cannabisnews.com: A Prison State, If Not a Police State










  A Prison State, If Not a Police State

Posted by CN Staff on May 04, 2004 at 12:20:44 PT
By Paul Craig Roberts 
Source: LewRockwell.com 

The US has a unique distinction: It is the world’s greatest prison state. The US, "the land of the free," has the biggest prison population in the world and the highest rate of prisoners per capita of all countries – including countries that President Bush believes need liberating by US armed forces. Even China, with one party rule and a population that is 4.5 times larger than the US population, has 30% fewer total prisoners than the US. China’s per capita rate is a small fraction of the US rate.
The US prison population per capita is three times higher than "axis of evil" country Iran, five times higher than Tanzania, and seven times higher than a civilized European country like Germany. One out of every 142 Americans is in prison – and this does not include military prisons or INS jails. The conservatives’ war on drugs, launched during President Reagan’s first term, bears much of the blame. Between 1980 and 2000, a period during which the US population grew by 21%, the number of state and federal inmates soared by 312%. Almost one-half million Americans are in prison for drugs-only offenses. Many of them are innocent or were encouraged by federal agents or informers posing as friends to transport small amounts of drugs as a favor. Consider Elaine Bartlett, pardoned by New York Gov. George Pataki in 2000 after serving 16 years of a 20-year-sentence. Bartlett was tricked by an acquaintance, who turned out to be a government informant, into taking four ounces of cocaine to Albany. Bartlett was given 20 years even though she had no history of arrests or convictions and left 4 children behind, the oldest being 10 years old. Most government informants are real criminals who escape charges or are given lenient plea bargains in exchange for helping prosecutors boost their conviction rates by entrapping innocent people. It is a disgrace to the US legal system that judges permit such false convictions. Many other innocents are in jail because police dropped small packets of drugs – or in the Texas cases bags of ground up wallboard – into their cars when stopped, allegedly for traffic offenses. Society gained nothing but more criminals by locking up Bartlett. Her six-year-old son was traumatized by his mother’s absence. At the end of every prison visit he had to be forcefully removed by prison guards from clinging to his mother. By the time he was 10 years old, he was a drug runner. He bought his first gun at age 12 and was in prison by age 16. You can read the whole story in the book, Life on the Outside, by Jennifer Gonnerman. With a legal system that mass-produces criminals, prisons are being constructed at a breathtaking rate. An Urban Institute study, "The New Landscape of Imprisonment," released on April 29, documents the boom in prison construction during the last two decades. Jeremy Travis, one of the authors, says: "The prison network is now deeply intertwined with American life, deeply integrated into the physical and economic infrastructure of a large number of American counties. It provides jobs for construction workers and guards, and because the inmates are counted as residents of the counties where they are incarcerated, it means more federal and state funding and greater political representation for these counties." A number of states now have prisons in almost one-third of their counties. Florida has at least one prison in 78% of its counties! In 1923 there were only 61 prisons in the entire US. Another conservative idea – prison privatization – has created a contractual monster that must be fed with a constant stream of inmates. A variety of new police Gestapos have been created that help to keep the massive prison complex – our own Gulag Archipelago – filled. The most dangerous is Child Protective Services, created by Walter Mondale in response to his constituency of anti-family feminists and "child therapists" in need of employment. CPS was set up on the insane assumption that a large percentage of families committed "child abuse." CPS offices are everywhere, and employees outnumber child abusers. The child sex abuse witch hunt in Wenatchee, Washington, was set off when the local CPS office was told to find some cases to justify its budget. It took years to expose and overturn one of the greatest cases of prosecutorial misconduct in human history. Dozens of families were destroyed and 50 children were put into foster care. The latest report from Child Protective Services Watch documents that children placed in our "child protection system" are 5 times more likely to die from physical abuse and 11 times more likely to be sexually abused than they would be from remaining in the homes from which they are removed! Mondale and his "child advocates" got their Gestapo legislation passed in 1974. A quarter century later there are 500,000 US kids in the "child protection system." Soon there will be one million because of the perverse incentive that funds the system. The federal government pays state and country child welfare services a bounty for each child seized from a family. Linda Wallace Pate, a California attorney specialized in foster cases, calls it a "kids for cash" system. The evidence is overwhelming that children are extremely traumatized by being ripped from families and placed in foster care. It turns out that the overwhelming majority of abused children suffer the abuse from their single mother’s live-in boyfriends or overnight lovers. Child abuse is rare in two-parent families, so CPS has expanded abuse to cover spanking – even playground bruises are grounds for seizing children – and shouting ("verbal abuse"). The war on crime has turned even parenting into a dangerous occupation. One can’t help but wonder whether the US itself is in need of liberation.Dr. Roberts -- PCRoberts postmark.net - is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. Copyright: 2004 Creators SyndicateNewshawk: Paul Armentano - http://www.norml.org/Source: LewRockwell.comAuthor: Paul Craig RobertsPublished: May 4, 2004Copyright: 2004 LewRockwell.comContact: lew lewrockwell.com Website: http://www.lewrockwell.com/Related Articles:U.S. Prison Population Tops 2 Million http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15897.shtmlAn American Gulag in The Makinghttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread14279.shtmlReport: Millions Behind Bars in U.S. http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread13878.shtml

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Comment #21 posted by FoM on May 07, 2004 at 18:46:24 PT
afterburner
Thank you for the link to the article.
