God Nuke A
Wed, May-25-05, 17:34
Torture, Inc - America's Brutal Prisons Savaged by dogs,
electrocuted with cattle prods, burned by toxic chemicals.
Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors
that were committed in Iraq? By Deborah Davies Global
Research.ca 5-25-5
They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking
place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a
four-month investigation for BBC Channel 4 . It's terrible to
watch some of the videos and realise that you're not only
seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you
are witnessing young men dying.
The prison guards stand over their captives with electric
cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have
been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at
them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. 'Crawl,
motherf*****s, crawl.'
If a prisoner doesn't drop to the ground fast enough, a guard
kicks him or stamps on his back. There's a high-pitched scream
from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.
Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can't crawl fast
enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt
of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For
hours afterwards his whole body shakes.
Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the
cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding
and kicking.
Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video
camera by one of the guards.
The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly
familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside
Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time
last year.
And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against
Iraqi prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three
British soldiers.
But there is a difference. These prisoners are not caught up
in a war zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from
inside a prison in Texas.
They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking
place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a
four-month investigation for Channel 4 that will be broadcast
next week.
Our findings were not based on rumour or suspicion. They were
based on solid evidence, chiefly videotapes that we collected
from all over the U.S.
In many American states, prison regulations demand that any
'use of force operation', such as searching cells for drugs,
must be filmed by a guard.
The theory is that the tapes will show proper procedure was
followed and that no excessive force was used. In fact, many
of them record the exact opposite.
Each tape provides a shocking insight into the reality of life
inside the U.S. prison system - a reality that sits very
uncomfortably with President Bush's commitment to the battle
for freedom and democracy against the forces of tyranny and
oppression.
In fact, the Texas episode outlined above dates from 1996,
when Bush was state Governor.
Frank Carlson was one of the lawyers who fought a compensation
battle on behalf of the victims. I asked him about his
reaction when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last year and U.S.
politicians rushed to express their astonishment and disgust
that such abuses could happen at the hands of American guards.
'I thought: "What hypocrisy," Carlson told me. 'Because they
know we do it here every day.'
All the lawyers I spoke to during our investigations shared
Carlson's belief that Abu Ghraib, far from being the work of
a few rogue individuals, was simply the export of the worst
practices that take place in the domestic prison system all
the time. They pointed to the mountain of files stacked on
their desks, on the floor, in their office corridors -
endless stories of appalling, sadistic treatment inside
America's own prisons.
Many of the tapes we've collected are several years old.
That's because they only surface when determined lawyers prise
them out of reluctant state prison departments during
protracted lawsuits.
But for every 'historical' tape we collected, we also found a
more recent story. What you see on the tape is still
happening daily.
It's terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that
you're not only seeing torture in action but, in the most
extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying. In one
horrific scene, a naked man, passive and vacant, is seen being
led out of his cell by prison guards. They strap him into a
medieval-looking device called a 'restraint chair'. His hands
and feet are shackled, there's a strap across his chest, his
head lolls forward. He looks dead. He's not. Not yet.
The chair is his punishment because guards saw him in his cell
with a pillowcase on his head and he refused to take it off.
The man has a long history of severe schizophrenia. Sixteen
hours later, they release him from the chair. And two hours
after that, he dies from a blood clot resulting from his
barbaric treatment.
The tape comes from Utah - but there are others from
Connecticut, Florida, Texas, Arizona and probably many more.
We found more than 20 cases of prisoners who've died in the
past few years after being held in a restraint chair.
Two of the deaths we investigated were in the same county jail
in Phoenix, Arizona, which is run by a man who revels in the
title of 'America's Toughest Sheriff.'
His name is Joe Arpaio. He positively welcomes TV crews and
we were promised 'unfettered access.' It was a reassuring
turn of phrase - you don't want to be fettered in one of
Sheriff Joe's jails.
We uncovered two videotapes from surveillance cameras showing
how his tough stance can end in tragedy.
The first tape, from 2001, shows a man named Charles Agster
dragged in by police, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles.
Agster is mentally disturbed and a drug user. He was arrested
for causing a disturbance in a late-night grocery store. The
police handed him over to the Sheriff's deputies in the jail.
