I haven't paid a great deal of attention to Unity 08's brand of "non-partisan" bullshit -- anyone whose stated goal is to get beyond blind partisanship but seems to think Joe Lieberman is just dandy is pretty obviously full of it. But today a friend of mine pointed something out to me. One of the founders council of Unity 08 is Tom Stroock the former U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala (1989-93) who is notorious in some circles for his outrageous treatment of Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was abducted, raped and tortured by a right-wing goon squad in Guatemala in 1989.

Even though Stoock later provided a letter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights investigating the case which indicated that he had seen through his "own personal observation, that [Sister Ortiz] was seriously beaten and mistreated", he slandered her and speculated to the State Department that "(Ortiz) had perhaps staged (her) own abduction to secure a cut-off of US aid to the Guatemalan army."

From a 1996 account of the case:

The Bush administration doubted Ortiz's credibility. Last week the Clinton administration released documents about Ortiz's case from that period. In one cable to Washington, then-Ambassador Thomas F. Stroock, a newly arrived political appointee of George Bush, wrote that be did not believe her account. He rejected her claim that one of her abusers, "Alejandro," was a North American man who spoke Spanish poorly and cursed in English. Stroock questioned "the motives and timing behind the story," writing that it may have been a "hoax" designed to influence an up-coming vote in Congress on Guatemala over U.S. military aid. "I know something happened to her in Guatemala," says Stroock by telephone from Wyoming. "What I don't know is what it was." Stroock. who met Bush at Yale, has long complained that Ortiz failed to cooperate with both U.S. and Guatemalan authorities after her ordeal. "It is one thing to be traumatized, but it's another thing not to talk to the police." About her story, Stroock adds, "I don't know whether to believe her or not." But today a growing number of people in the White House, Congress and elsewhere do believe Ortiz and her story.

Why would Stroock be so obstructionist?

The primary U.S. obstacle to Ortiz's vindication is the ambassador to Guatemala, Thomas Stroock. His office first became sensitive to Ortiz's account of her extreme abuse when she mentioned that Alejandro was from the U.S., and that he might have some connection with the State Department. Stroock's reaction is one of outrage that turns to assailing the basis of Ortiz's torture, claiming Ortiz was never burned or raped and questioned whether she was or even is a nun. (One State Department official, Lew Anselem, claimed that Ortiz's burns and bruises resulted from a lesbian sado-masochistic involvement. Anselem also claims that Ortiz kidnapped herself).

However, Stroock's rage conceals complicity. Evidence arises that Stroock played a role in "the secret U.S. support for the Guatemalan army." Stroock "had supervised the CIA station chief [in Guatemala] and...had access to the assets list." Further, 74 arms deals from the United States were implemented by Stroock, and some of these weapons were, according to journalist Allan Nairn, "used in the Santiago Atillan Massacre of December 1990." So, this high-placed U.S. diplomat, according to Ortiz, in effect helped cover-up a U.S.-supported Guatemalan-army genocide against its own people. Documents would later be forthcoming showing that Stroock as ambassador had no intention of doing justice to Ortiz's case. Ortiz regards Stroock as instrumental in aiding and concealing American involvement in horrific human rights abuses by the Guatemalan government. This, in turn, according to Ortiz, facilitated the extermination of any critics of a brutally repressive regime favorable to U.S. ideological and big-business interests in Guatemala.

   

What did they do to Dianna?

Dianna Ortiz is one American whose relationship to torture is different. That's because she was tortured in 1989, during a two-year stint in Guatemala as a young, politically unsophisticated nun from a Kentucky convent, teaching children to read in a rural province. She was abducted from a convent garden one morning by a U.S.-trained Guatemalan army captain, a police intelligence officer and their campesino torture temp, and installed in the secret basement of a police training institute called the Politecnica. (This was a regular site for torture conducted on orders of the military high command.) They took Ortiz not because she was any kind of radical but simply because she was a garden-variety Catholic missionary working with the poor at a time when the military wanted to seriously scare the church. (Priests and nuns, human-rights workers, doctors, labor activists and randomly chosen campesinos had been tortured in Guatemala for decades, not so much to get information as to terrorize entire trades and populations.) Ortiz was held for only 24 hours, unlike many other torture victims, whose ordeals last, incredibly, for months or even years. But those 24 hours resulted in a complete loss of memory of everything in her life prior to being tortured. She had to be reintroduced to her own parents, and she still has almost no memory of her childhood, her college years, how she became a nun, or her pre-torture friendships.

But that's not all, after her ordeal, she had to fight another enemy, the U.S. government as represented by Ambassador Stroock:

Ortiz's battle -- through two insanely brave lawsuits in Guatemala and one in the United States -- to bring her abductors to justice and uncover U.S. government documents about her torture. There are plenty. It turns out that federal investigators and State Department officials made an active effort to cover up her ordeal and to discredit her -- understandably, as the United States is the major source of funding for the Guatemalan military. Her torture stopped when a man with an American accent entered the room and said in English, "Shit." Then he said, in Spanish, to the torturers, "You idiots! Leave her alone. She's a North American, and it's all over the news." To Ortiz he says, "You have to forgive those guys ... they made a mistake."

From her testimony to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus:

Because I could no longer subject myself to the retraumatization brought on by the investigators' questions and manner, the DOJ closed my case. Exactly what the DOJ's final conclusions were, I do not know. I do know that as a result of the investigation, the DOJ came up with a 200+page report, which is classified. The Department of Justice told me the report was classified to protect sources and methods and to protect my own privacy. Dan Seikely, who was in charge of the Department of Justice investigation, said only three people would be able to see the report: Attorney General Janet Reno, the deputy attorney general, and himself. Only four copies of the report existed, he said, and they would be kept under lock and key. In recent months, however, it has become clear to me that a number other people have read the report. A government official recently told me that he had seen the report and added that officials in the State Department also had seen it, as had Thomas Stroock, the US ambassador to Guatemala at the time I was abducted. I can't help but wonder how my government intends to protect my privacy by releasing the report to such individuals. It was under Stroock's command that an embassy staff member told a visiting religious delegation--"I'm tired of all these lesbian nuns coming down to Guatemala." It was Stroock who said, a week after I was abducted, before any embassy member had interviewed me, "Her story as told is not accurate." It was Stroock who told the State Department that my motives were questionable, that I had perhaps staged my own abduction to secure a cut-off of US aid to the Guatemalan army. Yet it is Stroock to whom the US government gives the report--a report so private that even I cannot see it.

Thomas Stoock, just another one of the fine idealists behind Unity 08. Don't it just make you wish that we could have a non-partisan, pro-torture ticket to vote for in 2008?