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Comment #20 posted by BGreen on May 07, 2004 at 18:30:28 PT
Here's more about the so-called *contractors*
These murderers aren't bound by ANY laws, military or civilian! Could this be what the four "contractors" killed and mutilated in Fallujah were up to?The Reverend Bud Green********************************************************Private Contractor Tests New Illegal Ammo By, Killing An Iraqi1-shot killer. This 5.56mm round has all the stopping power you need — but you can’t use it. Here’s why:By John G. Roos
Special to the Times 12/01/03: (The Army Times) Ben Thomas and three colleagues were driving north out of Baghdad in an SUV on a clear mid-September morning, headed down a dirt road into a rural village, when gunmen in several surrounding buildings opened fire on them.In a brief but intense firefight, Thomas hit one of the attackers with a single shot from his M4 carbine at a distance he estimates was 100 to 110 yards.He hit the man in the buttocks, a wound that typically is not fatal. But this round appeared to kill the assailant instantly.“It entered his butt and completely destroyed everything in the lower left section of his stomach ... everything was torn apart,” Thomas said.Thomas, a security consultant with a private company contracted by the government, recorded the first known enemy kill using a new — and controversial — bullet. The bullet is so controversial that if Thomas, a former SEAL, had been on active duty, he would have been court-martialed for using it. The ammunition is “nonstandard” and hasn’t passed the military’s approval process. “The way I explain what happened to people who weren’t there is … this stuff was like hitting somebody with a miniature explosive round,” he said, even though the ammo does not have an explosive tip. “Nobody believed that this guy died from a butt shot.”The bullet Thomas fired was an armor-piercing, limited-penetration round manufactured by RBCD of San Antonio.A new processAPLP ammo is manufactured using a so-called “blended-metal” process, said Stan Bulmer, president of sales and manufacturing for Le Mas Ltd. of Little Rock, Ark. Le Mas is the distributor of RBCD ammo.Various bullet types made by RBCD are designed for different effects, Bulmer said. The frangible APLP ammo will bore through steel and other hard targets but will not pass through a human torso, an eight-inch-thick block of artist’s clay or even several layers of drywall. Instead of passing through a body, it shatters, creating “untreatable wounds.”Le Mas gave Thomas a small number of APLP rounds after he contacted the company.After driving off their attackers, Thomas and his colleagues quickly searched the downed enemy fighter for items of intelligence value. They also took time to examine the wound.“There’s absolutely no comparison, whatever, none,” to other wounds he has seen from 5.56mm ammo, Thomas said in a telephone interview while on home leave in Florida.He said he feels qualified to assess a bullet’s effects, having trained as a special-operations medic and having shot people with various types of ammo, including the standard-issue green tip and the Black Hills Mk 262, favored by spec-ops troops.Thomas was the only member of the four-man group who had RBCD ammo. He said that after the group returned to base, they and other members of his group snatched up the remaining rounds.“They were fighting over it,” he said. “At the end of the day, each of us took five rounds. That’s all we had left.”Congress wants testsLast year’s defense budget included $1.05 million for testing blended-metal bullets, Bulmer said. Fourteen months into the 24-month period during which those research and development-testing funds must be spent, the military has not purchased a single bullet from Le Mas.Publicly, at least, military officials say RBCD ammo is no more effective than other types now in use and, under certain conditions, doesn’t even perform as well. Those conclusions are derived from a series of tests conducted a few years ago in which RBCD ammo’s effects were observed in ballistic gelatin, the standard means for testing bullets.Naval Reserve Lt. Cmdr. Gary Roberts, a recognized ballistics expert and member of the International Wound Ballistics Association, conducted the gelatin tests in March 2002.According to his findings, “Claims that RBCD bullet terminal performance can vary depending on target thickness, size or mass were not shown to have merit, as bullet performance remained consistent irrespective