What are you telling your children? (Warning: political)

[cantdog]

Yellow Times published an article by Canadian John Chuckman that is germane here. (click the link)

I worry about how long the world at large will continue to appease us, the way Chamberlain and so many others did the big guy who last set out for world domination in the 1930's by invading country after country.

One damn fine day the rest of the world may discover they really can't tolerate any more East Timors, Iraqs, Afghanistans, Haitis, and Dominican Republics, they don't need to let one power hog the world's resources whilst poisoning the world's water and air and enslaving the world's poor.

We have to get these empire builders the hell out of the driver's seat.

cantdog

 

[shereads]

Unfortunately, there are too many people who never got to be part of an empire and think it would be cool. I imagine it was fun, for a while. Especially when the world still had a sufficient supply of isolated, igorant, poorly armed people who greeted Europeans as gods.

These days, it seems like every third-world backwoods hamlet has its own newspaper, and sometimes even a radio or two. There may no longer be enough subservient underclasses to sustain a truly enjoyable empire.

You just can't get good help anymore.

 

[SlickTony]

I think it's an attempt to re-do WWII, the best war we were ever in. No; the conditions that led to that war cannot be duplicated; it can't be done, and really, our administrations should quit trying.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Saddam's Trial

What effect do you think all this will have on the upcoming trial of Saddam?

I assume that they were intending to bring two major accusations against him: (1) using WMD's on Kurds and (2) violations of basic human rights. While I have no doubt that the things that went on in that prison under Saddam were far worse than anything our MP's did, the whole business kind of takes the wind out of their sails on HR violations makes it rather embarrassing to bring up the whole subject now.

The Supreme court is also hearing arguments now about Bush's suspension of habeus corpus and denial of human rights to the prisoners at Guantanamo, and whether they have a right to attorneys. Do you think Abu Ghraib will influence the decision in those cases? I understand that the guy in charge of Gitmo interrogation trained the interrogators at Abu Ghraib.

---dr.M.

 

[RenzaJones]

wrong thread

 

[shereads]

Re: Saddam's Trial

What effect do you think all this will have on the upcoming trial of Saddam?

I assume that they were intending to bring two major accusations against him: (1) using WMD's on Kurds and (2) violations of basic human rights. While I have no doubt that the things that went on in that prison under Saddam were far worse than anything our MP's did, the whole business kind of takes the wind out of their sails on HR violations makes it rather embarrassing to bring up the whole subject now.

The Supreme court is also hearing arguments now about Bush's suspension of habeus corpus and denial of human rights to the prisoners at Guantanamo, and whether they have a right to attorneys. Do you think Abu Ghraib will influence the decision in those cases? I understand that the guy in charge of Gitmo interrogation trained the interrogators at Abu Ghraib.

---dr.M.

What trial of Saddam? When? Third, fourth week in November?

Dr. M, you'd think it would be embarrassing, but it's entirely possible that GBW won't make the connection.

Unless he has a sense of the ironic, he's looking at the latest photos right now and saying, "That's not what I meant!"

 

[Pure]

May 10, 2004. 09:47 AM


Red Cross witnessed Iraq abuse

Claims by aid organization contradict Bush administration's explanation


ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS
ASSOCIATED PRESS

GENEVA - The Red Cross saw U.S. officers routinely mistreat prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in Iraq that included both physical and psychological abuse, according to a report disclosed today. The report by the International Committee of the Red Cross supports allegations that abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers was broad and “not individual acts” - contrary to President George W. Bush’s contention that the mistreatment “was the wrongdoing of a few.”

It also quoted U.S. officers as admitting that up to 90 per cent of the detainees had been arrested by mistake. “ICRC delegates directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the co-operation of the persons deprived of their liberty with their interrogators,” according to the confidential report.

The delegates saw in October how detainees at Abu Ghraib were kept “completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness,” the report said. It said it found evidence supporting prisoners’ allegations of other forms of abuse during arrest, initial detention and interrogation.

Among the evidence were burns, bruises and other injuries consistent with the abuse that the prisoners alleged, it said.

The 24-page document, confirmed by the ICRC as authentic after it was published Monday by the Wall Street Journal, said the abuses were primarily during the interrogation stage by military intelligence.