Agster is a tiny man, weighing no more than nine stone, but
he's struggling.
The tape shows nine deputies manhandling him into the
restraint chair. One of them kneels on Agster's stomach,
pushing his head forward on to his knees and pulling his arms
back to strap his wrists into the chair.
Bending someone double for any length of time is dangerous -
the manuals on the use of the 'restraint chair' warn of the
dangers of 'positional asphyxia.'
Fifteen minutes later, a nurse notices Agster is unconscious.
The cameras show frantic efforts to resuscitate him, but he's
already brain dead. He died three days later in hospital.
Agster's family is currently suing Arizona County.
His mother, Carol, cried as she told me: 'If that's not
torture, I don't know what is.' Charles's father, Chuck,
listened in silence as we filmed the interview, but every so
often he padded out of the room to cry quietly in the kitchen.
The second tape, from five years earlier, shows Scott Norberg
dying a similar death in the same jail. He was also a drug
user arrested for causing a nuisance. Norberg was severely
beaten by the guards, stunned up to 19 times with a Taser gun
and forced into the chair where - like Charles Agster - he
suffocated.
The county's insurers paid Norberg's family more than £4
millions in an out-of-court settlement, but the sheriff was
furious with the deal. 'My officers were clear,' he said. 'The
insurance firm was afraid to go before a jury.'
Now he's determined to fight the Agster case all the way
through the courts. Yet tonight, in Sheriff Joe's jail,
there'll probably be someone else strapped into the chair. Not
all the tapes we uncovered were filmed by the guards
themselves. Linda Evans smuggled a video camera into a
hospital to record her son, Brian. You can barely see his face
through all the tubes and all you can hear is the rhythmic
sucking of the ventilator. He was another of Sheriff Joe's
inmates. After an argument with guards, he told a prison
doctor they'd beaten him up. Six days later, he was found
unconscious on the floor of his cell with a broken neck,
broken toes and internal injuries. After a month in a coma, he
died from septicaemia.
'Mr Arpaio is responsible.' Linda Evans told me, struggling to
speak through her tears. 'He seems to thrive on this cruelty
and this mentality that these men are nothing.' In some of the
tapes it's not just the images, it's also the sounds that are
so unbearable. There's one tape from Florida which I've seen
dozens of times but it still catches me in the stomach.
It's an authorised 'use of force operation' - so a guard is
videoing what happens. They're going to Taser a prisoner for
refusing orders.
The tape shows a prisoner lying on an examination table in the
prison hospital. The guards are instructing him to climb down
into a wheelchair. 'I can't, I can't!' he shouts with
increasing desperation. 'It hurts!'
One guard then jabs him on both hips with a Taser. The man
jerks as the electricity hits him and shrieks, but still won't
get into the wheelchair.
The guards grab him and drop him into the chair. As they try
to bend his legs up on to the footrest, he screams in pain.
The man's lawyer told me he has a very limited mental
capacity. He says he has a back injury and can't walk or bend
his legs without intense pain. The tape becomes even more
harrowing. The guards try to make the prisoner stand up and
hold a walking frame. He falls on the floor, crying in agony.
They Taser him again. He runs out of the energy and breath to
cry and just lies there moaning.
One of the most recent video tapes was filmed in January last
year. A surveillance camera in a youth institution in
California records an argument between staff members and two
'wards' - they're not called prisoners.
One of the youths hits a staff member in the face. He knocks
the ward to the floor then sits astride him punching him over
and over again in the head.
Watching the tape you can almost feel each blow. The second
youth is also punched and kicked in the head - even after he's
been handcuffed. Other staff just stand around and watch.
We also collected some truly horrific photographs.
A few years ago, in Florida, the new warden of the high
security state prison ordered an end to the videoing of 'use
of force operations.' So we have no tapes to show how prison
guards use pepper spray to punish prisoners.
But we do have the lawsuit describing how men were doused in
pepper spray and then left to cook in the burning fog of
chemicals. Photographs taken by their lawyers show one man has
a huge patch of raw skin over his hip. Another is covered in
an angry rash across his neck, back and arms. A third has deep
burns on his buttocks.
