American Leaders as Despotic and Cruel as any Cruel Foreign Despotic Leaders…

posted by Bill Arnett @ 12:14 PM Permalink

It's been in a lot of newspapers lately that although America has only about a fifth of the worlds population, we arrest and hold more prisoners than any other country, including China and Russia. But there finally arises a time when the jailers become a captive of their own prisons.

That breaking point, the zero sum game, has now been reached in Afghanistan, to be followed by Iraq and other countries where America is running black prisons that make impossible the prosecution of people tortured and forced to live for years under the most deplorable conditions imaginable.

See this article from the NYT titled, "U.S. Planning Big New Prison in Afghanistan."

Excerpt:

The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.

The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Until now, the Bush administration had signaled that it intended to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan.[…]

But American officials now concede that the new Afghan-run prison cannot absorb all the Afghans now detained by the United States, much less the waves of new prisoners from the escalating fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.[…]

The proposal for a new American prison at Bagram underscores the daunting scope and persistence of the United States military’s detention problem…[…]

After the prison was set up in early 2002, it became a primary site for screening prisoners captured in the fighting. Harsh interrogation methods and sleep deprivation were used widely, and two Afghan detainees died there in December 2002, after being repeatedly struck by American soldiers.[…]

American officials also acknowledged that there are serious health risks to detainees and American military personnel who work at the Bagram prison, because of their exposure to heavy metals from the aircraft-repair machinery and asbestos. [I am really sympathetic to both prisoner and guards as I suffered two devastating cancers from Agent Orange exposure, so this is just plainly cruel. Bill]

“It’s just not suitable,” another Pentagon official said. “At some point, you have to say, ‘That’s it. This place was not made to keep people there indefinitely.’ ”

It brings a tear to my eye that our American leaders are so concerned with the health of American's that work at those facilities while failing once again to get proper legal and medical attention to the people America would keep incarcerated forever.

It's a cruel irony that thousands of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot or will not ever be expected to receive a fair trial from what used to be the country - America - renowned for its judicial system and respect for human and legal affairs.

Yet more shame brought to you courtesy of the most violent country in the world with a president considered to be the greatest threat to world peace.

McLame would just be as bad as bush, if not worse. McCain already seems sometimes to present signs of some type of dementia, just as Reagan did during the final years of of his tenure, and all it would take to destroy America would be a couple of years of war pigs leading an incompetent president around by the nose or keeping him occupied with bright, shiny trinkets.

Labels: bush hypocrisy, bush war doctrine, casualties, criminal justice system, flip-flops, military industrial complex, police state, prison camps