faith Partners of the Americas, a non-profit
organization dedicated to deepening relations of solidarity
between churches in the US and faith communities throughout
Latin America and the Caribbean. As I travel in the region there
is no place in the hemisphere where the US is not feared and
hated because of our war policies and actions and for our
blatant use of torture and kidnapping to carry out our policies.
The peoples of the region suffered the same for years from the
military dictators that ruled them. But throughout that dark
period the US was, for them, a beacon of hope because of our
public and international defense of human rights. No more. We
are clearly seen as the enemy. And they are painfully puzzled
that the American people don’t do something to stop this.
It is past time for the American people to stand up and say “no
more. These policies do not represent us—this is totally
un-American and we will have no more of it in our name.”
In 1963, Fred
Morris became a missionary of the United Methodist Church to
Brazil, where he spent eleven years. As the result of his
journalistic activities and his close association with
Archbishop Câmara, who was the leading opponent of the Brazilian
military, who had overthrown the democratically-elected
government in 1964, he was kidnapped by the Brazilian army in
1974 and spent 17 days in their torture chambers in Recife
before being expelled by presidential decree as a person
“prejudicial to national interests.” On his return to the United
States,
Time
published a
two-page first-person account of his experiences entitled
Torture, Brazilian Style
(Nov. 18, 1974). He subsequently appeared on the
Today Show
and more than 25
other TV talk shows in the U.S. and Canada. He testified before
the U.S. Congress and lobbied for human rights in Latin America
in Washington for nearly two years, and published another story
in
Harper’s
(October, 1975
‘In
the presence of mine enemies’
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