Friday, January 9, 2009

The United States: A Country Without Mercy

The United States: A Country Without Mercy
By Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21482.htm

In the United States, the country with the largest prison population
in the world, the number of wrongly convicted is very large. Hardly
any felony charges are resolved with trials. The vast majority of
defendants, both innocent and guilty, are coerced into plea bargains.
Not only are the innocent framed, but the guilty as well. It is
quicker and less expensive to frame the guilty than to convict them
on the evidence.

Many Americans are wrongfully convicted, because they trust the
justice system. They naively believe that police and prosecutors are
moved by evidence and have a sense of justice. The trust they have in
authorities makes them easy victims of a system that has no moral
conscience and is untroubled by the injustice it perpetrates.

Lt. William Strong, son of a military family, tired of his wife's
unfaithfulness and filed for divorce. The unfaithful wife retaliated
by accusing Strong of rape. There was no evidence of rape, but Strong
was deceived into a plea bargain. Once Strong entered a plea, he was
double-crossed and given 60 years.

Christophe Gaynor took an adolescent skate board team to New York
City for a competition. One of the kids attempted to buy illicit
drugs. Gaynor threatened to tell the boy's parents, and the boy
preempted Gaynor by accusing him of sexual molestation.

Gaynor was openly framed in the Arlington, Virginia, court system.

Americans, or perhaps more accurately some Americans, were horrified
by the photographs showing the torture of Iraqi detainees in Abu
Ghraib by the US military. The Senate Armed Services Committee has
issued a report which concludes that the torture policy originated at
the highest level of the Bush administration. Those Americans with a
moral conscience have reeled under further revelations--the torture
of Guantanamo detainees, the transport of people seized by US
authorities to third world countries to be tortured.

We have to ask ourselves why American service men and women and CIA
operatives delight in torturing people about whom they know nothing?
It has been well known since the Stalin era that torture never
produces accurate information. Yet, US soldiers and CIA personnel
jumped at the green light given to torture by President George W.
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and
the US Department of Justice. Why weren't our soldiers shocked
instead at the immorality of their leaders?

One answer is that the US military no longer operates according to a
code of honor. Military discipline in the traditional sense does not
exist. The ethos of the US military has degenerated into kick-ass
macho. Major General Taguba, who, instead of covering up the Abu
Ghraib scandal, attempted in his report to hold the US military to
its traditional principles, was forced to resign from the US Army.

Another answer is that the work of torture, like police work and
prosecutorial work, attracts brutal people who enjoy inflicting harm
on others. The two Republican female US Attorneys in Alabama who
framed Democratic Governor Seligman enjoyed ruining Seligman and
bringing grief to his family.

Deborah Davies of the BBC's Channel 4 undertook a four-month
investigation of the torture of American prisoners inside American
prisons. Videos taken by sadistic prison guards and videos recovered
from surveillance cameras reveal horrible acts of torture and even of
murder of prisoners by prison guards.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8451.htm

An American prison reformer told Deborah Davies, "We've become immune
to the abuse. The brutality has become customary."

Few Americans seem to be disturbed as these inhumane and illegal
practices continue unabated. Americans continue to see themselves as
the salt of the earth, the "indispensable people."

"Law and order conservatives" have a great responsibility for this
evil. Just as "law and order conservatives" created hysteria among
the people about crime, they created hysteria about terrorists.
Hysterical people condone great evils and arm government with power
in the mistaken belief that it will protect them.

What kind of people have we become when we exercise no oversight over
a criminal justice (sic) system that destroys the lives of innocent
people and locks them away in prisons to be tortured by sadistic
guards?

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