29th Street Ballroom
Government's Ambivalence Toward Prisoner Abuse
RECEIVED Fri., Jan. 21, 2005
Editor,
Our government’s ambivalence toward prisoner abuse and torture illustrates once again its schizophrenic nature. On the one hand, lower-ranking military personnel are standing courts-martial at Fort Hood for abusing prisoners in Iraq. The question seems to be whether they were following directives or acting on their own volition. On the other hand, concurrently with the courts-martial, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pressured congressional conferees to delete from a pending bill an item which would have forbid prisoner abuse and torture. Her reasoning was that its passage would grant to such prisoners rights to which they are not entitled!
Dr. Rice and the Bush administration’s tacit approval of prisoner abuse and torture and their four-year disavowal of the Geneva Conventions regarding prisoner treatment place the U.S. in league with the former Soviet Union, a government well-known for its torture methods used to extract information from captured agents and to punish dissidents, and World War II Japan, a culture that treated all prisoners of war like mongrels that deserved to die.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world watches with disgust while the once-respected USA devolves into just another despotic, Third World country that is run by a tin-pot dictator.
Our government’s ambivalence toward prisoner abuse and torture illustrates once again its schizophrenic nature. On the one hand, lower-ranking military personnel are standing courts-martial at Fort Hood for abusing prisoners in Iraq. The question seems to be whether they were following directives or acting on their own volition. On the other hand, concurrently with the courts-martial, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pressured congressional conferees to delete from a pending bill an item which would have forbid prisoner abuse and torture. Her reasoning was that its passage would grant to such prisoners rights to which they are not entitled!
Dr. Rice and the Bush administration’s tacit approval of prisoner abuse and torture and their four-year disavowal of the Geneva Conventions regarding prisoner treatment place the U.S. in league with the former Soviet Union, a government well-known for its torture methods used to extract information from captured agents and to punish dissidents, and World War II Japan, a culture that treated all prisoners of war like mongrels that deserved to die.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world watches with disgust while the once-respected USA devolves into just another despotic, Third World country that is run by a tin-pot dictator.
Bob Farnsworth