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November 20, 2006

U.S. Torturers Trained in U.S. Prisons

Avery F. Gordon, professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, believes that what happened in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and other US military prisons was modeled after U.S. "supermax" (super-maximum security) prisons and, in fact, prison conditions here are actually more brutal. Gordon says the 5,000 civilian prison guards who have already been called up for active military duty have simply taken what they've learned here at home with them.

Several reservists convicted of crimes at Abu Ghraib were civilian prison guards. Ivan L “Chip” Frederick II, identified in the Taguba report as one of the ringleaders because of his expertise in corrections, was a guard in Virginia. Charles A Graner Jr, shown with Lynndie England smiling behind a pyramid of naked Iraqi prisoners, had been repeatedly implicated in violence against prisoners at the Pennsylvania super-maximum security State Correctional Institute at Greene, where he was employed. Army reports indicate that Graner was called up in May 2003 and given supervisory positions at Abu Ghraib because of his guard experience.

Gordon says that "torture, humiliation, degradation, sexual assault, assaults with weapons and dogs, extortion and blood sports always have been part of U.S. prison culture and behavior," and the fact that mistreatment is so common in U.S. prisons explains why nobody interviewed by the FBI said they had seen prisoners mistreated at Abu Ghraib. This is in contrast, by the way, to the response of CIA observers at the detention centers, who were so sickened by what they saw that they refused to continue to observe the prisoner interrogations.

Of real interest to me is the gradual acceptance of treatment that used to be clearly unacceptable. "The procedures used, now legally sanctioned as ordinary and acceptable norms of prison life, were once considered violations of the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment." I can't help but think of the fact that we now accept water boarding as a legitimate interrogation technique when back in WWII we prosecuted Japanese soldiers for war crimes for having water boarded American soldiers.

How is it that pro-war conservatives who defend our treatment of prisoners in these detention centers have a lower standard for prisoner treatment than CIA officers? How is it that conservatives tend to believe we are offering too many creature comforts to our pampered U.S. prisoners, while at the same time we have prisons in which the brutality and even torture of prisoners is common and acceptable? Are we not being told the truth, or do we have a schizophrenic approach to prisons in this country?

And why are so many Americans able to justify brutality today when, in the time of our parents and grandparents, Americans saw themselves as better than that? Is it that after seeing so many slasher films, each trying to outdo the brutality and gore of the one before, we view something like water boarding as child's play, and feel that the bad guys in prison deserve whatever they get?

And finally, what has to happen inside a human mind to prepare a person to go to work every day and inflict horror and suffering on another human being? Doesn't this brutality really end up harming the "good guys" even more than the "bad guys"?

Posted by Becky at November 20, 2006 09:52 AM