'They usually use fire extinguishers size canisters of pepper
spray,' lawyer Christopher Jones explained. 'We have had
prisoners who have had second degree burns all over their
bodies. 'The tell-tale sign is they turn off the ventilation
fans in the unit. Prisoners report that cardboard is shoved in
the crack of the door to make sure it's really air-tight.'
And why were they sprayed? According to the official prison
reports, their infringements included banging on the cell door
and refusing medication. From the same Florida prison we also
have photographs of Frank Valdes - autopsy pictures.
Realistically, he had little chance of ever getting out of
prison alive. He was on Death Row for killing a prison
officer. He had time to reconcile himself to the Electric
Chair - he didn't expect to be beaten to death.
Valdes started writing to local Florida newspapers to expose
the corruption and brutality of prison officers. So a gang of
guards stormed into his cell to shut him up. They broke almost
every one of his ribs, punctured his lung, smashed his spleen
and left him to die.
Several of the guards were later charged with murder, but the
trial was held in their own small hometown where almost
everyone works for, or has connection with, the five prisons
which ring the town. The foreman of the jury was former prison
officer. The guards were all acquitted.
Meanwhile, the warden who was in charge of the prison at the
time of the killing - the same man who changed the policy on
videoing - has been promoted. He's now the man in charge of
all the Florida prisons.
How could anyone excuse - still less condone - such behaviour?
The few prison guards who would talk to us have a siege
mentality. They see themselves outnumbered, surrounded by
dangerous, violent criminals, so they back each other up, no
matter what. I asked one serving officer what happened if
colleagues beat up an inmate. 'We cover up. Because we're the
good guys.'
No one should doubt that the vast majority of U.S. prison
officers are decent individuals doing their best in difficult
circumstances. But when horrific abuse by the few goes
unreported and uninvestigated, it solidifies into a general
climate of acceptance among the many.
At the same time the overall hardening of attitudes in
modern-day America has meant the notion of rehabilitation has
been almost lost. The focus is entirely on punishment - even
loss of liberty is not seen as punishment enough. Being on the
restraint devices and the chemical sprays.
Since we finished filming for the programme in January, I've
stayed in contact with various prisoners' rights groups and
the families of many of the victims. Every single day come
more e-mails full of fresh horror stories. In the past weeks,
two more prisoners have died, in Alabama and Ohio. One man was
pepper sprayed, the other tasered.
Then, three weeks ago, reports emerged of 20 hours of video
material from Guantanamo Bay showing prisoners being
stripped, beaten and pepper sprayed. One of those affected is
Omar Deghayes, one of the seven British residents still being
held there.
His lawyer says Deghayes is now permanently blind in one eye.
American military investigators have reviewed the tapes and
apparently found 'no evidence of systematic abuse.'
But then, as one of the prison reformers we met on our journey
across the U.S. told me: 'We've become immune to the abuse.
The brutality has become customary.' So far, the U.S.
government is refusing to release these Guantanamo tapes. If
they are ever made public - or leaked - I suspect the images
will be very familiar.
Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo - or even Texas. The prisoners and all
guards may vary, but the abuse is still too familiar. And much
is it is taking place in America's own backyard.
_____
Deborah Davies is a reporter for Channel 4 Dispatches. Her
investigation, Torture: America's Brutal Prisons, was shown on
Wednesday, March 2, at 11.05pm.
The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at
www.globalresearch.ca grants permission to cross-post original
Global Research articles in their entirety, or any portions
thereof, on community internet sites, as long as the text &
title are not modified. The source must be acknowledged and an
active URL hyperlink address of the original CRG article must
be indicated. The author's copyright note must be displayed.
For publication of Global Research articles in print or other
forms including commercial internet sites, contact:
crgeditor@yahoo.com
www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of
which has not always been specifically authorized by the
copyright owner. We are making such material available to our
readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to
advance a better understanding of political, economic and
social issues. The material on this site is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you
wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair
use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole
responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect
those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
© Copyright belongs to the author 2005.