Once the detainees were moved to regular prison facilities, the abuses typically stopped, it said. The report cites abuses - some “tantamount to torture” - including brutality, hooding, humiliation and threats of “imminent execution.”

 

[Pure]

On the 'loss of innocence'. Huh?


A writer below finds it surprising that American are surprised, given that their own citizens, in prisons, are raped, let die (lack of medical treatment), maltreated, forced into chain gangs etc.

May 10, 2004. 01:00 AM




http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...75&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795


An ugly prison record



Given the way it treats its own inmates, America shouldn't be shocked at the abuse of Iraqis,

by Christopher Reed



For a nation founded on slavery and genocide, Americans retain an astonishingly enduring faith in their continuing righteousness.

They are sounding this note again as the prison torture scandal continues in Iraq.In a column in the New York Times last week, Middle East analyst Thomas Friedman warned that the revelations created the "danger of losing America as an instrument of moral authority and inspiration in the world."

Does he not read the world's newspapers? Uncle Sam as moral authority?Other U.S. pundits similarly harrumphed about America's endangered integrity and leadership. President George W. Bush himself said the prison mistreatments were not the American way. But they were, and they are. Friedman's column was headlined, "Restoring our honour," but the abuse of prisoners surprises nobody who reads newspapers or scans the Internet.

Americans have been mistreating and torturing their fellow Americans in their own lock-ups for decades. What honour is there to restore?In "liberal" California, horror stories have appeared for years from hellholes such as Pelican Bay prison, where they house "the worst of the worst" — and also inflict the worst brutalities. A prisoner dumped in scalding water so his skin peeled off like old varnish; prisoners left naked outside in rainy and bitter weather for days; multiple beatings and rapes; several unexplained deaths.

In Corcoran prison, California, guards held their own Roman gladiator games with prisoners pitted against each other in fights to the near death. A disliked and defenceless prisoner was placed in the same cell as the biggest and baddest sex criminal — known as the Booty Bandit — to be duly raped to the amusement of the prisoner's supposed guardians.Pelican Bay is such a fearful place, with prisoners kept under perpetual scrutiny while unable to see any other human being, a psychiatrist told a court that many were going insane.

A federal judge finally ordered reforms, as did another over Corcoran, but there is little evidence that either have become proper places even to house the worst.Similar reports surface across America. Texas is especially bad.

Significantly, private, for-profit prisons have some of the worst records.They often have such poor medical facilities that prisoners die from curable conditions, as Harper's magazine revealed in an exhaustive inquiry last year.California holds more prisoners than Britain, France, Germany, and Canada combined, yet jails are still grossly overcrowded.

Conditions in many southern U.S. prisons resemble some of the worst of the developing world, with prisoners sleeping on filthy floors overrun by rats.In 1999, it was reported that 13 women at California's state-run Chowchilla female detention centre had died the previous year from negligent, or non-existent, medical care.

Amnesty International reported in 1999 that male guards in several U.S. states routinely raped female prisoners.In a book published in 2001, Going Up The River, former Wall Street Journal reporter Joseph Hallinan told of visiting a prison in Alabama where chained inmates still broke boulders with sledgehammers.The sheriff of Phoenix, Ariz. was re-elected by loyal voters after bringing in female convict chain gangs.

All this has been going on since Saddam Hussein was a young man.It has worsened in recent years, despite a massive prison-building program that now incarcerates 2 million, the world's largest prison population.Yet Americans have mostly ignored the disgrace of their penal system.They became so fearful of crime, they lost consideration for the lives of criminals.

Any idea of rehabilitation has been abandoned. Even when scandals over mistreatment do emerge, many say the inmates deserve it.This does not excuse commentators such as Friedman, or the shocked, shocked, demeanour of U.S. news anchors and commentators. Yet the details from Iraq itself support the view that prisoner abuse in Iraq was inevitable.

At Abu Ghraib prison, the alleged main perpetrator is staff sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick, 37, the senior of six non-officers charged with cruelty and other mistreatment. He is a part-time military policeman called up last year for service in Baghdad — and was a prison guard for six years in Virginia.

Another reflection on the role of private enterprise in U.S. incarceration is the background of Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, also a military police reservist in Iraq. When she was put in command of Abu Ghraib and its thousands of Iraqi inmates last year, she had never done penal work before. In the army she was an intelligence officer and in private life, a business consultant.Shortly before her suspension from duty she told a Florida newspaper that her prisoners were living so well, she was worried they wouldn't want to return home. Another American living in dreamland.
-----

Christopher Reed is a Los Angeles-based reporter who has written extensively on prison conditions in the United States.

