On this Memorial Day, lest we forget the divine order we are working for, here is a grim reminder. I warn viewers that the scenes on this tape are perhaps as much as one can humanly take. (Viewer discretion is definitely advised.)
I add that, as a Member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, I was obliged to view evidence of this kind many times to reach a decision. I know it can be traumatizing so you should not watch it if you feel yourself not strong enough. Just read the discussion and not even that if it is too disturbing.
Regrettably these things happen in our world.
Last October, ABC News ran a report on a member of the United Arab Emirates royal family, Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, torturing an Afghan grain trader, Mohammed Shah Poor, in 2004. The Sheikh said the man had cheated him.
Such an allegation, even if true, would not excuse the Sheikh’s subsequent behavior.
The Sheikh used electric prods on the man and a board with a nail in it. He filled the man’s mouth with sand, drove over him, and raped him.
Houston businessman Hassam Nabulsi and the Sheikh were business partners until they had a falling out, landing them all in court. Nabulsi brought the tape, available in the UAE, back to the United States and aired it to illustrate what kind of a man he alleged the Sheikh to be.
The Sheikh is apparently easily identifiable from the tape, which, allegedly, the Sheikh himself was eager to have made so that he could watch it later.
Evidently torture of this kind is not only allowable in the UAE, but stopped by neither police nor military. In the tape we see a military man or policeman assisting the Sheikh.
Lest we think that the corruption ended with this sad and regrettable crime, a court in Abu Dhabi, capital of the UAE, acquitted Sheikh Issa in January 2010.
The Sheikh’s defence was that he was drugged by two other men (not surpisingly, alleged to be the two brothers of his accuser, Nabulsi, who ended up being sentenced to five years in jail), and therefore unaware of his actions, which he admitted included torturing the man.
Prosecuting and persecuting one’s accusers is standard procedure in human-rights violations like this. I’m sure we’ve all seen it done to silence whistleblowers. An instance of it was detailed in a recent post, telling how a bank whistleblower who exposed drug money laundering ended up being jailed for revealing banking secrets while the bank itself paid only a nominal fine.
Sheikh Issa does not seem drugged in the video and the torture appears to have lasted a very long time, which is usually indicative of clear and uninfluenced intentionality.
Sheik Issa has escaped human justice, but he will not escape the universal law.
Grim behavior of this kind also goes on from our side as well, as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo illustrate. Sadly, America operates or uses a number of torture rendition prisons in other countries.
I’m personally familiar with one in Egypt through my discussions with a credible German doctor who was tortured there because she witnessed U.S. medivac helicopters transporting drugs in the Middle East. There are others in Eastern Europe and, I believe, Syria and Jordan.
The CIA also medivaced in drugs from Honduras to Governor Bill Clinton’s Mena, Arkansas airport, where Clinton himself sometimes received them. Two of its couriers (Barry Seal and Chip Tatum) were killed to keep the secret.
Whoever is guilty of this behavior probably will not be coming with us when we ascend. In Third Dimension, the torturers live alongside the tortured and ordinary citizens, but in Fifth Dimension they will not, just as they do not in the afterlife.
We are building a world that is free from these crimes. If “Someday I Will Find My Way Home” inspires us, this evidence, far on the other side of equation, can make us determined to build a world of human rights, one that is torture-free, no matter who the torturer may be.