The headline explains: "US guard jailed for one year after admitting abuse of prisoners in Iraq."
I am not a fan of prisons. I think that post-Ronald Reagan prisons in the United States, where rehabilitation has been replaced with brutalization so severe that everyone involved in the industry (from administrators to prisoners) are made into monsters, are a total mess and in dire need of reform.
The House of Bush used the State of Texas as their testing ground to bring the brutalization of American citizens to new lows when the current American president became the Western leader to exterminate more of his own citizens than anyone else in my lifetime.
The post WWII movement to make prisons places of rehabilitation, not just brutalization, was a hugely successful movement. Educating and rehabilitating criminals, especially non-violent criminals, is a good plan; and it worked quite successfully, even if it was expensive.
The House of Bush, with their fundamentalist philosophy and their insatiable need to suck every penny they can get out of the American taxpayer, insists that rehabilitation is too expensive and it is not what interests the American people. House of Bush insists that you want prisoners punished and brutalized, which they insist is cheaper than rehabilitation.
It would be cheaper if House of Bush did not privatize the prisons! Any money that could have been saved by switching from rehabilitation to brutalization is now lost and cannot be accounted for, because private corporations are not accountable to the taxpayers; and they are the ones running these old-fashioned, but new-fangled, prisons.
So, the expense of a rehabilitation-based prison system is still on the budget, but we are getting a brutalization-based prison system and a bunch of friends of the House of Bush are profiteering mightily.
This is the trend in the United States: privatize the prisons and eliminate rehabilitative programs. It is failing us. We are being cheated. It is morally wrong and it is not working.
Prior to the post-WWII movement towards a rehabilitative philosophy, five thousand years of imprisonment philosophy was strictly brutalization-based. You got hold of a prisoner and you beat him or raped her into submission. You broke their spirit so that one of two things happened: (1) they were spiritually unable to do much more than live in a gutter and drink themselves into oblivion; or (2) they became as brutal as their captors and continued to perpetrate crimes against other human beings either within the confines of their prison or on the general citizenry upon release.
The move towards rehabilitation that fundamentalists in the House of Bush find so expensive and inconvenient is a reflection of a sophisticated civilization, a civilization that is growing and expanding. There is no room for that in a fundamentalist society, however, and our giant steps backwards in prison reform these past two decades is now playing-out as an absurdist play in Iraq.
The headline "US guard jailed for one year after admitting abuse of prisoners in Iraq" says so little.
Here we have a soldier not trained as a prison guard, put in a situation where the philosophy of imprisonment is total brutalization, he does as he is ordered, and he is now a prisoner for it, while the men leading the House of Bush (who continue to promote this philosophy) are walking free and issuing statements to the press about how appalled they are that anyone in prison is being treated poorly!
The philosophy of the House of Bush is to kill as many prisoners as possible and brutalize those you cannot get away with killing. Just look at the current American president's record as governor of Texas. Our commander-in-chief, the man who leads our armed forces, believes that it is acceptable to kill human beings we have imprisoned.
Either we are a civilized culture with a rehabilitative-based prison philosophy, or we are not. Clearly we are not. Why then is a 24-year-old soldier being imprisoned for his role in furthering American policy and American fundamentalist philosophy?
I think this soldier should be punished. I think everyone involved with perpetrating brutality against other human beings should be punished, not least of all the leaders in the House of Bush. What is the appropriate punishment for someone you have hired to kill people when he who offends you? Imprisonment? That seems a bit uncivilized!
Let's be realistic here: We hired this man to kill people. If we don't like his methods, let's punish him by firing him, giving him a dishonorable discharge, taking away his GI Bill and all his veterans' benefits (what little the House of Bush has left intact), and let's give him a bad reference if a potential employer calls for our opinion. To further the cycle of brutalization by sending him and his cohorts to prison is a huge mistake.
The entire Iraq situation is a mess. The leadership of the House of Bush is singularly responsible for this mess and the current American president should be impeached for his malfeasance.
If we do not speak-up about this mess in Iraq, the House of Bush will take our silence as tacit agreement.
If you do agree with what is taking place in Iraq, I question your love of America and your moral fiber.
Peace.
A little Yahoo! about it
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