of gelatin block size.”Roberts found that in gelatin, a 9mm, 60-grain slug exhibited “tissue damage comparable to that of other nonexpanding 9mm bullets and is less than that of standard 9mm [jacketed hollow point] designs, since the RBCD bullet does not create as much tissue damage due to its smaller recovered diameter.”A .45-caliber bullet “offered average terminal performance in bare and denim-clad gelatin, similar to that noted with the 9mm bullet. ... The RBCD bullets do not appear to be a true frangible design, as significant mass is retained after striking a target.”Not surprisingly, Roberts’ assessment remains a major impediment to getting RBCD ammo into military hands. Considering his standing in the ballistics community, his findings are accepted as gospel by many influential members of the special-operations community. But Bulmer insists that tests in ballistic gelatin fail to demonstrate RBCD ammo’s actual performance because the gelatin is chilled to 36 degrees. Their bullets seem to shatter most effectively only when they strike warmer targets, such as live tissue. Bulmer said tests using live animals clearly would show its effects. Despite his appeals for such testing, and the funds set aside by Congress to conduct new tests, the military refuses. Bulmer said authority to spend the testing funds initially went to U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., which delegated testing responsibility to the Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C. Queries to the command confirmed that it was aware of the testing requirement but had not decided when, or if, the tests will be conducted. Bill Skipper, president and CEO of the American Business Development Group, is a lobbyist representing Le Mas on Capitol Hill. “When I heard of the ballistic characteristics of this ammo, as a retired military officer, I realized it has to stay in the good guys’ hands,” he said, adding that SOCom’s reluctance to test it is “irresponsible.”“This is an issue of national security,” he said.Some supporters of RBCD ammunition suggest SOCom officials may be reluctant to test the ammo because it threatens “in-house” weapons and ammunition programs underway at the command. Special-operations forces long have sought a more potent standard round than the 5.56mm, which lacks the punch needed during the long-distance engagements that frequently occur in Afghanistan and Iraq. In response, SOCom is working with weapons and ammunition manufacturers to develop a new round and new upper receivers for M4 and M16 rifles.The command apparently has narrowed its search to a 6.8-by-43mm round. Indication of industries’ involvement in this effort was seen in October during the annual Association of the U.S. Army exhibition in Washington. If Le Mas’ 5.56mm APLP round delivers the performance SOCom is seeking in the new 6.8mm ammo — and Bulmer insists it does — the rationale and the potentially lucrative contracts for producing a new ammo type and modifying thousands of weapons used by special-operations forces would disappear.Thomas said he isn’t familiar with the reasons that might keep RBCD ammo from getting a realistic test within the military.“The politics, that’s above my pay grade,” he said. “All I really care about is that I have the best- performing weapon, optics, communications, medical equipment, etc. I’m taking Le Mas ammo with me when I return to Iraq, and I’ve already promised lots of this ammo to my buddies who were there that day and to their friends.” When military officials in the United States got wind that Thomas had used the round, he quickly found himself in the midst of an online debate in which an unnamed officer, who mistakenly assumed Thomas was in the service, threatened him with a court martial for using the nonstandard ammo.Although Thomas was impressed by RBCD ammo’s performance, he feels it should not be the standard ammunition issued to all U.S. forces. “The first thing I say when I talk to people about Le Mas’ ammo is, make sure that 22-year-old infantrymen don’t get a hold of this, because if they have an accident ... if they have a negligent discharge, that person is dead. It doesn’t matter how much body armor you have on.“This is purely for putting into bad guys. For general inventory, absolutely not. For special operations, I wouldn’t carry anything else.”A video clip on RBCD ammo that was shot at the annual Armed Forces Journal Shootout at Blackwater is online at www.armedforcesjournal.com/bullets. John G. Roos is editor of Armed Forces Journal.