 

[shereads]

A writer below finds it surprising that American are surprised, given that their own citizens, in prisons, are raped, let die (lack of medical treatment), maltreated, forced into chain gangs etc.

Most of us know there are atrocities committed in our prison system. But in light of our God-ordained patriotic mission to free Iraq from the man who used this prison to torture his enemies, the pictures have been a shock to the system even for those of us who believe we should never have invaded.

Additionally, I have a tough time imagining fresh-faced young people behaving worse than the prison guards in "Cool Hand Luke."

The pictures are also disturbing because the MPs look so proud of themselves.

But then, why wouldn't they feel proud? They've been told that by giving these prisoners "the treatment," they're helping the War On Terror. Their commander in chief has created tiers of prisoner types, some of whom are implicitly to be denied their rights under the Geneva Convention and U.S. military law. The Sec. of Defense has said publicly about Guantanamo prisoners, "I could care less how they're treated."

This isn't a bunch of hardened people who've become brutal after years of guarding other hardened people in a hopelessly flawed system. These are kids.

It's impossible not to wonder where their brutality came from. Is it just the situation? Are there a lot of ordinary people who'd behave like this if the circumstances allowed it?

 

[shereads]

From tonight's Washington Post.

According to a clerk at Baghdad's Al Fanar Hotel, on the east bank of the Tigris River, Berg checked in on March 22, left for Mosul the next day, returned to the hotel on April 6 and checked out on April 10.

Berg said he was going home, the clerk said, and walked down Saddoun Street, a major artery, because the road was closed to vehicular traffic. He left behind in his room a yellowed and folded page from a book by Jon Burmeister, a South African writer of thrillers who died in 2001.

The page carries a short prose poem titled "The War That Wasn't." It describes a man named Jericho, who is awakened by machine-gun fire, "his heart hammering thunderously against the ribcage as though trying to escape."

The poem ends: "What the hell was happening? God knows, he thought. But it seemed clear that the war had arrived -- the war that wasn't coming here . . ."

 

[Pure]

Interesting note from today's paper, a Sergeant Fredericks, has been charged. He has a background as a prison guard in Virginia.

Those responsible for the thousands of prisoners had a variety of backgrounds, it appears: from Frederick's above, to Walmart clerk.

 

[SlickTony]

No offense to anybody in this group who might come from that neck of the woods, but I couldn't help snorting with laughter when I heard on the radio, when the reports of abuse first started to surface (to where everybody was talking about them, not in January) someone saying that a bunch of country boys from rural W. Va etc. wouldn't be able to think up stuff like that on their own...c'mon. All anyone has to do is sing the opening notes from Dueling Banjos and everyone gets the allusion.

 

[cantdog]

about the fresh faced kids

The young work from the limbic system, all emotion. It's the fresh-faced ones who do that stuff.

 

[Pure]

zimbardo, on tv, mentioned that his standford student 'guards' spontaneously thought of many of the things reported, including sleep deprivation, forcing prisoners to pee or crap in buckets, etc.

an interesting note. the methods of the guards *made the prisoners unsavory in look and above all in smell. that reinforces the perception of 'subhuman.'

 

[cantdog]

rural West Virginia

Perhaps not impossible. But the covert ops-- pardon me, the "civilian contractors" who specialized in interrogation on behalf of Intelligence did actually consult with others of their ilk in Palestine and in Afghanistan, and very likely described what would make the men feel helpless and unhinged to these kids. They didn't have to make it up themselves.

Israeli soldiers expose themselves to women in hostile crowds to cause them to recoil in confusion, too. These are cultural buttons being pushed with intent.

They are sleep deprived, naked, constantly reinjured, and made to shit in a bucket in an otherwise empty room. The prisoners look pathetic, smell bad, fear the worst, and are made to do degraded and disturbing things... the details might be W Va, but the impetus, and the guidance and advice, is all USA torture school stuff.

We became vitally interested in this sort of thing during and after Korea, when the POWs held by the enemy seemed to have been broken and manipulated in an extraordinary manner. We called it "brainwashing," and our military wanted it in our arsenal.