JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
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> All this implausible deniability about how the U.S. is a nation that doesn't
> use torture, but might if really pushed under these oh-so-special
> circumstances of al Qaeda. Please. Find me one medium-sized jail or prison
> in the U.S. that doesn't use torture for discipline, control, or as a twisted
> sport. Here the jailers beat a guy (arrested that night for threatening his
> ex) to the point that the surgeon said his brains were falling out of his
> head. His ex just wanted him to calm down, instead she sat in all-night
> vigil at the hospital only to be told he'd died from the beating. That's
> detention in a county jail. I could list several other local incidents in
> just the last 3 years. In the state prison up the road they beat to death a
> guy on death row--seemed excessive, couldn't they wait? (He supposedly beat
> himself up but that didn't explain the boot prints.) And we only hear about
> these because deaths have to be explained in a way that injuries don't.
>
The odd thing is that this habit of police & prison officials in the u.s. is even taken for granted in a good deal of popular film, fiction, and tv drama, and yet even leftists regard each concrete exposure as being shocking and somehow "out of the ordinary." And in the rare cases were cops clearly guilty of murder are tried, juries won't convict. We've had three utterly injustifiable police killings in rural areas of McLean County Illinois in the last few years. One brought to trial. No convictions.
Many years ago my son ran from a Bloomington cop and hid under a car. The cop pulled him out, said I'll teach you, and kicked the living shit out of him (bruisings all down one side of his body). The cop was a real grandfatherly type of Officer Friendly. One can (or ought to be able to) imagine what kind of treatment black kids can expect from this police force. And Bloomington is probably better than most.
Carrol
> Jenny Brown