What About Rights in the 10th?

It seems clear that Frank Wolf's record on human rights is one he plans on emphasizing in the fall, and while Frank Wolf has had a lot to say about human rights around the world, he cannot stand scrutiny in his own backyard.

U.S Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) penned a hot letter to United Nations Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon requesting he not send a human rights official to Prince William County to inspect the treatment of immigrant workers here. - The Washington Post

Why does Frank Wolf care about helping and protecting everyone but his own constituents. He doesn't protect our own right to vote, but rails when other countries have questionable elections. He decries people being put out of their homes abroad, but ignores his own constituents cries for help when they're put out of their homes. It seems that when Frank Wolf speaks on rights and liberties, he is unwilling to apply the same scrutiny to his own district that he insists on in other countries.

It's a common thread for Congressman Wolf, who last year paid people in other states to survey online porn, even while people were losing their Internet jobs in his own District. In order to win in November, Frank Wolf needs to distract the voters and divert their attention from the things he doesn't do for his constituents with his twenty-eight years in Congress.

Frank Wolf thinks that helping out in little ways will distract the voters from his complete lack of helping out in big ways. Frank Wolf thinks that yelling about rights in other places will distract the voters from the erosion of their rights at home.

The Voters of the 10th are smarter than that. In November, the time will come to retire Frank Wolf, and elect Judy Feder.

Frank Wolf and the White House Torture Memo

Given that Frank Wolf is against banning waterboarding water torture, what does he think of this?

The Justice Department in 2003 gave military interrogators broad authority to use extreme methods in questioning detainees and argued that wartime powers largely exempted interrogators from laws banning harsh treatment, according to a memorandum publicly disclosed on Tuesday.

[...]

Some legal scholars said Tuesday that they were amazed at the scope of the memorandum.

“This is a monument to executive supremacy and the imperial presidency,” said Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School and the Washington College of Law at American University. “It’s also a road map for the Pentagon for fending off any prosecutions.”

The memorandum gave the military broad latitude to use harsh interrogation methods. It reasoned that federal laws prohibiting assault were not applicable to military interrogators dealing with members of Al Qaeda because of White House authority during wartime. It also argued that many American and international laws would not apply to interrogations overseas.

Given Frank Wolf's well-known commitment to human rights in China and Darfur, you'd think he would have vocally denounced this memorandum, later rescinded by the Justice Department, as immoral and illegal (not to mention deeply unAmerican). But since we didn't hear a peep from Frank Wolf on this, apparently we can assume that he agrees with this definition of torture:

“The victim must experience intense pain or suffering of the kind that is equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body functions will likely result,” Mr. Yoo wrote.

The Army Field Manual, by the way, explicitly bans coercive interrogations. Apparently, Frank Wolf agrees with the Bush Administration's lawyers and disagrees with the Army Field Manual. Also, apparently, Wolf is more concerned with human rights violations in China than he is with human rights violations authorized by the Bush Administration. Can we say "partisanship over principle?"