National Conscience in Prison. Why is Abu Ghraib not seen as a wake-up call to American conscience? How can the President who established a culture of violence against the helpless not be held to account? Why is his Administration of criminal bullies not 40% behind in the polls?
+
CNN reported today:

Abuses photographed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq represented "deviant behavior and a failure of military leadership and discipline" at the facility, but direct and indirect responsibility for those acts and others elsewhere went higher up the chain of command, an independent panel reported Tuesday. * * *

Five detainees died from abuse during interrogations, it said. Many others died from natural causes and enemy mortar attacks. Twenty-three cases of detainee deaths were still under investigation -- three in Afghanistan and 20 in Iraq …. * * *

A Pentagon report by U.S. Maj. Gen. George Fay is expected to recommend up to 27 people once assigned to Abu Ghraib for referral to authorities for possible additional legal action, including as many as five private contractors, * * *

[The] lawyer [for a guard who pled guilty] said that a culture of humiliation existed "prior to Frederick and his company arriving on the scene."

This is the behavior of the "heroes" that the New Militarism wants us to praise to the skies. It includes PRIVATE CONTRACTORS committing violence against prisoners! That's Republican "privatization" at work! Ain't it wonderful?
+
And note the prominent mention of (sexually) "deviant behavior" — that is, sado-masochistic behavior, which is actually smiled upon by the military. But we don't want no damned faggots in our morally pure military, no way! Jess good ol' boys who have a little fun beatin' furriners and humiliatin' them nekkid.
+
How would we react if five American prisoners were stripped naked and beaten to death by Iraqi guards if positions were reversed? Too many Americans no longer ask questions like that. They have lost the ability to identify with the victims of U.S. violence, lost the ability to put themselves into other people's shoes. That is what is happening to us under the Bush Administration. We are becoming a Nation of cold, vicious bullies, fundamentally corrupted by power. Bush and his entire cabinet's culture of arrogance and callousness have GOT to go.
+
This is not the United States I was born into, the U.S. that destroyed Nazism and liberated concentration camps, then rushed billions of dollars of aid in the Marshall Plan to save Europe from starvation and then Communist takeover.
+
This is not the America of decent, Northern values, but Redneck America, a Nation of gun racks on pickup trucks flying the Confederate flag. I HATE that "Amurica" and want the North to retake control of our civilization while there's still time. Massachusetts, sí! Texas, no!
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:35 PM