Private Contractor Tests New Illegal Ammo By, Killing An Iraqi
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Comment #19 posted by FoM on May 07, 2004 at 18:05:00 PT
About Today's Hearings
I watched the hearings all day. I am no longer sick by the pictures. I am numb. As I say this I'm saying it calmly. I question if our country will ever recover and that it might crumble. I don't know how this can be fixed. Starting all over again might be the only way. I hope I'm wrong. House cleaning is not something that we want to be done but it must be done. No one will trust our leaders and those who jail us ever again.
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Comment #18 posted by BGreen on May 07, 2004 at 17:29:31 PT
There are WORSE pictures yet to be seen
CNN is reporting there are pictures and a video that haven't been released that are much worse than the pictures we've already seen.How could the prison states of amerika commit rape, murder and torture of people they refer to as towelheads and sand niggers? It's easy to believe when you remember what they've done to the peaceful cannabis plant and its partakers.The Reverend Bud Green
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Comment #17 posted by afterburner on May 07, 2004 at 16:59:11 PT
FoM, Check this One Out
We are all Iraqis by Pete Brady (07 May, 2004) "Victims of drug war not surprised by US actions in Iraq" 
http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/3449.html 
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Comment #16 posted by FoM on May 07, 2004 at 16:53:31 PT
A Question
Are people in American prisons protected against abuse by any laws?American Gulag in The Making: http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread14279.shtml
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Comment #15 posted by FoM on May 06, 2004 at 10:29:28 PT
Portion of WP Article
This is hard for me to even read but I thought it would be ok to post in this thread.***"The sadistic abuses of Iraqis at a U.S. military prison raise serious questions about the accountability of U.S.-hired private military contractors who are involved in illegal activity," said Schakowsky, a longtime critic of the growing prominence of civilian contractors. CACI International Inc. and Titan Corp., employees of which were named in the inquiry, said Tuesday that they still had not received notice from the Pentagon about any charges against their employees and that they therefore had not taken disciplinary action. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2044-2004May4.html
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Comment #14 posted by Jose Melendez on May 05, 2004 at 12:53:19 PT
Police, state.
see: http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1329/is_3_28/ai_100879487also, from: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1329/3_28/100879487/p6/article.jhtml?term=Relying on DynCorp and other private military companies has enabled Washington to circumvent Congress and avoid attention. "If the narcotraffickers shot American soldiers down, you could see the headlines: `U.S. Troops Killed in Colombia,'" says Myles Frechette, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia during the Clinton administration. By contrast, the 1992 assassination of three DynCorp employees, whose helicopter was shot down during an anti-drug mission in Peru, merited exactly 113 words in the New York Times. (In February, when another aircraft crashed during a drug operation in Colombia, three employees of Northrop Grumman were taken hostage.)from: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/05/ma_365_01.html"At a remote tactical training camp, in a swamp 25 miles from the world's largest naval base, six U.S. sailors are gearing up for their part in President Bush's war on terrorism. Dressed in camouflage on a January afternoon, they wear protective masks and carry nine-millimeter Berettas that fire nonlethal bullets filled with colored soap. Their mission: recapture a ship -- actually a three-story-high model constructed of gray steel cargo containers -- from armed hijackers. The men approach the front of the vessel in formation, weapons drawn, then silently walk the length of the ship. Suddenly, as they turn the corner, two "terrorists" spring out from behind a plywood barricade and storm the sailors, guns blazing. The trainees, who have instinctively crowded together, prove easy pickings: Though they outnumber their enemy 3-to-1, every one of them gets hit. They return from the ambush with heads hung, covered in pink dye. "You had people hiding behind their teammates!" barks their instructor, Tony Torres, a compact man with freckles and salt-and-pepper hair. "That's as shameful a thing as I can think of. That's f*cked up. That's just f*cked up." When approaching a "bad guy," Torres reminds them, a unit must move aggressively, fanning out to divert the terrorists' attention. "You guys need to get your shit together," he scolds. "There's not a lot of cover in this structure. The only thing to do is move toward your threat." The men listen attentively. They know that Torres, a Navy vet, honed his skills during nine years in the service, performing search-and-rescue operations and providing nuclear-weapons security. But Torres no longer works for the military. These days he is an employee of Blackwater USA, a private company that contracts with the U.S. armed forces to train soldiers and guard government buildings around the world. Every day, the Navy sends chartered buses full of trainees from Naval Station Norfolk to the company's 5,200-acre facility in Moyock, North Carolina. Last fall, Blackwater signed a $35.7 million contract with the Pentagon to train more than 10,000 sailors from Virginia, Texas, and California each year in "force protection." Other contracts are so secret, says Blackwater president Gary Jackson, that he can't tell one federal agency about the business he's doing with another. "
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Comment #13 posted by FoM on May 05, 2004 at 12:07:26 PT
Shishaldin 
Thank you. I checked out the information you posted. I believe we haven't begun to see where this will lead. It very well could make WaterGate seem like it was just a picnic.
