But, the reality is that America is now a Gulag nation, operating a vast network of domestic and international prisons and detention camps, where torture and abuse are accepted and tolerated.
The duty of those who uphold true American values, such as those enshrined at Nuremberg after our victory over Nazism, is to not allow the gulags and ongoing instances of torture and abuse to be swept back under the rug.
The torture was shocking because it goes to the heart of belief in American exceptionalism, and the religious view of President Bush that god gave America a special mission to civilize the world by bringing freedom, democracy, and the rule of law.
The torture photos and videos emotionally punch in the opposite direction. The name of Abu Ghraib has now joined the lexicon of terror- the list of those concentration camps and sites of massacres whose names the world now hears as synonymous with atrocities and crimes.
No longer does America represent the good guys, who only kill "bad guys", as Rumsfeld and the cowboy president would say. It took photos of Americans in uniform torturing naked Iraqi men (and women, according to reports), to cause an outcry that killing of civilians and secret detentions had not.
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However, our shame is that the conditions at Abu Gareb are repeated in countless domestic prisons around the country. It was no accident that the MP's who carried out the torture were prison guards in civilian life. ( Saturday's new York Times)
We now incarcerate more than 2 million people--we have more people locked in gulags than in our armed forces. We have more people locked in gulags than graduate from college (2 million vs. 1.3 million) in any given year. We have more people incarcerated on per capita basis than any other nation on earth. We are a prison nation. The crimes and tortures that occur in our domestic gulags are horrible. For example, there is now a court case wending its way through the legal system about Texas prison authorities allowing prisoners to be sold as sex slaves by rival prison gangs, and failing to protect or put a stop to it after repeated pleas. The gulag mentality is fomented by the good vs. evil morality of the Christian right. Once people are labeled as evil, which happens to black felons, they are no longer considered part of our society, with any of the rights and humanity of "Americans". Some of the most religious parts of the country also run the most brutal prisons and criminal justice systems. It is no accident that Texas executes so many prisoners--and has not once stopped an execution because of exculpatory evidence. President Bush even mocked Karla Tucker, the first women executed in Texas, on television shortly before she was killed. This attitude, foisted by racism, is what allows the American gulag to continue. It is a crime that we continue to allow blacks to be imprisoned at up to 8 times the rate of whites. "In 1932 a black was four times more likely to be incarcerated than a white. By 1980, the disparity had risen to eight times more likely." It is a crime that it is mostly blacks who are executed, especially if their crime involved a white. We have been silent too long. It is hypocritical for us to condemn the tortures of Abu Ghraib without rooting out and condemning the gulags in our own country, where racist torture still exists every bit as much as it does in Iraq. The only difference is that jailers in Iraq are now on their best behavior. Update: Here's more from the Washington Post on Monday. |
