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By Ty Moore | ||
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The Bad Apple Never Falls Far From the Tree Rumsfeld has refused to release thousands of gruesome photos and videos. Leaked memos have emerged "exploring" how Bush could get around the Geneva Conventions. The Red Cross has bitterly complained that its early warnings of prison abuse resulted, not in policy changes, but in U.S. forces impeding their further investigations. Rumsfeld was forced to admit he authorized "secret detentions" of Iraqis. John Ashcroft, Justice Department head, vehemently claims Bush "did not order torture," but refuses to turn over the documents detailing what interrogation methods Bush and Rumsfeld did authorize. But overshadowing all the gossip about secret memos, or legalistic wrangling over the definition of torture, is the basic reality that when an imperialist power invades, occupies, and pillages another country, violent repression is inevitable. United Nations recognition of "sovereign" regimes in Baghdad and Kabul means nothing to the tens of thousands who have faced arbitrary arrest and detention by U.S. forces, most never being charged with a crime. The U.S. Supreme Court, after two and a half years of escalating international outrage, has finally granted the "detainees" at Guantanamo vague legal status and the right to a lawyer. However, the attempts to concoct legal licenses for Bush's imperialist adventures have only further undermined their legitimacy. In the court of public opinion, there is no way to paper over the brutal reality of a colonial occupation. | ||
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By John Gallup | ||
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While absolutely true for most of us, American corporate and political leaders have a long history of promoting atrocities and violent repression. From genocide of Native Americans to CIA subversion of democratically elected governments and support for brutal dictatorships across the world, the U.S. government has committed or directly sponsored an incredible amount of barbarism. The U.S. Army's School of the Americas in Georgia, for instance, was formed to protect U.S. corporate interests in South and Central America by training Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, that is, civilian-targeted warfare. For more than 50 years, SOA graduates have used torture and murder to enforce the political repression of educators, student leaders, religious workers, and especially union organizers and workers.
From My Lai to Abu Ghraib The 1968 My Lai massacre is probably the most famous case of U.S. savagery there. As reported later by soldiers involved, U.S. troops spent hours killing everyone in the village despite the fact that there was not "one military-aged male in the whole place." (i) Teenage girls were brutally raped and then murdered. Women, children, and the elderly were rounded up into groups, forced to squat close to the ground, and then shot and stabbed in the back one by one. In all, as many as 500 were killed. Like Bush, President Nixon claimed that My Lai was an "isolated incident." But none other than John Kerry debunked this lie. Representing Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry testified in 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, explaining that U.S. war crimes were "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with full awareness of officers at all levels of command." (ii) Kerry described how U.S. soldiers "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blew up bodies, randomly shot civilians...and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam." Demonstrating extreme hypocrisy, Kerry supports Bush's war on Iraq and promises to maintain the occupation if elected president. Such widespread, hateful violence exposes the complete fraud of so-called humanitarian foreign interventions. The U.S. has always exerted its power abroad to repress challenges to its global corporate empire. Colonial wars of subjugation require a racist, dehumanizing attitude among the occupying forces towards the colonized peoples. In Iraq, as in Vietnam, this attitude pairs with the extreme stresses of battle to inevitably produce horrific incidents.
(i) Prof. Doug Linder, School of Law, University of Missouri. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/Myl_intro.html
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By Hank Gonzalez | ||
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A 1996 Justice Department investigation of jails in Maricopa County, Arizona uncovered an incident in which jail staff used a stun gun against a prisoner's testicles. In 1997, FBI investigators reported that guards at Corcoran State Prison in California used rape between inmates as punishment and used gunfire to break up staged "cockfights" between prisoners. The FBI found that between 1985 and 1997, 30 inmates at Corcoran were shot by guards. Eight were killed.
Baghdad or Chicago? In the U.S. as in Iraq, prisoner abuse is bound up with racism. Because of the racist drug war and the disproportionate impact of poverty and unemployment in minority communities, African Americans make up nearly half of the massive U.S. prison population. In racially polarized U.S. prisons, non-white inmates suffer the worst abuses at the hands of prison authorities.
The Roots of Abu Ghraib For example, the man who was hired by the U.S. government to set up Iraq's new prison system, Lane McCotter, ran Utah's prisons in 1997 when mentally ill Utah inmate Michael Valent died after spending 16 hours naked in a restraint chair. John Armstrong, presently a prison official in Iraq, was in charge of the Connecticut prison system between 1995 and 2003 when three Connecticut inmates died from restraint, suffocation, and beatings. American racism and prison torture in Iraq is an ugly extension of the racism and state-sanctioned violence long practiced at home. Recognizing common cause is step one toward joining in common cause: building the anti-war movement must be intimately linked with ongoing struggles against police and state repression at home.
Justice #39, July-August 2004 |