MarijuanaNews.com : Abuse In Prisons: Iraqi and American. Bush says, “That is not the way we do things in America.” No, That Is Exactly The Way We Do Things in America! Especially In Texas and Florida.

Posted May 5, 2004
Analysis by Richard Cowan brought to you by Advanced
Nutrients.

The photos of the sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners resulted in a grotesque
outpouring of hypocrisy on all sides.

For
the first time ever, Arabs are complaining about the abuse of prisoners in an
Arab country. Of course, at the same time, Arabs in Sudan are committing
genocide against fellow Muslims in the Dafur region – who happen to be black,
but somehow that is not racist.

While
this is going on, the government of Sudan has been given a seat on the UN Human
Rights committee, where it is denouncing the US for humiliating prisoners!
See
Is
The UN An Instrument of Peace and Freedom Or Of War and Tyranny? UN Narks Make
Answer Clear. Lies and Hatred In Service To International Police State.
(International Narcotics Control Board Report)

But that it their problem. (It must be their problem, because Bush has no plans
for invading Sudan. Although it
is not clear that he had any real plans for invading Iraq, either.)

Meanwhile
back in DEAland, Bush says, “That is not the way we do
things in America.” That may or
may not be true of the US military, but of all the lies
told in the context of the Iraqi war, that is probably the worst.

See
Prohibition
and The Prison State. “Protecting” Youth and Minorities. In DEAland, The UK
and France Prisons Are Full.

Our
problem is that the systematic abuse of prisoners is very much the way that we
do things in America.
(And in the UK, as well. Styal
Women’s Prison in Cheshire had six prisoners commit suicide in one twelve-month
period up to August of 2003. There were 94 suicides in British prisons
last year, one less than in 2002, but, the number of women committing suicide
rose to 14, the highest number on record.)

In
a remarkable column published this week, “A Prison State, If Not a Police
State,” Paul Craig Roberts points out how big a problem the American Gulag has
become. (Mind you, Roberts is not some “bleeding-heart liberal.” He is a
former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant
secretary of the U.S. Treasury under Ronald Reagan!)

Here
is an excerpt, all emphasis added. I urge you to
look at the complete article at http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts43.html

“The US has a unique distinction: It is the world¹s 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…

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…

(T)here 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…

One can’t help but wonder whether the US itself
is in need of liberation.”

But
the problem goes far beyond the numbers. While everyone
is appalled by the sexual abuse of the Iraqis, much worse is happening in
DEAland prisons.

In
April of 2001, Human Rights Watch issued a
press release, Rape
Crisis in U.S. Prisons announcing a 378-page report, No
Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons, charging that state authorities are
responsible for widespread prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse in U.S. men’s
prisons. It is based
on correspondence with more than 200 prisoners spread among thirty-four states,
inmate interviews, and a comprehensive survey of state correctional
authorities.”

“Human
Rights Watch warned that by failing to implement reasonable measures to prevent
and punish rape—and, indeed, in many cases, taking actions that make sexual
victimization likely—state authorities permit this physically and
psychologically devastating abuse to occur.”

This
sounds remarkably like what is being said about the abuse of Iraqis, only the
problem is clearly much larger, even though HRW reports, “Nearly half of all states do not even compile separate statistics on
sexual assault.”

“(T)he most recent statistical survey,
published in the Prison Journal, showed that 21 percent of inmates in seven
Midwestern prisons had experienced at least one episode of pressured or forced
sex since being incarcerated, and at least 7 percent had been raped in their
facility. And an internal departmental survey of corrections officers in one
southern state found that line officers — those charged with the direct
supervision of inmates — estimated that roughly one-fifth of all prisoners
were being coerced into participation in inmate-on-inmate sex.

“These rapes are unimaginably vicious and
brutal…Gang assaults are not uncommon, and victims may be left beaten, bloody
and, in the most extreme cases, dead.”

There is now a Federal law supposedly addressing the
problem, but Human Rights Watch found that “correctional staff frequently
ignore or even react hostilely to inmates’ complaints of rape.”

HRW adds, “Another devastating consequence of
prisoner-on-prisoner rape discussed in the report is the transmission of the HIV
virus. Several prisoners with whom Human Rights Watch is in contact believe that
they have contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, through forced sexual
intercourse in prison.”

To
make Bush’s hypocrisy even more outrageous, Texas and Florida have two of the
worst prison systems. (Warning pictures much more horrifying than those from
Iraq are on Movement
Against Corruption and Complicity and The
Texas Prison Abuse Campaign websites. Also see Stop
Prison Rape.)

On Tuesday,
Donald Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference, that investigations were being opened to
determine whether abuses occurred in other prisons and prison camps run by the
U.S. military. What about those run by the President and his brother, Jeb?

Finally,
it should be noted that few of the 700,000 Americans arrested for simple
possession of marijuana every year actually go to prison, but many spend time in
jail, and jails are often much worse than prisons.

See
Marijuana
Arrests In New York City Continue to Soar. Arrests Will Exceed 60,000 for this
Year. Up From Only 720 in 1992!
and
“Let
me tell you why we should settle only for legalization, and not
decriminalization.”
A Reader In New York Makes A Valuable Point, Learned The Hard Way.

In
fact, the abuse starts even before the victims are arrested. What we saw in the
faces of the American guards was the corruption of power at the most basic
level. The same sort of behavior occurs when the narks raid homes in the middle
of the night, kicking down doors, screaming threats and obscenities, forcing
innocent Americans to parade naked.
See

Great
Journalism on Outrageous Case Shows Why the People of Colorado Support Medical
Marijuana Initiative.
and

Delaware
AIDS Patient Defiantly Faces Third Medical Marijuana Charge:
“I believe I’m the voice of tens of thousands of people who can’t have
a voice.”

However,
unlike the abuse of Iraqis, the abuse of American victims of the Drug War is
often ignored by the DEAland media. They do not ask critical questions about
cannabis prohibition, or even the war on medical cannabis patients.
See
Bush
Should Have John – Comical Ali – Walters Explain The Iraq War, Then The
Media Would Never Ask Any Embarrassing Questions. Doctrine Of Drug Czar
Infallibility? Blame Canada, Again.
Bush
says, “Our citizens in America are appalled by what they saw …”

Based on
his record, this probably means that we will now declare a War on Cameras.