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/DAV505A.html -
electrocuted with cattle prods, burned by toxic chemicals.
Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors
that were committed in Iraq? By Deborah Davies Global
Research.ca 5-25-5
They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking
place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a
four-month investigation for BBC Channel 4 . It's terrible to
watch some of the videos and realise that you're not only
seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you
are witnessing young men dying.
The prison guards stand over their captives with electric
cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have
been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at
them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. 'Crawl,
motherf*****s, crawl.'
If a prisoner doesn't drop to the ground fast enough, a guard
kicks him or stamps on his back. There's a high-pitched scream
from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.
Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can't crawl fast
enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt
of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For
hours afterwards his whole body shakes.
Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the
cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding
and kicking.
Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video
camera by one of the guards.
The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly
familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside
Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time
last year.
And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against
Iraqi prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three
British soldiers.
But there is a difference. These prisoners are not caught up
in a war zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from
inside a prison in Texas.
They are just some of the victims of wholesale torture taking
place inside the U.S. prison system that we uncovered during a
four-month investigation for Channel 4 that will be broadcast
next week.
Our findings were not based on rumour or suspicion. They were
based on solid evidence, chiefly videotapes that we collected
from all over the U.S.
In many American states, prison regulations demand that any
'use of force operation', such as searching cells for drugs,
must be filmed by a guard.
The theory is that the tapes will show proper procedure was
followed and that no excessive force was used. In fact, many
of them record the exact opposite.
Each tape provides a shocking insight into the reality of life
inside the U.S. prison system - a reality that sits very
uncomfortably with President Bush's commitment to the battle
for freedom and democracy against the forces of tyranny and
oppression.
In fact, the Texas episode outlined above dates from 1996,
when Bush was state Governor.
Frank Carlson was one of the lawyers who fought a compensation
battle on behalf of the victims. I asked him about his
reaction when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last year and U.S.
politicians rushed to express their astonishment and disgust
that such abuses could happen at the hands of American guards.
'I thought: "What hypocrisy," Carlson told me. 'Because they
know we do it here every day.'
All the lawyers I spoke to during our investigations shared
Carlson's belief that Abu Ghraib, far from being the work of
a few rogue individuals, was simply the export of the worst
practices that take place in the domestic prison system all
the time. They pointed to the mountain of files stacked on
their desks, on the floor, in their office corridors -
endless stories of appalling, sadistic treatment inside
America's own prisons.
Many of the tapes we've collected are several years old.
That's because they only surface when determined lawyers prise
them out of reluctant state prison departments during
protracted lawsuits.
But for every 'historical' tape we collected, we also found a
more recent story. What you see on the tape is still
happening daily.
It's terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that
you're not only seeing torture in action but, in the most
extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying. In one
horrific scene, a naked man, passive and vacant, is seen being
led out of his cell by prison guards. They strap him into a
medieval-looking device called a 'restraint chair'. His hands
and feet are shackled, there's a strap across his chest, his
head lolls forward. He looks dead. He's not. Not yet.
The chair is his punishment because guards saw him in his cell
with a pillowcase on his head and he refused to take it off.
The man has a long history of severe schizophrenia. Sixteen
hours later, they release him from the chair. And two hours
after that, he dies from a blood clot resulting from his
barbaric treatment.
The tape comes from Utah - but there are others from
Connecticut, Florida, Texas, Arizona and probably many more.
We found more than 20 cases of prisoners who've died in the
past few years after being held in a restraint chair.
Two of the deaths we investigated were in the same county jail
in Phoenix, Arizona, which is run by a man who revels in the
title of 'America's Toughest Sheriff.'
His name is Joe Arpaio. He positively welcomes TV crews and
we were promised 'unfettered access.' It was a reassuring
turn of phrase - you don't want to be fettered in one of
Sheriff Joe's jails.
We uncovered two videotapes from surveillance cameras showing
how his tough stance can end in tragedy.
The first tape, from 2001, shows a man named Charles Agster
dragged in by police, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles.
Agster is mentally disturbed and a drug user. He was arrested
for causing a disturbance in a late-night grocery store. The
police handed him over to the Sheriff's deputies in the jail.
