Battleangel

Torture, racism in America with an uncanny resemblance to that which we have witnessed in Abu Ghraib and similar places. What the US government, media has assured us to be a few “bad apples” seems to be quite representative of the entire “orchard.” Jennifer Van Bergen writes for Raw Story:

On Feb. 6, 2006, Jessie Lee Williams, Jr., a 40-year-old black man in a Southern Mississippi jail, was allegedly hooded and hog-tied by police, beaten about the head and testicles and ultimately died from blunt injuries to the head.

The coroner determined the death was a homicide. The local sheriff indicated law enforcement agencies were investigating and that the individual targeted by the investigation is “no longer employed by the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department.”

Despite the fact that the beating was videotaped, no arrests have been made.

US Prisons the Training Ground for Military Detentions?

A recent Amnesty International report covered by RAW STORY revealed that nearly 200 African-American men in a Chicago prison have alleged torture between 1971 and 1991. The report concluded there are troubling similarities between detainee abuse allegations in US military prisons around the world and US prisons at home.

Williams’ treatment, like that of many of those in the Chicago cases, is similar to reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib, the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other US detention facilities in the Middle East. The nurse’s notes in Williams’ case states that Williams was placed in a restraint chair, hooded, sprayed with pepper spray, and had blood coming from both ears. He was told by the restraining officer that the officer would kill him, after which the man choked him until he couldn’t breathe.

Meanwhile, the line between military and civilian life continues to blur. Abuses perpetrated in respective sphere permeates the other and act as justification, model behavior. It’s a self-perpetuating inclination for sure, but one that despite its spontaneous appearance is allowed to fester because it benefits America’s shortsighted elite. The end result will surely be monstrous and will surely undo the same power that it was summoned to ensure. Hannah Arendt’s now classic and ever so pertinent observation on the matter comes to mind –

To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but its price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is paid by the victor in his own power. The much-feared boomerang effect of the “government of subject races” (Lord Cromer) upon the home government during the imperialist era meant that rule by violence in far-away lands would end by affecting the government of England, that the last “subject race” would be the English themselves.

“On Violence” (from A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence New York Review of Books, Volume 12, Number 4. February 27, 1969)