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Comment #12 posted by Jose Melendez on May 05, 2004 at 04:58:39 PT
Re: comment #11 
DynCorp, industrial military complex federal fraud, DEA collusion and much more:http://pipepeace.com/terror/potusHint.html
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Comment #11 posted by Shishaldin on May 04, 2004 at 23:09:27 PT
a snippet from the Mother Jones article... 
...from my previous post.
You might recognize these guys from their M.O.:The largest beneficiary of this privatized war has been DynCorp, which is helping Colombia's national police destroy coca crops with aerial defoliants. But according to experts familiar with the war, the company's role goes well beyond spraying fields. DynCorp employees "are engaged in combatant roles, fighting in counterinsurgency operations against the Colombian rebel groups," says Peter Singer, a foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Corporate Warriors. "Indeed, the DynCorp personnel have a local reputation for being both arrogant and far too willing to get ‘wet,' going out on frequent combat missions and engaging in firefights." DynCorp has not responded to the allegation. Relying on DynCorp and other private military companies has enabled Washington to circumvent Congress and avoid attention. "If the narcotraffickers shot American soldiers down, you could see the headlines: ‘U.S. Troops Killed in Colombia,'" says Myles Frechette, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia during the Clinton administration. By contrast, the 1992 assassination of three DynCorp employees, whose helicopter was shot down during an anti-drug mission in Peru, merited exactly 113 words in the New York Times. (In February, when another air-craft crashed during a drug operation in Colombia, three employees of Northrop Grumman were taken hostage.) 
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Comment #10 posted by Shishaldin on May 04, 2004 at 23:03:36 PT
FoM, those "contractors"...
are just renamed Mercenaries! That's another one of those "forbidden words" in media. "They're not soldiers of fortune, they're *contractors*" ...and unaccountable to anyone except the company they work for.Just another means to (try to) keep Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld's hands clean. Here's what they really are:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/05/ma_365_01.htmlhttp://www.blackwaterusa.com/
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Comment #9 posted by Cannabis Enthusiast on May 04, 2004 at 17:07:36 PT
More adults blazing the weed up
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Living/ap20040504_1182.html
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Comment #8 posted by FoM on May 04, 2004 at 17:02:17 PT
goneposthole
We can never win the hearts and minds of Moslems. It is too late. The damage is done. The pictures are forever stamped in everyone's mind. I want to know who the contractors were from this sentence in the New Yorker.****In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included C.I.A. officers and linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force inside Abu Ghraib. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact
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Comment #7 posted by goneposthole on May 04, 2004 at 16:37:55 PT
It's the agony and the agony
This war in Iraq. It brings out the best in humanity, doesn't it? The 'ugly American' is further demonized. The Iraqi people are humiliated and resentful.It is as ugly as it looks. I think the Bush Cabal's 'road map to peace' has taken a turn down the warpath. Bring the war to a full halt, and get out of Iraq. What else can be done?Everybody could bury their heads in the sand. Ignore it and it will go away. 
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Comment #6 posted by FoM on May 04, 2004 at 14:41:22 PT
kapt
There goes the respect for the Veterans again. My husband didn't see abuses in Vietnam. I want to know why prisons don't have rotating human rights workers in them at all times. Why can't that be done?