Agster is a tiny man, weighing no more than nine stone, but
he's struggling.
The tape shows nine deputies manhandling him into the
restraint chair. One of them kneels on Agster's stomach,
pushing his head forward on to his knees and pulling his arms
back to strap his wrists into the chair.
Bending someone double for any length of time is dangerous -
the manuals on the use of the 'restraint chair' warn of the
dangers of 'positional asphyxia.'
Fifteen minutes later, a nurse notices Agster is unconscious.
The cameras show frantic efforts to resuscitate him, but he's
already brain dead. He died three days later in hospital.
Agster's family is currently suing Arizona County.
His mother, Carol, cried as she told me: 'If that's not
torture, I don't know what is.' Charles's father, Chuck,
listened in silence as we filmed the interview, but every so
often he padded out of the room to cry quietly in the kitchen.
The second tape, from five years earlier, shows Scott Norberg
dying a similar death in the same jail. He was also a drug
user arrested for causing a nuisance. Norberg was severely
beaten by the guards, stunned up to 19 times with a Taser gun
and forced into the chair where - like Charles Agster - he
suffocated.
The county's insurers paid Norberg's family more than £4
millions in an out-of-court settlement, but the sheriff was
furious with the deal. 'My officers were clear,' he said. 'The
insurance firm was afraid to go before a jury.'
Now he's determined to fight the Agster case all the way
through the courts. Yet tonight, in Sheriff Joe's jail,
there'll probably be someone else strapped into the chair. Not
all the tapes we uncovered were filmed by the guards
themselves. Linda Evans smuggled a video camera into a
hospital to record her son, Brian. You can barely see his face
through all the tubes and all you can hear is the rhythmic
sucking of the ventilator. He was another of Sheriff Joe's
inmates. After an argument with guards, he told a prison
doctor they'd beaten him up. Six days later, he was found
unconscious on the floor of his cell with a broken neck,
broken toes and internal injuries. After a month in a coma, he
died from septicaemia.
'Mr Arpaio is responsible.' Linda Evans told me, struggling to
speak through her tears. 'He seems to thrive on this cruelty
and this mentality that these men are nothing.' In some of the
tapes it's not just the images, it's also the sounds that are
so unbearable. There's one tape from Florida which I've seen
dozens of times but it still catches me in the stomach.
It's an authorised 'use of force operation' - so a guard is
videoing what happens. They're going to Taser a prisoner for
refusing orders.
The tape shows a prisoner lying on an examination table in the
prison hospital. The guards are instructing him to climb down
into a wheelchair. 'I can't, I can't!' he shouts with
increasing desperation. 'It hurts!'
One guard then jabs him on both hips with a Taser. The man
jerks as the electricity hits him and shrieks, but still won't
get into the wheelchair.
The guards grab him and drop him into the chair. As they try
to bend his legs up on to the footrest, he screams in pain.
The man's lawyer told me he has a very limited mental
capacity. He says he has a back injury and can't walk or bend
his legs without intense pain. The tape becomes even more
harrowing. The guards try to make the prisoner stand up and
hold a walking frame. He falls on the floor, crying in agony.
They Taser him again. He runs out of the energy and breath to
cry and just lies there moaning.
One of the most recent video tapes was filmed in January last
year. A surveillance camera in a youth institution in
California records an argument between staff members and two
'wards' - they're not called prisoners.
One of the youths hits a staff member in the face. He knocks
the ward to the floor then sits astride him punching him over
and over again in the head.
Watching the tape you can almost feel each blow. The second
youth is also punched and kicked in the head - even after he's
been handcuffed. Other staff just stand around and watch.
We also collected some truly horrific photographs.
A few years ago, in Florida, the new warden of the high
security state prison ordered an end to the videoing of 'use
of force operations.' So we have no tapes to show how prison
guards use pepper spray to punish prisoners.
But we do have the lawsuit describing how men were doused in
pepper spray and then left to cook in the burning fog of
chemicals. Photographs taken by their lawyers show one man has
a huge patch of raw skin over his hip. Another is covered in
an angry rash across his neck, back and arms. A third has deep
burns on his buttocks.
