Someone in the UK has got hold of a video, lovely, showing British soldiers beating Iraqi boys whom they’d caught throwing stones. Have a look. The cameraman, American, does a voice-over mocking the kids, “please don’t hurt me,” as the soldiers bludgeon and kick them repeatedly.
Last week it was news about a woman named Hope in New York, whose cousin had called the police because another cousin had sexually molested her. When the police came they ended up arresting the victim, taking her to jail, then assaulted her again with 7-8 heavy and thuggish cops jumping on her, stripping the clothes off her, and leaving her naked in a jail cell!
Just yesterday, millions of Americans saw police dump a paralyzed man out of his wheelchair onto the floor of the police station, like he was just so much trash. Where do these attitudes and policing methods come from? How did the cops get to think that this sort of stuff is normal in the US?
These attitudes come out of the airports, out of Guantanamo, out of the Colorado Springs city council, where similar policing attitudes and methods were glossed over when used against elderly St Pat’s Day paraders in the city last year.
I remember Elizabeth being hauled across the pavement just an hour or so after having given her a ride to be there. She could not walk to the area where we were to start the parade and I had had to ask a cop to let my car though the barricade just for her to get to the Bookmobile. Later, after being assaulted by the cops, she had to face the city bringing criminal charges against her in the aftermath… for supposedly being part of a plot to block the parade from going on!
These police attitudes come as the American Reich has begun an electrical arms race across the country, with Taser International being the Lockheed of police weaponry. Our city and county governments think nothing about now spreading these devices into the schools!
These attitudes come from Iraq and Afghanistan, where our bombers drop ordinance down onto children below, just as if they were so much trash. This is policing today, in the American Reich. This is a new system in place, that uses torture on POWs even as our own local city flies flags about American POWs once held in Vietnam from the flag masts of the downtown post office right here in The Springs.
The American Reich doesn’t see the incongruence in their idiotic national pride about being the supposed repository of all democracy as they police as they are now doing. They have become more thuggish in simple increments, and now do not see the distance downhill they have actually traveled.
We live in a scary place and in scary times, but unlike in New York with Hope and here in The Springs with Elizabeth, at least in Florida these cops who dumped the paralyzed man on the floor from his wheelchair are now facing some troubles of their own. Yet, there are many more places where those in charge are totally complicit in the Reich style policing. Foremost among these hot spots of official complicity, is the Congress of the US.
Other military industries complicit in war crimes in Iraq have offices in Colorado Springs at Academy and Fountain Blvds.
ATK Alliant Techsystems is the leading supplier of Depleted Uranium, which is poisoning the Iraqi populace as well as our soldiers. Ft Carson vets who father children with birth defects will know whom they can hold responsible.
Likewise, CACI International provides “security solutions” to our boys overseas. Celebrated, ie leaked, examples were the torture methods employed at Abu Ghraib.
To be fair, abuses at Abu Ghraib were also administered by Colorado Springs neighbor TITAN CORP, now L-3 Communications Titan Group.
Isn’t it amazing that so many culprits of Iraq atrocities are represented in Colorado Springs, at ACADEMY AND FOUNTAIN?! Our visit on Tuesday will be straight into the midst of these callous profiteers.
It’s been ages since I saw an article in Time Magazine worth reading, but ‘Are Prisons Driving Prisoners Mad?‘ does ask the right question It even goes so far as to answer the question honestly, and then to conclude that driving prisoners insane is in nobody’s real interests. There is though another question which is, ‘Are the Prisons Deliberately Driving Prisoners Insane?’ I believe that the answer is YES, which in turn leads to yet another question. ‘Why?’
The short article in Time hints that YES, the prisons are deliberately doing what they are doing, and says that it is out of society’s relatively normal urge, which they call ’emotional sense’ to make life harsh for those who have committed brutal acts. They conclude though, that ’emotional sense’ does not make practical sense. That’s because some of these now insane prisoners get eventually released back out into society and there they are even more likely to do harm than before.
What was interesting about this relatively honest Time Magazine commentary, is that nowhere did it ever call what was going on TORTURE. It did say that examining how SuperMax prisons and isolation function to permanently injure people did open up the need for courts to examine these practices and to maybe stop them. That somehow a line had been crossed?
So what amount of torture crosses the line for Time/Life/ AOL and folks like them? Apparently they have some second thoughts about turning people into vegetables and raving psychotics through sensory deprivation? But that is just one tier of torture within America’s Gulags. You get to that tier because other tiers of torture also are in place. SuperMaxes and isolation chambers begin in stages to torture prisoners. Are the earlier stage of solitary confinement deemed normal and appropriate by Time Magazine?
Take for example, the routine separation of prisoners in America from their children and spouses? Is that not a form of torture and prisoner abuse, too. Is that not the first tier towards driving human beings insane by torture? After all, what is a norm in prisoner abuse in American jails is not the norm in many other countries. In other systems of detention, prisoners are not forced into homosexuality, nor separated from the calming effects of holding their babies and hugging their older children. Is it not a form of torture to not allow normal human contact of this type for prisoners that will, in their majority, some day return to society?
Also, is it not torture to physically and emotionally allow some prisoners to torture others. The prison administrators like to charge that this is something that prisoners do to themselves and that they are doing all they can to stop it. Does anybody really believe this? Actually, just like in our foreign wars, the ‘deciders’ in control use one group against another, and afterwards blame them all for being responsible for the mayhem that is presided over. Inside the prison, homosexuals are often used against the others as informants, and heterosexuals are used against the homosexuals. Blacks vs Whites vs Hispanics. Short timers vs lifers, and lifers vs short timers. The prison administrative gang lords it over the prisoner gangs, and the prisoner gangs fight back, but usually against each other. The forms of torture administered within the American prisons are varied and often quite camouflaged. but they are there and constant. The greatest torture in the prisons is arbitrariness. It is used as a constant stick by the legal system.
All this mayhem encouraged amongst the tiers of torture inside American prisons only goes to reinforce the excuse for having so many locked up. ‘See? We got to do it! It’s not that we are cruel, oh hell no! It’s just that they are animals!’ But that’s all really a lie.
The truth is, that America’s tiers of torture inside the prison system were deliberately put into effect because the economically elite ruling class hates the poor, hates the weak, hates the people they rob and abuse, and want to torture them. It’s no mistake at all, and they encourage a mob to support them in their own hatred towards those they despise. The torture is there, because the rulers want to break others down into dysfunctional, mentally and physically destroyed human beings. This is the same nastiness and viciousness of those that burned witches at the stake, lynched innocent Blacks, beat and whipped slaves and prisoners of the past. It’s still going on, though the forms have evolved.
The tiers of torture within the US prison system are twin to the secret rendition centers and Guantanamo where our military abuses POWs held without any due process. So the answer to Time Magazine’s question is…. Yes, US prisons are driving prisoners insane. Thats’ what torture is meant to do, and torture works.
Should we honor the torturers and their work in America, Time? You do in most of your commentaries and ‘news’. We need to stop torturing all prisoners, and not just those held by the military.