This is a story of middle-class America and the tragedy of outsourcing. Bear with me, as this is a rather personal story.
As a prologue, it should be common knowledge that the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign countries has become endemic to corporate life. In many cases, it is difficult to argue with this trend, as American workers are hardly clamoring for the jobs that are being outsourced (though many of the unemployed in this country might strenuously disagree with me).
Certain jobs, however, should stay right here in this country. There are certain things that Americans do better than anyone else on earth and now, in this flurry of corporate outsourcing, some of these vital jobs are getting away from us.
Outsourcing has many synonyms: "third party processing," the use of "service bureaus,"
"facilities management," and enlisting "Application Service Providers." To this list, I would like to add "extraordinary rendition."
Suspected terrorists, we have learned, have been detained at U.S. airports, taken into custody and then inexplicably shipped to other nations for questioning. Once there, the host nation employs methods to abuse and torture these subjects into revealing what they know (or do not know) about terrorist plots. These foreign torturers, most of which are non-union, are then able to bill for thousands of hours of torturing at a far lower rate than American torturers would demand. One would think that this is cost effective, but it isn't.
Listen, my father was a professional torturer for his entire career. He worked at "Professional Information Extractors" in Philadelphia, PA for over 30 years as a questioner, torturer and Union steward (Local #42 of the National Brotherhood of Inhumane Practitioners). He personally oversaw a team of torture specialists, skilled artisans all, whose Cold War output alone was staggering. They enjoyed lucrative government contracts, mostly by subcontracting from the CIA, and processed more than a thousand detainees a year.
Now, Dad is out of a job. His skills, honed over a quarter century of forcibly gleaning information from detainees, are no longer needed, it appears. Government experts have touted the superior abilities of foreign workers to waterboard, beat and starve subjects into spilling the proverbial beans, but this flowery praise is a smokescreen. Simply put: you can't beat American know-how and ingenuity, be it in the entertainment industry, the production of sturdy, dependable luggage or the systematic degradation and humiliation of suspects for the purposes of extracting information.
It is important to keep these vital jobs right here in this country. The sub-par torturing that Syria and other nations are using to fight the war on terror should be an embarrassment to this country. We can, and have, done a far superior job and we cannot afford to let these important and lucrative positions be shipped overseas.
Write a letter today to your local paper and demand that we reverse the trend of extraordinary rendition. And remember the motto of the National Brotherhood of Inhumane Practitioners: "We didn't invent torture. We just perfected it."