'They usually use fire extinguishers size canisters of pepper
spray,' lawyer Christopher Jones explained. 'We have had
prisoners who have had second degree burns all over their
bodies. 'The tell-tale sign is they turn off the ventilation
fans in the unit. Prisoners report that cardboard is shoved in
the crack of the door to make sure it's really air-tight.'
And why were they sprayed? According to the official prison
reports, their infringements included banging on the cell door
and refusing medication. From the same Florida prison we also
have photographs of Frank Valdes - autopsy pictures.
Realistically, he had little chance of ever getting out of
prison alive. He was on Death Row for killing a prison
officer. He had time to reconcile himself to the Electric
Chair - he didn't expect to be beaten to death.
Valdes started writing to local Florida newspapers to expose
the corruption and brutality of prison officers. So a gang of
guards stormed into his cell to shut him up. They broke almost
every one of his ribs, punctured his lung, smashed his spleen
and left him to die.
Several of the guards were later charged with murder, but the
trial was held in their own small hometown where almost
everyone works for, or has connection with, the five prisons
which ring the town. The foreman of the jury was former prison
officer. The guards were all acquitted.
Meanwhile, the warden who was in charge of the prison at the
time of the killing - the same man who changed the policy on
videoing - has been promoted. He's now the man in charge of
all the Florida prisons.
How could anyone excuse - still less condone - such behaviour?
The few prison guards who would talk to us have a siege
mentality. They see themselves outnumbered, surrounded by
dangerous, violent criminals, so they back each other up, no
matter what. I asked one serving officer what happened if
colleagues beat up an inmate. 'We cover up. Because we're the
good guys.'
No one should doubt that the vast majority of U.S. prison
officers are decent individuals doing their best in difficult
circumstances. But when horrific abuse by the few goes
unreported and uninvestigated, it solidifies into a general
climate of acceptance among the many.
At the same time the overall hardening of attitudes in
modern-day America has meant the notion of rehabilitation has
been almost lost. The focus is entirely on punishment - even
loss of liberty is not seen as punishment enough. Being on the
restraint devices and the chemical sprays.
Since we finished filming for the programme in January, I've
stayed in contact with various prisoners' rights groups and
the families of many of the victims. Every single day come
more e-mails full of fresh horror stories. In the past weeks,
two more prisoners have died, in Alabama and Ohio. One man was
pepper sprayed, the other tasered.
Then, three weeks ago, reports emerged of 20 hours of video
material from Guantanamo Bay showing prisoners being
stripped, beaten and pepper sprayed. One of those affected is
Omar Deghayes, one of the seven British residents still being
held there.
His lawyer says Deghayes is now permanently blind in one eye.
American military investigators have reviewed the tapes and
apparently found 'no evidence of systematic abuse.'
But then, as one of the prison reformers we met on our journey
across the U.S. told me: 'We've become immune to the abuse.
The brutality has become customary.' So far, the U.S.
government is refusing to release these Guantanamo tapes. If
they are ever made public - or leaked - I suspect the images
will be very familiar.
Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo - or even Texas. The prisoners and all
guards may vary, but the abuse is still too familiar. And much
is it is taking place in America's own backyard.
_____
Deborah Davies is a reporter for Channel 4 Dispatches. Her
investigation, Torture: America's Brutal Prisons, was shown on
Wednesday, March 2, at 11.05pm.
The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at
www.globalresearch.ca grants permission to cross-post original
Global Research articles in their entirety, or any portions
thereof, on community internet sites, as long as the text &
title are not modified. The source must be acknowledged and an
active URL hyperlink address of the original CRG article must
be indicated. The author's copyright note must be displayed.
For publication of Global Research articles in print or other
forms including commercial internet sites, contact:
crgeditor@yahoo.com
www.globalresearch.ca contains copyrighted material the use of
which has not always been specifically authorized by the
copyright owner. We are making such material available to our
readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to
advance a better understanding of political, economic and
social issues. The material on this site is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you
wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair
use" you must request permission from the copyright owner.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole
responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect
those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
© Copyright belongs to the author 2005.
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/DAV505A.html -