``Right, no disagreement here. But I don't think this is a bad time to raise the issue of torture in U.S. prisons. Leaving aside the death penality, even when convicted of a crime, the punishment is confinement: it is not torture, rape, humiliation, insanity, or death...'' Joanna
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I guess I do think it is a particularly wrong time to parade out US criminal justice system abuses. Why? Because these are abuses of a different system with a different purpose that was theoretically intended to function differently. While torture is torture and it is in principle morally equivalent no matter what, that equivalence tends to obscure an important political difference.
In other words, I think discussing the US prison system covers up the fundamental point. The purpose of confinement in a US prison is punishment.
The purpose of confinement in Abu Ghraib is not punishment.
Torture in Abu Ghraib is not punishment.
The purpose of Abu Ghraib is to extract information and torture is the artifact, the means to that end.
Confinement to Abu Gharib is merely a convenience, an expedient, a routine necessity, an architectural enhancement.
Cargo containers like those used in Afghanistan would serve the same purpose, as does any enclosure that will hold a number of people surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns.
. . .
Here is an example. Suppose we go to an anti-war march. We are arrested and hauled over to the old Keysar stadium or more likely the Cow Palace, and held for a few weeks while military guards randomly beat us up and play with us. When we demand to know why we are being held, they tell us we were `noncompliant' and `destabilizing influences'. That's true. We were. Or hope we were.
Meanwhile a whole team of FBI, MI agents along with some private security `experts' are grilling the population one by one as they work their way to us. We get our turn in the grilling sessions. They want to know who we are, what we do, who our family is with names and addresses, who are friends are, what our political beliefs are, who we know socially and politically, what we've seen going on at other rallies, names of others like us, what we did in the 60s or 80s and so forth.
We take our beatings and grillings, spill our guts, and sit in the compound yard recovering, gripe about food, conditions, engage in petty crimes of our own to pass the time, and so forth. More people arrive and we find out they came from somewhere else, the people before us routinely disappear. Finally we get our turn and we go out some door and there is a street. We think thank god it wasn't an execution cell.
That's it. There is no more, until the next time. After all they have our names, addresses and a list of everybody we know. So there could always be a next time.
We find out later some people had it worse, some died or were killed, and other just escaped.
Now, let's go back and analyze how our trip to the Cow Palace could have been better. Well, they could have not let the guards play with us. They could have controlled our petty crimes among ourselves. They could have had showers and clean clothes to wear. They could have accepted what we told them without beating us up so much. They could have at least let us write letters to our family to let them know we were alive---even if the letters were censored for other content.
It's true. Those would have been improvements and reforms. Even progress...
We are talking about putting up curtains and flowers on a gulag. Sure given time, money and protest, I guess we could have gotten curtains, hot water, and clean clothes. A few books to read to pass the time between interrogations would have been nice too, now that we are making a list...
At this point we have forgotten that we were not supposed to be rounded up and taken to the Cow Palace in the first place.
Being noncompliant in the act of standing on the street is not a crime, no matter how destabilizing it looks.
In fact trying to analyze the `crime' of noncompliance is probably a mistake, a cul de sac that ends in arguments over better or worse pretexts. The legalistic sounding pretexts which are labeled `crimes' are merely situational and circumstantial conveniences.
Any random collection of people anywhere doing anything at all out doors in day light is probably sufficient. It is just that if they are collected to hear some `noncompliant' speech, well there is a better likelihood they will have more information than people taken at a random intersection.
Think of crimes of noncompliance as labor saving devices of a military occupation and totalitarian rule.
If nobody acts noncompliantly, or alternatively if everybody does, then it is more difficult to separate the people who may know something worth beating out of them from those who don't know anything, making their beatings a waste of time.
See? This whole trip is insane.
Chuck