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Comment #5 posted by kaptinemo on May 04, 2004 at 14:01:56 PT:
This is BULL****!
I had the same training that guy had in Basic (Charlie-12-1, 19982); and I *still* have the little 'comic book' they issued to us about what was a lawful and unlawful order, how you couldn't shoot airborne troops while they were in the air but as soon as they hit dirt you could 'bust caps' on them, how you had to protect POW's from even the locals, how you were responsible for their safe conduct after they surrendered, cataloging their personal effects and returning them (without weapons, of course) later on, not subjecting them to unduly harsh treatment or indignities, the whole nine yards. And that was 22 years ago.I knew damn' well what I was swearing to uphold...these guys have no excuses. 
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Comment #4 posted by FoM on May 04, 2004 at 13:58:38 PT
RasAric and Petard
I know and I agree. I'm just sick about this. I don't cry often anymore but this makes me want to cry. If there is a God in Heaven I don't know why He hasn't blown this world into kingdom come.
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Comment #3 posted by RasAric on May 04, 2004 at 13:47:55 PT
FoM
I could not agree more. This country disturbs me so greatly because it's evil hides behind the guise of freedom. As a child it was alway driven home that we are the land of the free. Free in what way I wish to know. Free to do what we are told to do? Free to to do what we please as long as it does not upset the status quo? This is not freedom. This country is becoming less free every day. People are taught that freedom is the right to vote for what you believe in and against what you don't believe in. This mentality is inherently selfish and flawed.We, as a country, must begin to realize that freedom includes a plethura of lifestyles; some of those lifestyles are not agreeable with all of us, but must be allowed in order to preserve real freedom. In a free country there is NO room for prohibition.Civil rights are not a matter of opinion and whether we agree with our neighbors lifestyles or not we must support them; for if we condemn them, our freedoms will be the next to go.
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Comment #2 posted by Petard on May 04, 2004 at 13:25:23 PT
The Gaurd interviewed by 60 Minutes
The Iraqi Prisoner torture and abuse story, weekend before last, made reference to "lack of training" in spite of the fact that this guy being interviewed has a regular day job when not serving in the National Gaurd as a full-time prison gaurd in New York State. So, let's think this over a moment. The guy tortures Iraqi prisoners because he lacks training, but his regular job in America, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks per year (assuming a 2 week vacation), is gaurding prisoners. Hmmm, makes me wonder what those New York State inmates would have to say about his job performance outside the National Gaurd.He also defended his abuses on not having read the Geneva Convention or even being furnished a copy of it. I assume he DID make a Sworn Oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution, has he even read that or been furnished a copy so as to be informed as to what he has sworn to uphold and defend?All this is typical. I was scanning the radio on my hour long drive home from school 2 months ago. when Sean Hannity had a retired Federal District Judge on. The former Judicial "authority" stated that HE, as a person charged with the duty to decide the Constitutionality of criminal and civil proceedings, had NEVER read the Constitution until AFTER he retired. This legal "authority" voluntarily admitted that he decided the Constitutionality of cases without even knowing what was and was not Constitutional for something like 20 to 30 years. (Hannity is about the most hypocritical of all the radio show hosts BTW. He apparently has forgotten that although he constantly proclaims Christianity that it forbids judging others, which is the content of his show entirely. He's no better than Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker in essence, just a different "sin".)This is the Land of the Free (free to roam a 15x15 cell), Home of the Brave (reason for their incarceration: bravery to step up in the face of oppression). Paul Revere's ghost rides every night across America, flashing, waving, screaming, galloping hard, lighting up the night with HUNDREDS of lanterns, as they're coming from every direction, all of the time.
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Comment #1 posted by FoM on May 04, 2004 at 12:42:29 PT

Just a Comment
My mind has been racing with the abuses of prisoners in Iraq. It's like a horror movie but worse. We have people in charge who guard prisoners doing what they did to them and I'm so upset I can't find the words to say how I feel. We are terrorists too but Rumsfeld says it's abuse not terrorism. So was Saddam an abuser only or a terrorist? I don't see any difference. We seem to really like putting people away in prisons in America the land of the not so free.
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